Israel and International Law

You either write a commentary or a code—each is a distinct task in itself.

Moses Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed

Like it or not, international law deposes in Israel’s favor. For if we believe in the validity of international law, then we have no logical or ethical alternative but to endorse it fully. Nor is it subject to the principle of estoppel, a legal axiom which does not admit the subsequent adoption of positions contrary to prior accords. If international law, as international jurists say, has a suprapositive, or transcendent, dimension, then it must be applied in precisely the same way as distributive justice—rigorously, indiscriminately and without exception. If we reject this conclusion, we are no better than Iranians for whom international treaties are dead letters. We are rogue actors, merely cynics wedded to the politics of expediency or temporizers divorced from the dictates of conscience. 

The status of the so-called “occupied territories” (the “West Bank”) has become an international cause célebre. The truth is that what Israel knows as Judea and Samaria, even if only the merest sliver, are not “occupied” but “disputed” territories, as UN Resolution 242 and the Rhodes Armistice Agreement of 1949 make abundantly clear—not to mention, as I noted in Part 2 of "The Truth About Israel," the League of Nations Mandate, the Treaty of Sèvres and the San Remo Conference which confirmed the Jewish historical connection and lawful claim to the lands in question. This is simply and authoritatively the case, despite the bad-faith labelling of goods originating in the so-called “settlements” as from the “occupied territories.” Such casuistry remains a paramount scandal.

From whatever angle we wish to examine the issue, whether historically, juridically or militarily, the argument against the legitimacy of the Israeli right to settle in the Territories or to regard them as an Israeli allodium does not derive, as many have contended, often derisively, from a divine injunction or the world’s bad conscience. “We have really such an overwhelming case,” wrote Arthur Koestler in an aide mémoire to publisher Victor Gollancz, “that it is idiotic to base our claims on Bergen Belsen or Abraham’s interview with God.” Such claims are dispositive.

Anti-Zionists will often point to UN Resolution 181 (1947) and the EU Venice Declaration (1980) as legitimate instruments of contractual law. In "Islam and Dhimmitude," Egyptian-born scholar Bat Ye’or shows definitively that they have no legal force whatsoever. UN Resolution 181, which in effect envisioned an unworkable “three-state” solution to the question of Palestine, has “no power to dismember a territory and allocate its parts. It was an attempt to delegitimize the Jewish presence in Jerusalem and reduce the Jewish state to an indefensible parcel that will soon be made to disappear.” Its purpose was to erase Israel from the map. With the Venice Declaration, “the European Economic Community demanded the creation of a Palestinian state on the territories liberated by Israel in 1967, which had been illegally occupied and rendered Judenrein [ethnically cleansed of Jews] by Arab countries since 1949.” The Venice Declaration was little more than a “suggestion” made with perfidious intent and was never passed into law. It was commentary, not code.

Indeed, the EU Journal officiel invokes international law without the slightest authority to do so. Its aim, Ye’or writes, “is to establish in these Israeli lands a second Judenrein Palestinian state, as called for by the founder of the Arab Higher Committee, Amin al-Husseini, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and ally of Hitler.” Husseini formed several Muslim battalions that were attached to the Waffen-SS, aiding the Axis war-effort by fighting Partisans and massacring civilians in Bosnia. He also lobbied Hitler to expand the “Final Solution” to the Jews in North Africa and Palestine. This Jew-killer, speaking on Radio Berlin, called on the Arabs “to rise and fight…for your sacred rights. Kill the Jews wherever you find them.” This is a cry for genocide, not a plea for international law. It is bad commentary aspiring to be worse code.

When all is said and done, there is no ideal solution to the Palestinian quandary, at least not for the foreseeable future. Muslims may request a hudna, or peace treaty, as long as it is in the interest of Muslims. When the early Muslims were in a position of weakness, the Prophet Muhammad found it necessary to sign the ten-year Treaty of Hudaybiyyah (680 A.D.), a form of “strategic compromise,” or taqiyya. The treaty was broken by Muhammad after only two years (a fact ritually denied by every Muslim site, which naturally places the blame on the Quraish enemy). Negotiations, when they occur, are to this day a species of ruse or deception. Allah himself is described in the Koran as a  “best deceiver” or “schemer” (Koran 3:54, 8:30). So long as this mindset remains in force, there can never be peace.

Over the years some analysts have come to believe that it may be politically appropriate to apply a clause of prudential revocation to the so-called peace process that is more process than peace and engage rather in a mediatorial process that envisages the return of the Gaza Strip to Egypt, though Hamas would first have to be routed and disbanded; and, after scrubbing the area of its indigenous terror cells, the judicious division of the “West Bank” between Israel and Jordan. After all, Gaza was Egyptian territory by force majeure until 1967, and the “West Bank,” originally mandated as part of the Jewish “national home” by the League of Nations in 1922, was formally annexed (with British approval) by the Hashemite emirate of Jordan in 1950 after two years of arbitrary rule. 

Egypt, however, wants nothing to do with Gaza, as the wall at its border signifies, and Jordan isn’t about to jeopardize its fragile cohesion by gladly embracing the Palestinians. As a nation that feels threatened by a zymotic Palestinian enclave, Jordanian authorities have even begun to revoke the citizenship of hundreds of thousands of resident Palestinians. The Palestinians are nothing but trouble, and Jordan has not forgotten the Black September PLO-fomented civil war in 1970. After being expelled from Jordan, the PLO then moved on to destabilize Lebanon. 

It is probably more accurate to consider Gaza not as a “people” but as a terrorist colony with a supporting population of Arab settlers. Palestine (“West Bank”) should be conceived as a “shell state,” defined by Loretta Napoleoni in "The Islamist Phoenix" as “the result of the process through which an armed organization assembles the socioeconomic infrastructure (taxation, employment services, etc.) of a state without the political one (i.e., no [national] territory, no self-determination).” The charters and covenants of these terror super-cells are commentary, not code. They have no legal international standing in the “family of nations.” 

 Notwithstanding, Hamas and the Palestinians in general have become the world’s darlings, the subject of a kind of political trainspotting, a striking fact that defies reason and credibility. It is equally staggering that almost nobody in the media and ministries and agencies cares about the Kurds, Yazidis, Uyghurs, Hazaras and other equally oppressed groups, obviously because there are no Jews in the vicinity to blame. Clearly, the Palestinians are the world’s stalking horse in the hunt for Jews.

None of this impinges upon the tattered conscience of the media, the bruised souls of the academy and the malign practice of the international cabal that works against the existence of the Jewish state. None of these “spiteful masochists,” to quote French author Michael Houellebecq in "The Map and the Territory," can recognize the truth beyond the “veil of lies and ashes” they see the world through. None of these groups recognize the Islamic teaching that lands once invaded and occupied by Muslims must always remain the property of Islam. None of these groups, whether disingenuous or simply dimwitted, recognize the influence of the taqiyya principle infecting every ostensible peace negotiation. None of these groups are willing to recognize that the motives of Islam are not “unclear,” as the press and police duplicitously claim they are after every lone jihadi killing spree. None of these groups recognize that they too are in the Islamic crosshairs. And all of these groups are in default of international law.