The Jewish Press
December 26, 2012 -- Mr.
President, some foreign policies need to be carefully thought through a
second time. Your "two-state" approach to peace between Israel and
“Palestine” wrongly accepts the core argument of an Israeli
“occupation.” Even the most cursory look at pertinent world history
would reveal compelling legal reasons to now reject this unfounded
argument.
Consider,
for example, that organized Arab terrorism against Israel began on the
very first hour of Israel's independence, in May 1948. This meticulously
planned corollary to the Arab world's self-proclaimed "war of
annihilation" took place almost twenty years before there were any
"occupied territories." Indeed, virulent anti-Jewish terrorism in the
British Mandate period had actually taken place many years before
Israel's UN-announced statehood.
But one must begin at the beginning. The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) is the historical source of the current Palestinian Authority (PA).
What were its objectives? Significantly, it was founded in 1964, three
years before Israel ever came to control the West Bank (Judea/Samaria)
and Gaza. What, then, was the PLO planning to "liberate" between 1964
and 1967, when Egypt controlled Gaza illegally, and Jordan occupied the
West Bank (Judea/Samaria) illegally?
Mr.
President, the logical answer must be all of Israel – that is,
everything within the "green" armistice lines of 1949. Yet these are
precisely the 1967 borders you have repeatedly identified as the
appropriate starting point for current peace negotiations.
What more should we know about the PLO? Though not widely mentioned by your administration, it was explicitly
declared a "terrorist organization" in several U.S. federal court
decisions, including the widely cited Tel-Oren v. Libyan Arab Republic
(1984).
Earlier,
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, hopefully seeking peace with the
always-recalcitrant Palestinians, had forcibly expelled more than 10,000
Jews from Gaza and northern Samaria. Immediately, these areas were
transformed by Hamas from productive growing lands and living areas to
terrorist rocket-launching sites. In response, Israel had to mount a
pair of major counterterrorist operations (Cast Lead and Pillar of
Defense) just to protect its noncombatant populations from increasingly
gratuitous and expansive rocket attacks. Ultimately, these indispensable
self-defense operations wound up killing innocent Palestinians as well
as innocent Israelis. So much for the Hamas commitment to
"self-determination."
Mr.
President, why aren't the Palestinians reasonably expected to cease
deliberate and random violence against Israeli civilians before being
admitted into the civilized community of nations? Isn't it clear that
they actually seek something other than an “end to occupation?” Isn't it
already very likely that both Fatah and Hamas still regard all of
Israel as “occupied” territory? After all, their official maps, long
familiar in Washington, still include all of Israel as part of
“Palestine.”
Mr.
President, without an alleged occupation there could remain no possible
legal or moral justification for Palestinian policies of relentless
terror. Nonetheless, the fact that “occupation” is a contrived legal fiction
has had little or no impact on your administration's core position on
Palestinian statehood. Nor, somehow, has it occurred to any supporters
of Palestinian statehood that both Hamas and Fatah still find their
common ideological mentors in Hitler and Goebbels, two figures for whom
the prospective rulers of a nascent "Palestine" are openly ardent
objects of admiration.
Mr.
President, at its heart, your policy toward Israel and "Palestine"
reveals certain incremental bewitchments of language. Over the years,
Arab patience in building an expanding Palestinian state on mountains of
Israeli corpses has drawn systematically upon achieving a prior
linguistic victory. In fact, the ritualistic canard of an Israeli
"occupation" has now been repeated so often that it has generally been
taken as an irrefutable fact.
Mr.
President, why is it disregarded that an Israeli “occupation” just
happened to follow the multi-state Arab aggression of 1967? Egypt, Syria
and Jordan, hardly evident democracies, have never denied this
aggression. And who bothers to recall that these very same Arab states
were also the principal aggressors in the expressly genocidal Arab
attacks that first began on May 15, 1948? This combined assault took
place literally moments after the new Jewish state’s UN-backed
declaration of independence.
Mr.
President, please recall that a sovereign state of Palestine did not
exist before 1967, or before 1948. Nor did UN Security Council
Resolution 242 ever promise a state of Palestine. A state of Palestine
has never existed.
Even as a nonstate legal entity, the mandate of "Palestine" ceased to exist in 1948, when Great Britain relinquished its League of Nations mandate.
During the 1948-49 Israeli War of Independence, West Bank and Gaza came
under unauthorized control of Jordan and Egypt. Contrary to the
conventional wisdom, these Arab conquests did not put an end to an
already-existing state, or to an ongoing trust territory. What these
Arab aggressions did manage to accomplish was the intentional
prevention, by the Arab states, of a new Arab state of "Palestine."
From
the biblical Period (ca. 1350 BCE to 586 BCE) to the British Mandate
(1922-1948), the land named vengefully by the Romans after the ancient
Philistines was controlled only by non-Palestinian elements. However, a
continuous chain of Jewish possession of the land was legally recognized
after World War I. At the San Remo Peace Conference in April 1920, a
binding treaty was signed in which Great Britain was given mandatory
authority over "Palestine." This authority was based on the expectation
that Britain would prepare the area to become the “national home for the
Jewish People.” Previously, since 1516, the Ottoman Turks had ruled the
area cruelly, and as an undesirable provincial backwater.
The
writer, strategic and military affairs columnist for The Jewish Press,
is professor of Political Science at Purdue University. Educated at
Princeton (Ph.D., 1971), he lectures and publishes widely on
international relations and international law and is the author of ten
major books in the field. In Israel, Professor Beres was chair of
Project Daniel.
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