Speculation about a possible anti-Israel maneuver at the United Nations by either the Palestinian Authority or the Obama White House has retreated to the back burner. Whether or not such an effort materializes before Donald Trump’s inauguration as president, we should get two things straight that the United Nations refuses to:
One, Israel’s occupation of the West Bank is not illegal. Under the circumstances, it’s normal.
Two, Israel’s not prolonging its control of the territory. Palestinian leadership is.
Not that you’d know either from S. Michael Lynk. He’s the U.N. special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories. (What, no U.N. special rapporteur on human rights in the Chinese, Russian, Iranian or Cuban territories, among conspicuous others?)
Lynk, in his first report, claimed “Israel’s occupation is denying Palestine’s [sic.] right to development and severely hampering” its economic and societal growth.
The special rapporteur’s premature use of “Palestine” preempts U.N. Security Council resolutions 242 and 338, the Israeli-Palestinian Interim Accords and the U.N.-backed diplomatic “roadmap” of 2003. All envision direct negotiations between the parties to resolve the conflict. It also contradicts the 1933 Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of Nations since the West Bank and Gaza Strip do not qualify.
Impeachable source
Lynk charged that the “occupation is dripping in human rights violations” inflicted by Israel. The special rapporteur discerned growing poverty and unemployment, “food insecurity” and steady “violence and lack of accountability by Israeli security forces, in reaction to either demonstrations or to attempted attacks by Palestinians.”
A law professor at Western University in Ontario, Lynk came tainted to his U.N. post. When his selection was announced last spring, Canada’s foreign ministry urged someone else, someone “professional, neutral and credible.”
But credibility and the United Nations rarely overlap, particularly regarding Israel. When Lynk was nominated, Canadian Jewish organizations decried his pre-U.N. activities, including urging the Jewish state be prosecuted for war crimes, accusing it of ethnic cleansing and comparing Israel to Nazi Germany. No doubt such works recommended him to the anti-Israel U.N. Human Rights Council.
Blaming Israel for “the occupation,” let alone insisting on its illegality, reveals either bad faith or ignorance. Israel gained the West Bank and Gaza Strip in self-defense in the 1967 Six-Day War. It retained them similarly in the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
The West Bank had been occupied illegally by Jordan, the Gaza Strip by Egypt as a result of aggression during Israel’s 1948-’49 War of Independence. Israel’s post-1967 position as military occupational authority, pending a negotiated settlement, is normative under international law. Its obligations include seeing to minimum humanitarian requirements of the population.
Responsibility for economic and other development in the West Bank and Gaza falls, since the 1993 Israeli-Palestine Liberation Organization’s Oslo Accords, primarily on the Palestinian Authority. The PA—split between PLO/Fatah and Hamas rivals in the West Bank and Gaza, respectively—has received billions of dollars in foreign assistance.
Palestinian abuse ‘all in the family’
However, little has gone to economic development. Much drained off as salaries, subsidies to families of imprisoned terrorists, funding for anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish incitement and corruption. A West Bank teachers’ strike early in 2016 reportedly panicked PA leadership over Western donors’ new interest in authority bookkeeping.
As for human rights abuses in “the Palestinian territories”—disputed territories pending a negotiated settlement according to Security Council resolutions 242 and 338—the special rapporteur’s mandate is uniquely biased. Unlike those covering U.N. inquiries elsewhere, these reviews can report only alleged Israeli abuses, not Palestinian-against-Palestinian or Palestinian-versus-Israeli, as UN Watch, another critic of Lynk, has pointed out.
Had Palestinian leaders wanted to end the occupation, they could have accepted Israeli-U.S. offers of a West Bank and Gaza Strip state in exchange for peace with Israel in 2000 and 2001, an Israeli-only proposal in 2008, or U.S efforts to mediate new talks in 2014 and earlier this year. They refused.
Revisionism by the U.N. special rapporteur, by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization—which via resolution seeks to convert Jerusalem’s Temple Mount from Judaism’s holiest site to an Islamic-only shrine—and by the U.N. Human Rights Council does not erase reality: Palestinian leadership leverages the United Nations to delegitimize Israeli actions in the territories, hoping to end the occupation of Israel by Jews.
“One, Israel’s occupation of the West Bank is not illegal. Under the circumstances, it’s normal.”
Wrong. The occupation of the West Bank transformed from a “belligerent occupation” to an illegal occupation when the first illegal colony, Kfar Etzion, was established after the 1967 war of choice. See the 4th Geneva Convention, Article 49, paragraph 6, the International Criminal Court of Justice in 2004, UN Security Council resolution 465 and 1860, see Article 2 paragraph 4 of the UN Charter and visit a public library. I’m embarrassed for you.
“Two, Israel’s not prolonging its control of the territory. Palestinian leadership is.”
And yet, the more than 650,000 illegal squatters, the associated brutal occupation army that enforces this crime, and the four and a half million indigenous Palestinians on their own land keep getting squeezed more and more everyday into tinier space, see any reputable map for instance the nearly live UN West Bank Fragmentation Map, says otherwise.
What kind of “policy” organization is this? Why would you publish such ridiculous and false claptrap?
For those not familiar, Ahmed Michael Hess runs a hate blog called BBS News. He gets virtually no traffic and so he goes and trolls other sites with his tired and desperate lies.
Feel free to find one single iota of “hate” at BBSNews. In early twenty-seven years not one of these lying Hasbara trolls has ever been able to do so, gosh, I wonder why?
For that antisemitic hate you need Eric Hammer favorite Web site, Stephen Bannon’s Breitbart. His hero is now the leading true anti-Semite, at the right hand of the orange buffoon who just won an election based on fake news, “news” by the way that got its pedigree from Israeli Hasbara trolls Just Like the odious anti-Semite Eric Hammer, who enjoys calling Jews anti-Semites who do not agree with it’s lying troll ways.
I have offered to put Eric Hammer on television and air it’s reprehensible antisemitism but it is a coward. That would require coming forward and being a man. Instead it is an impotent little discredited Hasbara (synonymous with ‘explaining’ lies) troll, who is not only partly responsible for the rise of fake news in this country, but also the coming One State(tm) that it has helped foist upon world Jewry.
Next year is the centennial of Balfour, the man who in his policy statement of 1917 made quite clear that Palestine, even at that time, was a “country” as everyone already knew, especially the EIGHT TIMES greater Muslim Palestinian population of Palestine at the time, vastly outnumbering Yishuv Jews, before all the ethnic cleansing of course that would eventually follow and lead to more than 650,000 illegal squatters over the border in another country, the state of Palestine.
Historians and scholars are well aware of the primary documents that prove these facts beyond a shadow of a doubt. Start with Article 22, paragraphs 1 and 4 of the League of Nations Covenant when Palestine was created as a Class-A Mandate state, twenty-four years before Israel was “declared” under a stillborn UN GA resolution, 181, that Israel has as never adhered to even though it is said to be “irrevocable” in the Israeli declaration of independence.
Article 22 is enshrined in the very top of the Palestine Mandate. There is no possible way to deny it yet lying Hasbara trolls such as Eric Hammer do so quite often, revealing not only their hatred and bias but also their abject ignorance of reality and just how dangerous it is to keep telling these lies.
Those lies have cost the Jewish national home forever. The orange buffoon man’s defense pick knows that Israel is Apartheid and becoming the One State(tm), Ehud Barak, Israel’s most decorated soldier (shared) knows this and told the 2016 Herzliya these very same facts that I routinely point out.
And Stephen Bannon is a true anti-Semite’s anti-Semite, admired by White Supremacists all over the nation, and little Eric here aspires to be just like his hero, always calling Jews “Ahmed” when faced with Jews who knows he a liar and speaks for no one but other idiot White Supremacist bigots.
And yet poor little Eric Hammer, the long discredited anti-Semite cannot get it’s through it’s pointy little head. The jig is up. The truth is now mainstreaming throughout the world at Internet speeds.
Poor little Hasbara troll, hoisted by its own hubris, again…
Again with the hammer you hit your head with Ahmed. Use whatever brain cells you have left to call a doctor and get your head examined. You are a diseased moron who hates Jews and who lies constantly.
Pfffttt, yer done.
That’s all you’ve got? You tell the same pathetic lies day in and day out. I have repeatedly shown you to be a liar but you desperately and laughably cling to your lies. You are nothing but a foaming at the mouth rabid anti-Semite who hates Jews with every fiber of his pathetic being. You have no following and your pontifications have been shown time and again to be the stuff of idiocy. Go to stromfront and post your hatred there. You’ll find plenty of like minded souls who hate Jews and Israel just as much as you do Ahmed.
Mr. Hess is mistaken, repeatedly. The 1967 Six-Day War was not a “war of choice” on the part of Israel, confronted at the time by hundreds
of thousands of Arab troops and more than 1,000 tanks on its borders, mobilized by leaders who were vowing to destroy the Jewish state.
The 4th Geneva Convention, which he cites, does not apply, any more than the 2004 International Court of Justice advisory opinion (not “International Criminal Court of Justice”, the ICC being a separate body). Regarding the Geneva Convention, Israel has neither forcibly transferred Jews into or Arabs out of the West Bank. The area being disputed territory, under no recognized sovereignty since the British defeat of Ottoman Turkish forces during World War I, it does not belong to any “High Contracting Party” so the Convention would not apply in any case.
The ICJ opinion in opposition to Israel’s West Bank security barrier exceeded the court’s jurisdiction. As the United States noted at the time, disposition of the West Bank is a political-diplomatic, not judicial matter, to be resolved by the parties to the conflict. U.N. Security Council Resolutions 242 (1967) and 338 (1974), the 1993 Israeli-Palestinian Oslo accords and 1995 Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement take precedent. Further, the court could not rule against the anti-terrorism barrier any more than it could object to barriers against illegal immigration between the United States and Mexico.
As for the presence of Jewish communities in the disputed territories, contrary to the often-invoked “illegal settlements” mantra, they are called for under the relevant international law, the League of Nations/United Nations Palestine Mandate, Article Six. It encourages “close Jewish settlement” on the land west of the Jordan River. The U.N. Charter, Chapter 12, Article 80, upholds the Mandate. The San Remo Treaty (1920), the Anglo-American Convention (1924) and other relevant international instruments likewise envisioned Jewish settlement throughout what would become Mandatory Palestine.
Regarding Israel’s “brutal occupation” of Hess’ “four and a-half million” Palestinian Arabs, Hess seems to have doubled the West Bank population estimated by the Palestinian Authority. That population has enjoyed a higher standard of living, according to the U.N.’s 2005 Human Development Report, than Arabs in Algeria, Syria, Yemen, Egypt and Morocco and that was before the actual brutal destruction of Syria, wars in Libya and Yemen, upheaval in Egypt and elsewhere following the 2011 Arab Spring.