ISRAEL MATZAV: See how they 'suffer' under that Israeli 'occupation'

A reminder to all of you that although the Sabbath has already started in Israel, it has not yet started in Chicago, where I am today, and will not start for several more hours.

The home you see above is the home of a 'Palestinian' in Hebron. Looks more like a palace doesn't it? They're really suffering under that Israeli 'occupation.'

By the way, there are thousands of Arab homes like this across Judea and Samaria. Before it became unsafe for Jews to travel through the Arab villages (i.e. before Oslo - and yes, that's the truth), we used to occupy ourselves on bus trips to relatives in Samaria choosing in which home we would like to live....

VERY disturbing pictures of Palestinian life under Israeli 'Occupation'

'You Can't be an Occupier in Your Own Home' In candid TV interview, Bayit Yehudi head says the lesson from world inaction on Syria is that Israel can only trust G-d and its own might.

Economy Minister Naftali Bennett (Bayit Yehudi) reassured the public on Monday that in his opinion, the citizens of Israel will not come under any attack from Syria, and explained why he is firmly against the establishment of a "Palestinian State" in Judea and Samaria.

Speaking on the KnessetChannel, he said that Israelis could go on living their lives' normally and even noted, when asked, that his family has not renewed its supply of gas masks yet.

Asked if he was disappointed by US President Barack Obama's decision to hold off on attacking Syria until Congress debates the idea, he said that he does not want to give advice to the US President. He added, however, that "Israeli citizens have to be realistic and know that at the end of the day, 'If I am not for myself – who will be for me?' [a Talmudic adage in favor of self-reliance – ed.]. If we do not take care of our own security, no one else will. Look at how the entire world is reacting to the murder of 1,000 children with gas."

“All things told,” he said, “the world is stuttering. And on the day of truth we can only depend on ourselves. Not international guarantees, no relying on agreements – in the end, our strength, which comes from our hold upon the Land and our belief in the Land, [and] the IDF where I still serve in the reserves and am proud of it – that is what will keep us alive here.”

"We have to look at what is happening and internalize the lessons,” he explained. “In the moment of truth, the world will not be with us. The people who now want to hand over Judea and Samaria in exchange for guarantees from the world, should see what is happening. The world turns its back.”

Similar comments have been made by a number of Israeli politicians in the past few days, as the perceived dithering of the Obama administration is watched carefully by friend and foe alike, splitting Arab opinion and provoking ridicule from the Syrian regime and its allies.

Asked whom we can trust, Bennett said – “first of all, we have G-d, but also our own strength. We will not depend on the world anymore. We will not! Seventy years ago, when we hoped that the world would be there, they were not. No one was," he said, in a reference to the failure by the Allies to bomb Nazi extermination camps during the Holocaust.

"We are not occupiers"

In a wide-ranging 30-minute interview with Nehama Duek, Bennett firmly rebuffed her contention that Israel is an occupying power in Judea and Samaria.

“We are not occupiers. You cannot be an occupier in your own home. Internalize this, Nehama. We are not controlling them, they have been ruling themselves for a long time.”

“In Lebanon, in Syria, in Egypt, everything is in chaos. The only stable place is here, in our land. We have stability and quiet thanks to the IDF, from the fact that we are present in Judea and Samaria and that we live there. The same geniuses who told us that if we give Syria the Golan Heights we will have peace, are now telling us that we have to hand over Judea and Samaria. I don't accept this."

When Bennett described his proposal for applying Israeli sovereignty on parts of Judea and Samaria – Duek protested that the Palestinians want a state.

“Okay,” he said. “And I want to live. What takes precedence? My will to live? My wanting that my four children survive – or their will to have a state and an army that will annihilate me? What can I do? Even though they'd really love to annihilate me, they have no partner in this. I have this bug in my system – I love to live in my country."

During the interview, Bennett spoke about national unity, saying that part of his political mission is to unite different streams in the nation, and “to lower tensions.”

On August 22, Bennett had a similar message for the public regarding the Syria gas attack: 

“Seventy years ago, when they annihilated children and babies, the world was silent,” he wrote. “The internet and television stations are not moving the world out of its complacency. Images of mass graves and piles of children cannot pass in silence.”

"A child is a child is a child,” he stated. “And don't tell me '[it's just] Arabs killing Arabs.' I will not be silent.”

