On Settlements, Agreements and Legitimacy: a midnight monograph

It is most significant thus that in ratifying the Palestine Mandate Charter (and, in point of fact, doing so without so much as a solitary dissenting vote amongst their often fractious lot), the League Council, acting on behalf of the entire 51-member Assembly of the organized world community of nations (and together with the nonmember, United States of America) formally recognized that the Jews had maintained an abiding and ongoing occupancy in the Land of Israel for some four thousand years, but that for many centuries of those millennia, their continuing deprivation of sovereignty had left them open and vulnerable to every malevolent and predatory assault, both there and throughout much of the world.

[xix]—albeit, for the foregoing parties, ideologically incommodious and decidedly inconvenient—item of history that Jewish domiciliarity in the Land of Israel: in every part of the Land of Israel, the Promised Land, the subsequently much-renamed Holy Land (“Syria-Palaestina,” “CisJordania,” etc), had humbly and modestly, yet staunchly and resolutely, persisted—in varying numbers, proportions and configurations—right up until the modern era.[xx]

[xxi] thenceforth and continuously (sometimes, even, with great dynamism) throughout the succeeding centuries. Yet—shorn of the implements of sovereignty, the blade and buckler of now-forbidden, Jewish dominion (thus perennially wanting in the societal harborage, ordered liberty and territorial control ensured by a vigilant, muscular, independent, self-directed, national polity)—it was a presence ragged and fouled, often as not.  Stunted and misshapen.  Battered and broken. Anxious and tentative.  Heartstricken.  Bowed.  Cowed. 

? the nation itself, a clever beggar (and a none-too-savory one)—ever the supplicant, never the player, world without end—and the world saw nothing wrong with that. Indeed, many were disturbed (some privately, some not so privately) at the prospect that it might ever be otherwise for the Children of Israel. Their ongoing reality, as perceived by the human family, was lost in memory, frozen in time, leaving in its former place—and as their place—only a grotesque spectacle and eternal caricature of themselves.  

§—and, in the end, for much the same reason….

å the most prominent and flourishing Jewish communities on the Arabian Peninsula, then driven out of the region by main force many lesser ones—and having then proceeded to plunder their property (now conveniently free for the taking) in order to finance the attacking armies of jihad—the fractious Arabian tribes, long acclimated to raiding and being raided but united now under the banner of an appetite-indulgent Islam, and aroused and rampant at the prospect of spoil, had stormed explosively northward, bursting out of the peninsula and into the Levant.

? decisively defeated (and then proceeded to massacre the surrendering forces of) the Byzantine [Eastern Roman] Empire that had “inherited” the Land of Israel? from pre-Diocletal (viz., still administratively unified) Rome:  thereby ending, after 636, Byzantine rule south of the Anatolian Peninsula.

[xxii] The new Arab government went even so far as to deliberately separate the Jews from their native soil.

δ and thus exceedingly vulnerable, Jewish community, was a prolonged affair, and over time became an accomplished fact through the routine seizure of Jewish land and dwellings, and the conscription of Jewish labor.[xxiii]

v faith, viz., non-converting Jews and Christians, the Twelve Laws of the Dhimma [“compact” or “covenant”].  The dhimmi were informally characterized as “protected” classes.  (Protected from what? one might well ask.)[xxiv] The Laws of Dhimma were indeed contractual, and were enforced upon these protégés of Islam on pain of death. 

?—were a head tax [jizya] and a land tax [kharaj], accompanied by related exploitative measures, as well as a raft of bigoted and economically crippling restrictions and deliberate, undisguised humiliations.[xxv]

Θ to ride—on anything. Wearing a sword was strictly forbidden the dhimmi, as was the bearing, or carrying, of arms of any sort.

*of infidels,” writes present-day, Egyptian-born, Bat Ye’or, “is a fundamental principle of Islamic law, inscribed in every aspect of their status.”[xxvi] (The attitude continues unchanged even into the modern age.)

[xxvii] would appear, by contrast, like a library society garden party—complete with Brie, Chardonnay, petits fours and a string quartet.

? What’s more, no other subsequent occupier—or migrating collectivity—ever created a polity of its own there either. Indeed, “[f]or nearly two thousand years, [and] though the Jews were powerless to prevent it, no other people had made Palestine its national home.”[xxviii]?

On Settlements, Agreements and Legitimacy: Part II“

?The central provinces of the Land of Israel—where Jewish life was summoned and commanded into existence when the world was yet deep in the Age of Bronze—have been known as Judea & Samaria for, quite literally, thousands of years and well into the modern era. They are so designated in the Tanakh [the “Old” Testament]—and one notes not only that Christ refers directly to them by name in the Gospels and that Matthew’s 2^nd chapter opens by uncomplicatedly and unambiguously identifying the Master’s birthplace as “Bethlehem of Judea” (as prophesied in Micah 5:2), but also that they figure prominently thus in the Acts of the Apostles. Anyone hoping to uncover so much as a solitary mention anywhere in the Scriptures of a so-called “West Bank” will have an easier time finding  himself a ‘kosher pork chop.’

? While we’re noting the locus of the vehicle  along the political spectrum, it would be perhaps even more ironic (to say nothing of unfair) to overlook that the author, Eugene V. Rostow—grandson of socialist immigrants and son of socialist parents, was himself named for the Terre Haute-born godfather of the American Left, Eugene Victor Debs [1855-1926].

?   Formally designated the International Court of Justice (ICJ)—also known as The Hague Court—primary judicial organ of the UN.

Ñ  Since the Senate, pace Pres. Wilson, had declined [twice:  19 Nov 1919, & 19 Mar 1920] to ratify the Treaty of Versailles—requisite to League membership, and the jurisdictional fons et origo of the League's authority.The state of war between America & the Central Powers—viz., Imperial Germany & Austro-Hungary (the US hadn’t fought Ottoman Turkey)—was instead ended by the Knox-Porter Joint Congressional Resolution of 1 Jul 1921, signed by Pres. Warren G. Harding the next day.

The US bound itself to the Palestine Mandate despite the fact that it never signed the League Covenant and never joined the world body.

j The document identified here as the San Remo Resolution was ironically (though not unsuitably) conceded by Britain’s virulently anti-Zionist Foreign Secretary, Lord George Nathaniel Curzon, to constitute modern-day Jewry’s “Magna Carta.”

?  In brief:  a matter acted upon with respect to its merits by a court of competent jurisdiction & settled by judgment is conclusive as to the rights of the parties (& their privies; i.e., any developing parties-in-interest, as by inheritance, succession, purchase or assignment). As res judicata, the judgment constitutes an absolute bar to subsequent action involving the same claim, demand or cause of action between the same parties.  [Black’s Law Dictionary (full cite at Appendix, infra), 1305-06, 1200]

?  That is, manifest, direct, independent self-rule.

? Regent, designated agent, temporary guardian, tutor and trustee.

? The consequences of that perception are fairly limned in Malcolm Hay’s Europe and the Jews: The Pressure of Christendom Over 1900 Years(Academy Chicago Publishers, 1992; orig., The Foot of Pride, Beacon Press, Cambridge, MA, 1950). It’s hardly exhaustive, but a suitable start (and not merely, as noted, as to Christianity or to Europe).

§   For what it’s worth…. It has been estimated that, worldwide, of all the Jews to have ever lived —in the perhaps-200 generations spanning the 40 centuries since Abraham—fully half of them have died violently at the hands of their fellow men:  one out of every two.  Make of such isolated factules what you will. Yet, as Israeli Foreign Minister [1966-74], Abba Eban, had more than one occasion to note, “Many things in Jewish history are too terrible to be believed, but nothing in that history is too terrible to have happened.”  [emphases added]  [Abba Eban: An Autobiography (full cite in endnote 8, infra), 333]

å  Typically the men would be beheaded, the women & children sold into slavery.

? Largest tributary of the Jordan River, and which flows westward into the latter from a location near what is now the Syrian border.

? Since AD 135, renamed, on order of the Roman Emperor Hadrian, “Syria-Palaestina.” See also endnotes 21 and 23, infra.

δ  By ongoing order of (what had been) the existing Byzantine administration.

v   Pagans who would not convert were often killed on the spot.

? Abu Bakr’s daughter, A'isha, Muhammad’s “favorite wife,” had shared the now-deceased Messenger’s bed for a decade:  from the age of nine (having been given to him at six—when he was in his 50’s).

Θ A saddle technologically facilitates the securing and maintenance of a rider’s balance—thus freeing him to do other things while mounted.

*  In the estimate of journalist & former White House foreign policy advisor for the Mideast, Joan Peters, the ingrained Arab & Islamic expectation of superiority to Jews, and their compulsive disinclination to relate to Jews as equals, constitutes “perhaps the most powerful factor in the Middle East conflict today, and certainly at the core the ‘Palestine’ question—the true heart of the matter.”  [emphases added]  [From Time Immemorial (full cite, endnotes, infra), 173-74]

? It is hard not to be struck by the extreme irony reflected in the intro to the earlier-cited SC Res. 242 of 22 Nov 1967, wherein is asserted the “inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war”—by which proposition the descendants of those who, in historical fact, took possession of the land in question by aggressive war now seek, with elaborate solemnity & swelling sanctimony, to bar the legitimate recovery and retention of that selfsame land by the descendants of those whom their warlike, plundering forebears wrested it from.  In sum:

get to take it back by force of arms.

Because the rules have changed.

(even defensive war).

Clear?

? Then too, as Peters notes, “[i]t was only politically that the Jews lost their land… “  [emph. in original]

Endnotes

[ii] Entitled “A New Beginning,” it had the presumption to include, among other things, an equating of the (largely self-inflicted) travails of the Palestinian Arabs in Israel, and in her disputed, unincorporated provinces, with the 1933-45 European Judaeocide, broadly known ever since as the Holocaust.  Such squalid rhetorical dislocations from reality by customers of this caliber are of course anything but ‘new’ as ‘beginnings’ go. 

[iii] Addressing healthcare ‘reform’ in a campaign speech at Rhode Island College, Providence, RI, 24 Feb 08.

[iv]  Mr Erekat’s imprecision enjoys a certain dubious fame deriving from, among other things, a hopeless case of “premature exclamajaculation”—i.e., his hair-trigger priming for excited utterance, especially of untimely—and notably slanderous—import.

tenth that many, and no massacre of civilians whatsoever—though CNN & the BBC (which hadn’t yet done their own, independent legwork) blithely continued repeating, and embellishing, the rot for weeks:  using Erekat’s figures, while labeling the subsequent devastation “like Hiroshima” and “a moonscape”—and indulging Arafat’s straightfaced allusion to “Jeningrad” (aerial photos plainly showed barely six percent of the camp destroyed), as well as, when it suited them, the claim by Nabil Shaath (Arafat’s then-chief negotiator) of  “3000 deaths, mostly civilians killed in cold blood.”

:  inadvertently activated after the troops’ withdrawal.  The camp’s fighters had prepared long and well for the battle, and had very obviously received expert technical assistance in their preparations, as evidenced in (among other things) many of the bombs found afterward:  which were identical in both makeup and manner of placement to mines & other explosives used by the IRA against British security forces.

hear ‘illegitimate’ as ‘illegal.’ 

Unless, of course, this kind of intellectual dishonesty is simply what it takes to rise in the hierarchy of the Palestinian Arab leadership (a distinct possibility, not, by any means, to be overlooked).

[v]  Apparently this $60B deal is the Administration’s way of (among other things) signaling its intention of not preventing Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weaponry.

An Iranian Bomb will surely augment the appeal to add military applications in the nuclear power plants.

join the Big Toy Club after all….

[vi] Ankara, 6 Apr 09, Speech to the Turkish Parliament, in Mr Obama’s first visit to a Muslim nation as president.

[vii] Julius Stone, Israel and Palestine: Assault on the Law of Nations (John Hopkins U. Press, Washington, DC, 1981), 5.  Professor Stone taught also in this country—at both Harvard Law School and the U. of Calif., Hastings College of the Law [SF].

[viii] The sheer perversity of the war—and its aftermath—was captured, some months after the shooting stopped, in the televised remarks of Israel’s then-foreign minister [1966-74] Abba Eban, as recalled in his subsequently published Abba Eban: An Autobiography, (Random House, NY, 1977):

This is the first war in history which has ended with the victors suing for peace, and the vanquished calling for unconditional surrender. [446]

[ix]  Sponsored by the UK Ambassador to the UN, [former Governor of Cyprus] Hugh Mackintosh Foot, Lord Caradon; unanimously endorsed [22 Nov 67] by the 15-member Council.

[x] “Pacific” settlement, that is, as distinguished from imposed settlement—as would have been the case if the Resolution had been issued under the Charter’s Seventh chapter (“Action with Respect to Threats to the Peace, Breaches of the Peace, Acts of Aggression”—Art. 39-51):  in which event, the Resolution would have been legally binding, mandatory.

[xi] Eugene V. Rostow, “The Future of Palestine,” Nov 93, McNair Papers, No. 24, Institute of National Strategic Studies; from the paper originally delivered at the American Leadership Conference on Israel & the Middle East, 10 Oct 93, Arlington, Virginia.

[xii] Signed 2 Mar 25, by the 30th President of the United States, Calvin Coolidge; ratified by the British Cabinet 18 Mar 25, and officially proclaimed, by President Coolidge on 5 Dec 25]:

Now, therefore, be it known, that I, Calvin Coolidge, President of the United States of America, have caused the said Convention to be made public, to the end that the same, and every article and clause thereof, may be observed and fulfilled with good faith by the United States and the citizens thereof.

