JERUSALEM NEWS
NEWS AND INFORMATION
Events, happenings, and Opinions Concerning
Israel, Israelites, Judah, and Everyone Else
Jerusalem News-804
Jerusalem News-804
27 Av 5768 28 August 2008
Contents:
1. Biden's
Ties to Pro-Iran Groups Questioned
2. The Legality of Jewish Settlement in Judah and Samaria
Brit-Am Preamble
Extracts from Eugene W. Rostow:
"Resolved: are the settlements legal? Israeli West Bank policies"
3. PA, Germany sign agreement to establish 55 police stations in West Bank
1. Biden's
Ties to Pro-Iran Groups Questioned
Kenneth R. Timmerman
http://www.israelunitycoalition.org/news/article.php?id=3091
Newsmax.com, August 26, 2008
Extracts Only (for complete article go
to URL above):
Sen. Barack Obama and his newly-picked running mate, Sen. Joe
Biden of Delaware, may have sparred during the primaries. But on one issue they
are firmly united: the need to forge closer ties to the government of Iran.
Kaveh Mohseni, a spokesman for the Student Movement Coordination Committee for
Democracy in Iran, calls Biden "a great friend of the mullahs."
He notes that Biden?s election campaigns "have been financed by Islamic
charities of the Iranian regime based in California and by the Silicon Iran
network," a loosely-knit group of wealthy Iranian-American businessmen and women
seeking to end the U.S. trade embargo on Iran.
"In exchange, the senator does his best to aid the mullahs," Mohseni argues....
2. The Legality of Jewish Settlement in
Judah and Samaria
Brit-Am Preamble
We believe that the Jews have a God-given right to the whole of the Land of
Israel.
They should settle as much of it as they can. This is their duty.
Anyone who disputes the Jewish right to the Land denies the authority of the
Almighty God of Israel.
It is best not to communicate with such persons.
Life being what it is however it happens that one may get caught up in a
situation
where discussion of the Jewish right to the Land of Israel is unavoidable.
For different reasons quoting from the Bible etc in such circumstances could be
counter-productive.
We then would have recourse to natural right and historical claims.
A frequent argument against Jewish Settlement quotes UN decisions and
International Law
and claims that the settlements are illegal. Those making such quotes sometimes
seem to know what
they are talking about. We may be inclined to accept their premise in argument
and simply say that
International Law etc has no authority to abrogate in this case the innate
Jewish Right to all the land of Israel.
This is correct.
Nevertheless it may also be useful to know that even from the point of view of
international law
the settlements are legal.
The article below discusses this issue.
Resolved: are the settlements legal?
Israeli West Bank policies
http://www.tzemachdovid.org/Facts/islegal1.shtml
By Eugene W. Rostow
The New Republic, October 21, 1991
Extracts Only (for complete article go
to URL above):
Assuming the Middle East conference actually does take place, its official task
will be to achieve peace between Israel and its Levantine neighbors in
accordance with Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338. Resolution 242,
adopted after the Six-Day War in 1967, sets out criteria for peace-making by the
parties; Resolution 338, passed after the Yom Kippur War in 1973, makes
resolution 242 legally binding and orders the parties to carry out its terms
forthwith. Unfortunately, confusion reigns, even in high places, about what
those resolutions require.
For twenty-four years Arab states have pretended that the two resolutions are
"ambiguous" and can be interpreted to suit their desires. And some European,
Soviet and even American officials have cynically allowed Arab spokesman to
delude themselves and their people--to say nothing of Western public
opinion--about what the resolutions mean. It is common even for American
journalists to write that Resolution 242 is "deliberately ambiguous," as though
the parties are equally free to rely on their own reading of its key provisions.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Resolution 242, which as undersecretary
of state for political affairs between 1966 and 1969 I helped produce, calls on
the parties to make peace and allows Israel to administer the territories it
occupied in 1967 until "a just and lasting peace in the Middle East" is
achieved. When such a peace is made, Israel is required to withdraw its armed
forces "from territories" it occupied during the Six-Day War--not from "the"
territories nor from "all" the territories, but from some of the territories,
which included the Sinai Desert, the West Bank, the Golan Heights, East
Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip.
Five-and-a-half months of vehement public diplomacy in 1967 made it perfectly
clear what the missing definite article in Resolution 242 means. Ingeniously
drafted resolutions calling for withdrawals from "all" the territories were
defeated in the Security Council and the General Assembly. Speaker after speaker
made it explicit that Israel was not to be forced back to the "fragile" and
"vulnerable" Armistice Demarcation Lines, but should retire once peace was made
to what Resolution 242 called "secure and recognized" boundaries, agreed to by
the parties. In negotiating such agreements, the parties should take into
account, among other factors, security considerations, access to the
international waterways of the region, and, of course, their respective legal
claims.
Resolution 242 built on the text of the Armistice Agreements of 1949, which
provided (except in the case of Lebanon) that the Armistice Demarcation Lines
separating the military forces were "not to be construed in any sense" as
political or territorial boundaries, and that "no provision" of the Armistice
Agreements "Shall in any way prejudice the right, claims, and positions" of the
parties "in the ultimate peaceful settlement of the Palestine problem." In
making peace with Egypt in 1979, Israel withdrew from the entire Sinai, which
had never been part of the British Mandate.
For security it depended on patrolled demilitarization and the huge area of the
desert rather than on territorial change. As a result, more than 90 percent of
the territories Israel occupied in 1967 are now under Arab sovereignty. It is
hardly surprising that some Israelis take the view that such a transfer fulfills
the territorial requirements of Resolution 242, no matter how narrowly they are
construed.
Resolution 242 leaves the issue of dividing the occupied areas between Israel
and its neighbors entirely to the agreement of the parties in accordance with
the principles it sets out.
The heated question of Israel's settlements in the West Bank during the
occupation period should be viewed in this perspective. The British Mandate
recognized the right of the Jewish people to "close settlement" in the whole of
the Mandated territory. It was provided that local conditions might require
Great Britain to "postpone" or "withhold" Jewish settlement in what is now
Jordan. This was done in 1922. But the Jewish right of settlement in Palestine
west of the Jordan river, that is, in Israel, the West Bank, Jerusalem, and the
Gaza Strip, was made unassailable. That right has never been terminated and
cannot be terminated except by a recognized peace between Israel and its
neighbors. And perhaps not even then, in view of Article 80 of the U.N. Charter,
"the Palestine article," which provides that "nothing in the Charter shall be
construed ... to alter in any manner the rights whatsoever of any states or any
peoples or the terms of existing international instruments...."
Some governments have taken the view that under the Geneva Convention of 1949,
which deals with the rights of civilians under military occupation, Jewish
settlements in the West Bank are illegal, on the ground that the Convention
prohibits an occupying power from flooding the occupied territory with its own
citizens. President Carter supported this view, but President Reagan reversed
him, specifically saying that the settlements are legal but that further
settlements should be deferred since they pose a psychological obstacle to the
peace process.
If there is to be any division of the West Bank between Israel and Jordan, the
Jewish right of settlement recognized by the Mandate will have to be taken into
account in the process of making peace.
This reading of Resolution 242 has always been the keystone of American policy.
In launching a major peace initiative on September 1, 1982, President Reagan
said, "I have personally followed and supported Israel's heroic struggle for
survival since the founding of the state of Israel thirty-four years ago: in the
pre-1967 borders, Israel was barely ten miles wide at its narrowest point. The
bulk of Israel's population lived within artillery range of hostile Arab armies.
I am not about to ask Israel to live that way again."
Yet some Bush administration statements and actions on the Arab-Israeli
question, and especially Secretary of State James Baker's disastrous speech of
May 22, 1989, betray a strong impulse to escape from the resolutions as they
were negotiated, debated, and adopted, and award to the Arabs all the
territories between the 1967 lines and the Jordan river, including East
Jerusalem. The Bush administration seems to consider the West Bank and the Gaza
Strip to be "foreign" territory to which Israel has no claim. Yet the Jews have
the same right to settle there as they have to settle in Haifa. The West Bank
and the Gaza Strip were never parts of Jordan, and Jordan's attempt to annex the
West Bank was not generally recognized and has now been abandoned. The two
parcels of land are parts of the Mandate that have not yet been allocated to
Jordan, to Israel, or to any other state, and are a legitimate subject for
discussion.
The American position in the coming negotiations should return to the
fundamentals of policy and principle that have shaped American policy towards
the Middle East for three-quarters of a century. Above all, rising above
irritation and pique, it should stand as firmly for fidelity to law in dealing
with the Arab-Israeli dispute as President Bush did during the Gulf war.
Fidelity to law is the essence of peace, and the only practical rule for making
a just and lasting peace.
EUGENE V. ROSTOW is a Distinguished Fellow at the United States Institute of
Peace.
3. PA, Germany sign agreement to
establish 55 police stations in West Bank
http://www.imra.org.il/story.php3?id=40496
PA, Germany sign agreement to establish 55 police stations in West Bank
Date: 28 / 08 / 2008 Time: 16:55
www.maannews.net/en/index.php?opr=ShowDetails&ID=31581
Bethlehem - Ma'an - Palestinian Interior Minister Abd Ar-Razaq Al-Yahya
and German Representative to the Palestinian Authority Klaus Burkhardt
signed a joint agreement to establish a total 55 new police stations in the
West Bank on Thursday.
The agreement is part of a joint project of the Palestinian Interior
Ministry, the European Union mission to support the Palestinian police, and
the United Nations.
Five of the new police stations will be in Jenin, where the Palestinian
security forces recently redeployed.
Over 80% of Palestinian police stations in the West Bank currently work out
of rented buildings.
The German representative released a statement in Arabic praising "Efforts
exerted by Palestinian police in establishing a police system committed to
the principles of rule of law."
He added that Palestinian police funding, training, and other forms of
support.
The German government pledged 15 million Euros (22 million US dollars) at a
conference in support of Palestinian security and rule of law it hosted in
Berlin in June. The government says it will disburse the funds by the end of
2008.
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