French appeals court rules Israel is not illegally occupying land

Dreuz reports that a French appeals court in Versailles has ruled that Israel was not acting illegally in building a light rail line across the Green Line.

The PLO must pay 30,000 euros separately to Alstom, Alstom Transport and Veolia Transport.

The PLO had argued that Israel was violating the Geneva Conventions by "transferring" citizens to the territories and destroying property, as well as a host of other claims.

The court ruled, however, Israel was acting within the Hague Regulations of how an occupier must act, "the authority of the legitimate power having in fact passed into the hands of the occupant, the latter shall take all measures in his power to restore, and ensure, as far as possible, public order and safety, while respecting, unless absolutely prevented, the laws in force in the country."

Going beyond that, the court ruled that the Geneva Conventions and Hague Regulations only apply to states, and to signatories, and the PLO is neither.

Google Translate does a good job - it is worth reading. The full ruling is also at the site, but in French.

The Israeli Palestinian Conflict: 10 Myths Preventing Peace

The Israeli Palestinian conflict is an often misunderstood political battleground where facts are mixed with opinion, perference, and prejudice. There's so much confusion around the conflict that we want to bring light to what is truth and what is myth. What issues are actually standing in the way of bringing peace between the Israelis and Palestinians? How does their fight over land complicate the conflict? And what role to political leaders like Yasser Arafat and Ehud Barak play along with organizations like UNRWA? These are questions we uncover in these 10 myths that are preventing peace in Palestine and Israel.

Visit our website to find out more about what you can do on this matter: http://www.jij.org.il/phrw

Are the Palestinians an Occupied Nation?

Conf. for Application of Sovereignty over Judea & Samaria

English translation of the legal arguments in the Levy Report

Since the Levy Report was released, there has been a lot of heat but little light about its legal reasonings, which were in Hebrew. The only part that was released in English were its conclusions and recommendations.


Here, for the first time, is an English translation of its legal arguments. Those who try to downplay the report must find reasons why these arguments are invalid, rather than the proof by assertion that they usually resort to.
[...]


Having considered the approaches presented before us [from the Left and from the Right], we think a reasonable interpretation of the standard term of "occupation", with all the obligations arising from it, in the provisions of international law is intended to apply for short periods of occupation of a territory of a sovereign state until the end of the conflict between the parties and the return of the land or any other negotiated agreement regarding it. 


But the Israeli presence in Judea and Samaria is significantly different: the possession of the territory continues for many decades, and no one can predict its end, if at all; the territory was conquered from a state (the Kingdom of Jordan) whose sovereignty over the territory has never been firmly legalized, and in the meantime it even renounced its claim of sovereignty; the State of Israel claims sovereign rights to the territory.


As for Article 49 of the Geneva Convention, many have interpreted it, but it seems the dominant view is that  the article indeed was meant to resolve the harsh reality imposed by some states during the Second World War, when they expelled and forcibly transferred some of their inhabitants to the territories they had occupied, a process which was accompanied by a substantial worsening of the condition of the occupied population (see this HCJ ruling and this article by Alan Baker).


This interpretation is supported by a number of sources: the authoritative interpretation of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), responsible for implementing the Fourth Geneva Convention, which states regarding the purpose of article 49 of the Convention:


It is intended to prevent a practice adopted during the Second World War by certain Powers, which transferred portions of their own population to occupied territory for political and racial reasons or in order, as they claimed, to colonize those territories. Such transfers worsened the economic situation of the native population and endangered their separate existence as a race.


Lawyers Prof. Eugene Rostow, Dean of Yale Law School in the US, and Prof. Julius Stone confirmed that Article 49 is intended to prohibit the same inhuman acts committed by the Nazis, i.e. a massive transfer of people into the occupied territories for the purpose of destruction, slavery or colonization:


[T]he Convention prohibits many of the inhumane practices of the Nazis and the Soviet Union during and before the Second World War - the mass transfer of people into and out of occupied territories for purposes of extermination, slave labor or colonization, for example....The Jewish settlers in the West Bank are most emphatically volunteers. They have not been "deported" or "transferred" to the area by the Government of Israel, and their movement involves none of the atrocious purposes or harmful effects on the existing population it is the goal of the Geneva Convention to prevent. (Rostow)


Irony would...be pushed to the absurdity of claiming that Article 49(6), designed to prevent repetition of Nazi-type genocidal policies of rendering Nazi metropolitan territories judenrein, has now come to mean that...the West Bank...must be made judenrein and must be so maintained, if necessary by the use of force by the government of Israel against its own inhabitants. Common sense as well as correct historical and functional context excludes so tyrannical a reading of Article 49(6.) (Julius Stone)


We do not believe that one can draw an analogy between this legal provision and those who sought to settle in Judea and Samaria not as a result of them being "deported" or "transferred" but because of their world view - to settle the Land of Israel.


