Saturday, September 08, 2012

Scobbie's "Do" on the Levy Report

I left the following comment at Professor Iain Scobbie's atrocious blog post on the Levy Report:-

Attempting to assert that Jews constructing homes and residing in them (and building schools, factories, planting crops, etc.) in the region of Judea and Samaria is somehow illegal and must be pejoratively termed as "settlement activity" is, actually, the more perverse viewpoint and the real travesty of law.

In the territory the entire civilized world recognized as the Jewish national home and which it was decided that that home be reconstituted, international law provided for a right of "close settlement by Jews" on state and waste lands in that area which, due to the provisions of Article 25 of the Mandate for Palestine in 1922, was temporarily limited to all the area of the country west of the Jordan River (for after all, Article 5 obligated the Mandatory Power not to cede or in any way placed under control of another power).  The rights provided for "non-Jews", that is, everyone else living in the country (including Arabs who conquered and occupied the country in previous centuries), were limited to solely to "civil and religious rights" but not "political" or "national".  The Mandate was to provide for the basis of a Jewish state.

That state was to arise through territorial compromise as recommended on November 29, 1947 but that suggestion was rejected by the local Arabs and at least seven other Arab countries in a war of aggression.  Surely, no rights can accrue such a group of people when, after losing that illegal war and then launching terror attacks against Israel in the 1950s through the Fedayeen terror and then after 1964, through Fatah, another war was propagated in 1967 through which, in an act of defense, Israel became an administer of Judea and Samaria whether one calls that a "belligerent occupation" or a reversion of sovereignty or anything in-between.

The Jewish people who were ethnically cleansed for Judea and Samaria during the Mandate period, even prior to the outbreak of Arab-initiated hostilities on November 30, 1947, from their homes in Hebron, Nablus/Shchem, Gaza, Jenin, and then from Gush Etzion, Neveh Yaakov, Atarot, Bet HaAravah and the Old City of Jerusalem, all geographical locations Scobbie would call the "West Bank", have all the legal right(s) to reconstitute those homes and farms and other elements of a normal national life, even including a university in Samaria, a winery in Binyamin and a factory in Judea.  There cannot be anything illegal for me to reside in Shiloh.

^

No comments: