BLAMING ISRAEL FOR STAYING ALIVE

Louis Rene' Beres

In the end, all current legal criticism of Israel’s recent Operation Cast Lead in Gaza is rooted in enthusiastic allegations of an “occupation.” Yet, incontestably, Israel completely left Gaza several years back, and now wants nothing more than to be permitted a permanent disengagement. Although Israel’s army must intermittently close off Gaza’s porous borders, causing the strip’s Arab population to suffer plainly grave hardship, this action is always an indispensable and lawful expression of self-defense. The very moment that Gaza Palestinians finally decide to cease terrorist and rocket attacks on Israel’s civilian populations, the IDF will gratefully abandon any further resorts to military force.

So why don’t the Palestinians simply cease their violence? Perhaps it is o they seek much more than an “end to occupation.” Perhaps it is likely that they see all of Israel as “occupied” territory.

Without an “occupation,” of course, there could be no justification for relentless Hamas policies of random terror against Israel. The fact that the “occupation” is a legal fiction is not itself a credibility problem, because ritualistic deception – if repeated often enough – can begin to sound exactly like truth. For this perverse but pragmatic bit of political wisdom, Hamas still finds its ideological mentors in Hitler and Goebbels, two figures for whom the Islamic Resistance Movement has repeatedly expressed very open admiration.

In all world politics, words matter. Over the years, Arab patience in building a Palestinian state upon accumulating mountains of Israeli corpses has drawn consciously upon achieving a prior linguistic victory. Curiously, the regularly unchallenged language referring to an Israeli "occupation" always ignores the carefully documented history of both West Bank (Judea/Samaria) and Gaza.

The most evident historical omission concerns the unwitting manner in which these “territories” first fell into Israel's hands. Here it is conveniently disregarded that “occupation” followed the multistate Arab state aggression of 1967. Indeed, Egypt, Syria and Jordan have never denied this aggression.

A sovereign state of Palestine did not exist before 1967 or 1948. Nor did UN Security Council Resolution 242 ever promise a state of Palestine. A state of Palestine has never existed. Never.

Even as a nonstate legal entity, "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 illegal control of Jordan and Egypt respectively. These Arab conquests did not put an end to an already-existing state or to an ongoing trust territory. What these aggressions did accomplish was the prevention of a state of Palestine.

From the Biblical Period (ca. 1350 BCE to 586 BCE) to the British Mandate (1918 - 1948), the land named by the Romans after the ancient Philistines was controlled only by non-Palestinian elements. 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 area had been ruled as a backwater by the Ottoman Turks.

Palestine, according to the Treaty, comprised territories encompassing what are now the states of Jordan and Israel, including West Bank and Gaza. Present day Israel comprises only twenty-two percent of Palestine as defined and ratified at the San Remo Peace Conference.

In 1922, Great Britain unilaterally and without any lawful authority split off seventy-eight percent of the lands promised to the Jews - all of Palestine east of the Jordan River - and gave it to Abdullah, the non-Palestinian son of the Sharif of Mecca. Eastern Palestine now took the name “Transjordan,” which it retained until April 1949, when it was renamed as Jordan. From the moment of its creation, Transjordan was closed to all Jewish migration and settlement, a clear betrayal of the British promise in the Balfour Declaration of 1917, and a patent contravention of its Mandatory obligations under international law. On July 20, 1951, a Palestinian Arab assassinated King Abdullah for the latter's hostility to Palestinian aspirations and concerns. Regarding these aspirations, Jordan's “moderate” King Hussein - nineteen years later, during September 1970 - brutally murdered thousands of defenseless Palestinians under his jurisdiction.

In 1947, several years prior to Abdullah's killing, the newly formed United Nations, rather than designate the entire land west of the Jordan River as the long-promised Jewish national homeland, enacted a second partition. Curiously, because this second fission again gave complete advantage to Arab interests, Jewish leaders accepted the painful judgment. The Arab states did not. On May 15, 1948, exactly twenty-four hours after the State of Israel came into existence, Azzam Pasha, Secretary General of the Arab League, declared to a tiny new country founded upon the ashes of Holocaust: "This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre."

This declaration has been at the very heart of all subsequent Arab orientations toward Israel, including those of “moderate” Fatah. Even by the strict legal standards of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Arab actions and attitudes toward the microscopic Jewish state in their midst have remained authentically genocidal.

In 1967, the Jewish state, as a result of its unexpected military victory over Arab aggressor states, gained unintended control over West Bank and Gaza. Although the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war is codified in the UN Charter, there existed no authoritative sovereign to whom the Territories could be "returned." Israel could hardly have been expected to transfer them back to Jordan and Egypt, which had exercised unauthorized and terribly cruel control since the Arab-initiated “war of extermination" in 1948-49. Moreover, the idea of Palestinian "self-determination" had only just begun to emerge after the Six Day War, and – significantly - had not even been included in UN Security Council Resolution 242, which was adopted on November 22, 1967.

The Arab states convened a summit in Khartoum in August 1967, concluding: "No peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with it...." The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was formed three years earlier, in 1964, before there were any “Israeli Occupied Territories.” What was it, therefore, that the PLO had sought to "liberate" between 1964 and 1967?

The “Palestinian Territories” are not occupied by Israel. To be sure, Gaza’s borders are still closely watched and supervised by Israeli military forces, but only because Jihadist Palestinian terrorists refuse to live peacefully with any Jewish state. A verifiable Hamas retreat from terrorism would finally allow Israel to cease all Gaza operations, thereby making it unreasonable for anyone to further allege an Israeli “occupation.”

Shouldn’t the world now be demanding precisely such a retreat, rather than denouncing Israel’s perfectly legitimate right to defend itself from endless terror?

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LOUIS RENÉ BERES (Ph.D., Princeton, 1971) is the author of many books and articles dealing with military affairs and international law. His columns appear often in several major U.S., European and Israeli newspapers.