We did not ignore the view of those who think that one should interpret the Fourth Geneva Convention as also prohibiting the occupying state to encourage or support the transfer of parts of its population to the occupied territory, even if it did not instigated it (on this issue see note 13here).


But even if this interpretation is correct, we would not change our conclusion that no analogy should be drawn between Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention and Jewish settlement in Judea and Samaria, in light of the status of the area under international law, and for that matter a brief history is required.


On 2 November 1917 lord James Balfour, the British foreign minister, issued a declaration that "His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine", the document which was addressed to lord Rothschild read:


His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.


In this declaration Britain recognized the Jewish people's right to the Land of Israel, and even expressed its willingness to advance a process that will eventually lead to the establishment of a national home for them in this part of the world.


This declaration appeared, in a different version, in the declaration of the San Remo peace conference in Italy which laid the grounds for the Mandate for Palestine which acknowledged the Jewish people's historic connection to Palestine (see Preamble):


The Mandatory will be responsible for putting into effect the declaration originally made on November 2, 1917, by the British Government, and adopted by the other Allied Powers, in favour of the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country...
Recognition had thereby been given to the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and to the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country.


It should be emphasized here that in the Mandate (as well as in the Balfour Declaration) only the "civil and religious" rights of the inhabitants of Palestine are mentioned as rendering protection, and there is no mention of the national rights of the Arab people. And concerning the actual implementation of this declaration article 2 of the Mandate says:


The Mandatory shall be responsible for placing the country under such political, administrative and economic conditions as will secure the establishment of the Jewish national home, as laid down in the preamble, and the development of self -governing institutions, and also for safeguarding the civil and religious rights of all the inhabitants of Palestine, irrespective of race and religion.


And in article 6 of the Mandate it says:


The Administration of Palestine, while ensuring that the rights and position of other sections of the population are not prejudiced, shall facilitate Jewish immigration under suitable conditions and shall encourage, in co-operation with the Jewish agency. referred to in Article 4, close settlement by Jews, on the land, including State lands and waste lands not required for public purposes.


In August 1922 the League of Nations approved the Mandate which was given to Britain, and thus the Jewish people's right to settle in the Land of Israel, their historic homeland, and to establish their state there, was recognized in international law.


To complete the picture, we'll add that with the establishment of the United Nations in 1945, the principle of recognition of the validity of existing rights of states acquired under various mandates, including of course the rights of Jews to settle in the Land of Israel by virtue of the above documents, was determined in article 80 of its charter:


Except as may be agreed upon in individual trusteeship agreements...nothing in this Chapter shall be construed in or of itself to alter in any manner the rights whatsoever of any states or any peoples or the terms of existing international instruments to which Members of the United Nations may respectively be parties.


In November 1947 the General Assembly adopted the United Nations committee's recommendation to divide the Land of Israel west of the Jordan river into two states: one Arab and one Jewish. 


But the plan was never implemented, and therefore was not binding under international law, since the Arab states rejected it and started a war to prevent its implementation and the establishment of a Jewish state.


The outcome of the war set the political reality from now on: the Jewish state was established within the lines drawn after the war.


However, the Arab state was not established, and Egypt and Jordan controlled the territories they occupied (the Gaza Strip, Judea and Samaria).


Later, the Arab states, which did not recognize the consequences of the war, demanded the armistice agreement include a statement  [*] saying that the cease-fire line should not be construed in any way as a political or territorial border.


Nevertheless, in April 1950, Jordan annexed the West Bank, unlike Egypt, which has never claimed sovereignty over the Gaza Strip.


However, Jordan's annexation was not accepted on any legal basis, and most Arab countries opposed it, until in 1988 announced that Jordan does not see itself as having the status of that area (on this issue see chief justice M. Landau's comments in this HCJ ruling; and this HCJ ruling).


Thus the original legal status of the territory was restored , namely, a territory designated as a national home for the Jewish people, who had a "right of possession" to it during Jordanian rule while they were absent for several years due to a war imposed on them.