[US Dept of State, Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the U.S., 1924,Vol. 2 (USGPO, DC, 1939), 212-22]

[xiii] U.S. Constitution, Art. 6, Par. 2 [the “Supremacy Clause”].

[xiv] Eugene V. Rostow, “Bricks and stones: settling for leverage; Palestinian autonomy,” TNR, 23 Apr 90.

[xv] Council of the League of Nations, Charter, Mandate for Palestine, London, 24 Jul 22, Art. 6.

[xvi] Eugene V. Rostow, “Resolved:  are the settlements legal? Israeli West Bank policies,” TNR, 21 Oct 91.

[xvii] Stone, Op cit., 181.

[xviii] Irwin J. Mansdorf, “Is Israel a Colonial State? The Political Psychology of a Palestinian Nomenclature,” Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Issue Brief No. 576, Mar-Apr 10.

reverse of the truth. Everywhere in the West, the foreign offices, defense ministries and big business were against the Zionists.“  [emphasis added]    [Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties,Revised (Harper Perennial Modern Classics, NY, 2001)]

[xix] Two works of the Rev. James William Parkes commend themselves readily to the reader’s attention and are most helpful in this regard:

A History of Palestine from 135 AD to Modern Times(Victor Gollancz, NY, 1949), and

1970)

Some occasional footnotes & statistics may be a bit garbled—hardly surprising in such an exhaustive tome—incorporating a dozen pages of bibliography & 120 pages of notes, in addition to its 400 of text & another 30 in appendices—the product of seven years of exacting & exhausting research (which ended up changing the author’s original perspective 180 degrees). Indeed sometimes the data & detail are so fulsome as to even overwhelm her. Future editions will doubtless clarify & reconcile these surface distractions from a superb, vital piece of work.]

[xx] It is quite true that the Jews were subjected to genocide and divested of their sovereignty by the Roman Empire. It is, further, true that Rome prohibited Jews from entering the renamed Jerusalem-qua-“Aelia” after the AD 135 collapse of the Bar Kokhba Revolt [see also herein infra].  However, it is a misstatement of history—an all-too-common-one, alas—to assert that the Jews were also flatly ‘exiled’ from all of Judea (now “Palaestina”) by the Mistress-on-the-Tiber or any of her agents, envoys or delegates. There simply was no such policy. 

:  the “new & improved”rendition of Judaism and “inheritor” of the original article (and the much-vaunted Promises attendant thereto). Convenient (if not essential) to the narrative was that the “demise and dispersion abroad” of the Jewish People were evidence of the Almighty’s final displeasure with, and ultimate rejection of, His original choice for the Chosen——notwithstanding that “the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable” [Rom 11:29]—whereby of course the field could now be seen as open for a new ‘choice.’  Handy, to be sure.

mean everlasting:

“I will.”  Full stop.

: 7, 13,19—He characterizes His intention as b’rit o-LAHM, “an everlasting covenant” (and in the same discourse, makes [17: 8] one of His oft-repeated promises of the Land, la’ah-khuZAHT o-LAHM, “as a possession”likewise “everlasting,” reserved to Avraham & heirs. 

never outgrown that species of acne, no matter how far past adolescence they’ve gotten.

[xxi]  Having been forced to call in his best generals from Britain and his best Legions from beyond the Danube—

[xxii]  Moshe Gil, A History of Palestine, 634-1099 (Cambridge U. Press, Cambridge, UK, 1992), 43; cited in Dore Gold, The Fight for Jerusalem:  Radical Islam, the West, and the Future of the Holy City (Regnery, DC, 2007), 95. 

[xxiii] [Benzion Dinur,Israel in the Diaspora (Dvir, Tel Aviv, 1960), Hebr, Vol. 1, “From the Conquest of the Land of Israel by the Arabs to the Crusades,” 27-30; cited in Benj. Netanyahu, A Durable Peace:  Israel and Its Place Among the Nations (Warner Books, NY, 2000), 27]

Qur’an, plainly had nothing to do with their ownership of, their settlement in OR their sovereignty over, the Land—but, rather, and solely, with their disinclination to swap their ancient, venerable faith for his new and trendy version of religion.

epithet, P’leshet [Philistia: ~ “domain of the invaders”], for the southern maritime, Gaza District pentapolis of the intrusive (and derisively labeled) P’lishtim  [“Philistines,” in the King’s English of James the First]:  “intruders,” “invaders,” “encroachers,” etc.  These were formely marauding, piratical Sea Peoples [the Shekesh, the Denyen, the Tjeker, etc] originating in the Aegean region, loosely affiliated with each other, yet well-organized for short-noticed military endeavors.