Together with the international commitment to govern the territory and ensure the rights of the local population and public order, Israel also had the full right to claim sovereignty over these territories, and all Israeli governments believed so, but they chose not to annex them and take a pragmatic approach in order to allow for peace negotiations with representatives of the Palestinian people and the Arab states.


Israel therefore did not see itself as an occupying power in the classical sense of the word, and so never saw itself committed to the Forth Geneva Convention with regards to Judea, Samaria and Gaza.


It should be added here that the Israeli government did indeed ratify the Convention in 1951 but since it was not adopted by the Knesset (on this issue see this and thisHCJ rulings) it merely issued a statement saying it will voluntarily implement the humanitarian provisions of the Convention (here, here, here and here).


As a result, Israel implemented a policy that allows the Israelis to live voluntarily in accordance with rules prescribed by the Israeli government and supervised by the Israeli legal system, while the continued presence is subject to the outcome of the negotiation process.


In light of the aforesaid, we have no doubt that from the perspective of international law, the establishment of Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria is legal, and therefore we can proceed to discussing this question from the perspective of domestic law.


[...]


NOTE:


[*] According to article II (2) of the Armistice Agreement with Jordan:


 ...no provision of this Agreement shall in any way prejudice the rights, claims and positions of either Party hereto in the ultimate peaceful settlement of the Palestine question, the provisions of this Agreement being dictated exclusively by military considerations.


According to article VI (9) of the agreement:


The Armistice Demarcation Lines defined in articles V and VI of this Agreement are agreed upon by the Parties without prejudice to future territorial settlements or boundary lines or to claims of either Party relating thereto.

Goodbye, occupation myth Even in purely legal terms, Israel did not occupy even an inch of Judea and Samaria

The era of occupation in the territories ended this week. Finally. A committee headed by Judge Edmund Levy and comprising senior jurists went out on a limb by asserting that Israel is not an occupying power in Judea and Samaria; rather, it is the rightful owner.


In diplomatic terms, this is a problematic assertion. The gentiles won’t understand how the Levy Committee’s findings fit with all the Israeli rhetoric of the past decade, ranging from former PM Sharon’s Latrun speech to current PM Netanyahu’s Bar-Ilan speech. They will view the findings as a fraudulent trick aimed at allowing us to evade the moral duty of granting a state to the real owners of the land. In their view, this has been Arab territory for ages.

While every Christian bookshelf contains a Bible that says otherwise, the Jews themselves have replaced it gradually with a different holy book. Its 10 commandments include “two states for two peoples,” “thou shalt not occupy,” “thou shalt not settle” and so on. Now it would be difficult to accommodate them to the Levy Report.

Indeed, it will be difficult; so what? An important legal principle asserts that verdicts must not be adapted to public opinion caprices. The clear role of honorable judges is to weed out bias or common lies, such as the claim about Israel’s occupation in Judea and Samaria. The fluent speakers of the Peace Camp nurtured it diligently. They created a false image as if this view is shared by all world jurists, with the exception of a few meaningless rightists here and there.

Legal vacuum

The Levy Committee shattered this false display. It reminded us that in purely legal terms as well, Israel did not occupy an inch in Judea and Samaria. This is a region that less than 100 years ago was promised to us but the most prominent international forum at the time (The San Remo conference.) A Palestinian state never existed there. The Jordanians annexed it violently in 1950, with almost nobody recognizing this takeover.


Hence, at worse, the region now faces a certain legal vacuum. Given our historic rights, there is no moral reason to prevent us from filling this void.
When Meir Shamgar was Israel’s attorney general, he volunteered to apply the Geneva Convention and The Hague’s rulings in Judea and Samaria. This was no admission of occupation, but rather, a humanitarian gesture to the Palestinians. In those distant days, there was a consensus here that a Palestinian state is a mad idea. The promoters of withdrawal mostly relied on demographic arguments.

The occupation chatter only started to develop with the passage of years, when the demographic threat failed to uproot Kiryat Arba and its environs. In a historic perspective, this chatter is a relatively fresh matter. Should Benjamin Netanyahu quickly adopt the Levy Committee’s conclusions, he would be able to turn back the wheel. His English is good enough to convince the gentiles too.

NY Times Claims Israel ‘Took’ Yesha from Jordan in 1967 A NY Times editorial rewrites history: Israel “took” Judea and Samaria from Jordan in 1967, when Jordan fled the areas in the Six Day war.

A New York Times editorial Tuesday rewrites history and claims Israel “took” Judea and Samaria from Jordan in 1967, when Jordan fled the areas after joining other Arab nations as they converged on Israel in the Six Day War.

The editorial lambasted Israel in last week's non-binding report by a government-appointed judicial panel, which contradicted the international community’s claim that Israel is an “occupier” and that it is illegal for Jewish communities to exist in Judea and Samaria.

The editorial stance of the Times was not surprising, but its editorial actually twisted the fact that Israel never “took" or conquered Judea and Samaria. The newspaper also repeated the frequent claim, not supported by facts, that all of Judea and Samaria were under authorized Jordanian sovereignty.

The Israeli panel of three legal experts, chaired by former High Court Justice Edmund Levy, pointed out that Jordan actually was the occupier of what mainstream media calls the “West Bank, which also is a misnomer because the literal definition is all of the land west of the Jordan River and reaching the Mediterranean Coast.

The United Nations partition plan of 1947 was to divide Israel, administered under the British Mandate, between Israel and a new country of Transjordan. After the Arab world refused to accept the idea of a Jewish State of Israel, the War for Independence broke out and ended with the Temporary Armistice Lines of 1949. Jordan assumed sovereignty over all of Judea and Samaria because its forces had occupied the area.

Jordanian forces fled the entire area during the Six Day War in 1967, leaving Israel to administer Judea and Samaria. Israel could be termed an “occupier” in the land that fell under its control and had been part of the country, but Jordan itself had occupied Judea and Samaria in 1947.

Nevertheless, The New York Times editorial continues to allege that Israel is in violation of “the Fourth Geneva Convention [that] bars occupying powers from settling their own populations in occupied lands.”

Even the editorial’s headline – “Wrong Time for New Settlements” – was a bit misleading concerning the newspaper’s opinion, which does not leave an option for a “right time” for settlements.

The Times also concluded that the Levy report was a “disastrous blow” because “pushing ahead with new settlements in the West Bank” is an obstacle to “peace talks, the best guarantee of a durable solution” to the Palestinian Authority-Israeli dispute.”

The newspaper even warned that the report also will damage Western efforts to halt Iran’s unsupervised nuclear development.

It reasoned that the report will bring about “new international anger at Israel…that could divert attention from Iran just when the world is bearing down with sanctions and negotiations to curb Tehran’s nuclear program.”

Pressed by Media, Evasive UN Pledges to Answer UN Watch Challenge on Labeling Gaza "Occupied"

As shown in the video and transcript below, the spokesman of UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon was asked by journalists on Friday to respond to UN Watch's challenge as to why the world body continues to label the Gaza Strip “occupied” by Israel, despite a Hamas leader last week stating the opposite.

After initially seeking to dodge the question, the spokesman promised the UN would look into it and respond. We're waiting.

Over the past week, UN Watch created an international buzz on the story with op-eds placed in Canada'sNational Post and the Jerusalem Post, which in turn were featured in the Mideast Mirror, the PLO-linkedAmerican Task Force on Palestine, the Daily Alert and Jewish Ideas Daily.

Transcript of UN daily press briefing, Jan. 6, 2012, with Martin Nesirky, Spokesperson for UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon:

Journalist #1: I have a report which I got this morning, apparently it came out yesterday from UN Watch in Geneva, which quotes one of the senior officials of Hamas saying that the Gaza Strip, specifically the Gaza Strip only, is no longer Israeli-occupied territory and it refers, however, to some comments that Farhan made when he must have been doing the daily briefing two and a half or three years ago, saying that it is still the UN policy that the Gaza Strip is part of the Israel-occupied territory.
And a 22 September 2011 report put out by the Office of the Secretary-General speaks of a UN mission’s visit to the “Occupied Palestinian Territory, specifically the Gaza Strip”. Do you have any comment on that, or does the UN still seriously believe that the Gaza Strip is occupied territory?

UN Spokesperson: I think we can discuss this after. I don’t think I am going to get into a long back-and-forth on this right now. But I will certainly speak to you afterwards about it. Yes, okay. Yes?

Journalist #2: Can we get someone in to brief about that from the UN, Martin? It would be very helpful as this whole Palestinian statehood issue is being reviewed and things like that…

UN: I’ll ask.

Journalist #2: …because it has come up in the past and there should be some UN clarification about the UN position on it. And it has been historically the UN saying it is occupied territory; my understanding is because the Israelis control the border crossing; I don’t know.

UN Spokesperson: I’ll ask. I am sure there is a fairly clear response to it. I need to check, and then I’ll come back to you. All right, okay, have a good afternoon. Thanks very much.

The myth of occupation

Military occupation can be roughly defined as control over the territory of a state by a hostile army. Occupation can be legal under international law, as long as it can be distinguished from the acquisition of territory by force, which is frowned upon. An example of a legal occupation was the occupation of Japan by the US after WWII.

But the Jewish presence in Judea and Samaria is not an occupation in this sense. One might ask, “what state is occupied?” There is no such entity as ‘Palestine’ and never was. The Jewish people have a prima facie right to settle in the territory of the Palestine Mandate which was guaranteed by the League of Nations. The precise eastern border of the State of Israel has never been delineated. It is certainly not the 1949 armistice line (what is often incorrectly called the “pre-1967 border”), by any reasonable interpretation of UNSC resolutions 242 and 338, which called for “secure and recognized boundaries” which would be arrived at by negotiations between the parties in the dispute.

As a corollary, Israeli settlements east of the armistice lines are not, as the anti-Israel media are fond of saying, “illegal under international law.”

It should be clear by now that when Arabs and their supporters talk about “the occupation,” they are referring to the Jewish state, and not just the Jewish presence beyond the Green Line. Describing her experiences “occupying Birthright [see also here],” activist Kiera Feldman wrote recently:

Human mic speeches began, and my friends spoke eloquently about the dispossession of 750,000 Palestinians in 1948—the occupation of Israel. We were joined by a crew of Palestinians from the Jenin Freedom Theater, a renowned institution in the West Bank. “Where is their Birthright?” shouted my friend Max [Blumenthal].

Palestinian Arabs, led by the PLO, have asked the UN Security council to admit them as a state, although their application does not specify its borders. If they should be successful, it’s certain that they would continue to press their claims against Israel diplomatically and legally (and of course by terrorism, although they don’t admit that) after the UN grants them a toehold.

Their claim is based on nothing more than their chutzpah. According to them there was a flourishing Palestinian society prior to 1948 before the Zionists came along and occupied their land. In fact, the ancestors of the majority of the Arab residents in 1948 arrived in the area of the Mandate since the mid-19th century, mostly from Egypt and Syria. Many came after British and Zionist development created economic opportunities not available under prior oppressive Ottoman rule.

Although they could have coexisted with the Zionists, their reaction to Jewish immigration was vicious and racist, especially after the rise of Haj Amin al-Husseini to Palestinian leadership. In 1947 they could have accepted partition, and created a state of ‘Palestine’. No Arabs would have had to leave their homes, either in the Jewish or Palestinian state.

Instead they chose the path of war, and failed to destroy the Jewish state and expel or kill its inhabitants as they had intended (Husseini himself, who had spent much of WWII in Germany under Hitler’s protection, had plans to establish Nazi-model death camps in Palestine).

After the war, they followed the path of rejectionism, preventing the resettlement of Arab refugees. With the creation of the PLO, they institutionalized terrorism, killing thousands of Israelis and others in hundreds of attacks. The establishment of the Hamas added a new, religious, dimension to the conflict, as well as increasing the level of violence.

Between 1950 and 1973, Arab nationalists, with help from the Soviets, instigated several regional wars. The result was that more territory passed from Arab to Israeli control, which only added to the Palestinian Arabs’ sense of dispossession.

We see, however, that “the plight of the Palestinians” is entirely a result of their actions and those of their allies. And their leadership — the PLO that is the heir to Husseini and Arafat, and the viciously racist and murderous Hamas — continues to reject the existence of a Jewish state in the traditional homeland of the Jewish people. Having learned nothing from their long losing streak, they still think they can eliminate Israel and the Jews.

Despite all this, the Israeli government is prepared to negotiate in good faith to relinquish some of the territory for a state of ‘Palestine’! But this could only happen if the Palestinians could be prepared to once and for all agree that the Jewish state is not ‘occupied’ and does not in fact belong to them, and end their state of war with it. Unfortunately, the chance of this happening with the current Arab leadership is nil.