To Condi; Who is Humiliating Whom?

On October 11, 2006 in a Keynote Address to the American Task Force on Palestine,[1] Secretary Condoleezza Rice claimed that Palestinian Arabs feel “daily humiliation of occupation.” Palestinians say they feel humiliated and harassed when Israeli authorities search them and their belongings; when they are prevented from “travel[ing] more freely” because of checkpoints, roadblocks, closures, curfews and security concerns.

“Student of International History” – Jewish Legal Occupation

You maintain that you are “a student of international history.” International law, the UN Charter, and Article 80 of the UN Charter implicitly recognize the Mandate of the League of Nations [Mandate for Palestine]. This Mandate granted Jews the irrevocable right to settle in the area of Palestine – anywhere between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.[2]

You must be familiar with Professor Eugene V. Rostow, a world renowned expert of international law who served as the Dean of Yale Law School (1955-66), who later became the U.S. Undersecretary of State, and in 1967 was a key draftee of UN Resolution 242. He explains:[3]

“The Mandates of the League of Nations have a special status in international law. They are considered to be trusts, indeed ‘sacred trusts.’

“Under international law, neither Jordan nor the Palestinian Arab ‘people’ of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip have a substantial claim to the sovereign possession of the occupied territories.

“… the mandate implicitly denies Arab claims to national political rights in the area in favor of the Jews; the mandated territory was in effect reserved to the Jewish people for their self-determination and political development, in acknowledgment of the historic connection of the Jewish people to the land.

Lord Curzon, who was then the British Foreign Minister, made this reading of the mandate explicit. There remains simply the theory that the Arab inhabitants of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip have an inherent ‘natural law’ claim to the area. Neither customary international law nor the United Nations Charter acknowledges that every group of people claiming to be a nation has the right to a state of its own.

“… it is a rule essential to international peace that claims of national self-determination be asserted only through peaceful means. The international use of force to vindicate such claims is and must be strictly forbidden by the United Nations Charter.”

“Humiliation”

In Israel, every Israeli is searched numerous times during the course of a day. Israelis are asked to open their bags and purses for inspection. In most cases, they are subjected to body searches with a metal detector every time they enter a bank or a post office, pick up a bottle of milk at the supermarket, enter a mall or train station, or visit a hospital or medical clinic. Young Israeli men and women are physically frisked in search of suicide belts before they enter crowded nightclubs.

As a matter of routine, Israelis’ car trunks are searched every time they enter a well-trafficked parking lot. Daily, their cars pass through roadblocks that cause massive traffic jams when Israeli security forces are in hot pursuit of suicide bombers believed to have entered Israel.

These ordinary daily humiliations now extend to similar searches when Israelis go to weddings or bar mitzvahs. No one abroad talks about the humiliation Jews in Israel are subjected to, having to write at the bottom of wedding invitations and other life cycle events, “The site will be secured [by armed guards]” – to ensure relatives and friends will attend and share their joyous occasion.

To date, no one protests the fact that, since the 1970s, Jewish schoolchildren in Israel are surrounded by perimeter fences, with armed guards at the schoolyard gates. Not one Arab village in Israel in JUdea and Samaria has a perimeter fence around it. Guards are not required at Arab shops, cafes, restaurants, movie theaters, wedding halls or schools – either in Israel or in Judea and Samaria.

Palestinians also do not need armed guards to accompany every school trip, youth movement hike or campout. They are not targets of terrorism.

Arab children have never been willfully attacked by Jews, while Arabs have deliberately murdered Jewish youngsters at boarding schools, junior high school students on overnight trips and teens on nature hikes. Arab Palestinians attacked Jewish school buses carrying elementary school children, murdered two children playing in a cave near their homes, killed a toddler in a nursery and murdered small children hiding under their beds – all in addition to wave after wave of suicide bombings.

Israelis’ freedom of movement is compromised daily as countless citizens seek to avoid crowded areas or events, change their daily routines by sticking to side streets, avoid traveling close to public buses, or simply stay out of the heart of their own capital entirely. Most school trips have been cancelled or curtailed during the past four years.

Israelis are told, to disguise themselves when traveling abroad – not to speak Hebrew in public and not to wear garments that reveal their Jewish/Israeli origins. On the other hand, Arabs who frequent Jewish cities and towns in Israel wear their traditional Arab headgear without fear of being attacked or harassed.

In fact, Secretary Rice, the average Israeli is “humiliated and harassed” far more times a day than the average Palestinian.

Contribution to Civilized Society? Make Peace with a People that Celebrates Mass Murder?

You believe Palestinian Arabs “have so much to give to the international community and to all of us.” In fact, culturally, Palestinians are not distinct from other Arabs. The sole contributions Palestinians can take credit for are the invention of skyjacking for political purposes in the 1960s, and lately, a special brand of suicidal terrorism that uses their own children as delivery systems for bombing pizza parlors, discos, and public commuter buses.

Michael B. Oren writing in the Wall Street Journal wonders: “How can there be peace with a people that celebrates mass murder?

“There is, of course, nothing new about Palestinians applauding terror. During the Gulf War in 1991, they danced on rooftops in praise of Iraqi scud missiles raining on Israeli neighborhoods. Again, in the mid-1990s, after bus bombs in Israel killed dozens–one of them was my sister-in-law–an estimated 70,000 Palestinians filled a Gaza stadium to cheer a re-enactment of the massacre.The deaths of over 3,000 a.m.ericans on September 11 was another cause for dancing in Palestinian streets, though Arafat’s men suppressed foreign coverage of the fete.” [4]

Condi; For Jews Building a Future Was Never Easy. Segregation Was a Casual Aspect of their Life.

From a report by the Palestine Royal Commission after touring Palestine in 1937:[5]

“With every year that passes, the contrast between this in­tensely democratic and highly organized modern [Jewish] community and the old-fashioned Arab world around it grows sharper, and in nothing, perhaps, more markedly than on its cultural side. The literary output of the National Home is out of all proportion to its size.

“It is the same with science. The Daniel Sieff Research Institute [today Weitzman Institute] at Rehovot is equipped with the most delicate modern instruments; the experiments conducted there are watched by chemists all over the world: yet from its windows can be seen the hills inhabited by a backward peasantry who regard it only as the demonstration of a power they hate and fear and who would like, no doubt, when their blood is up, to destroy it.”

“speaking generally, whether it be the Jew who has been driven from a comfortable life in a cultured milieu and is now digging all day in the fields and sleeping in a bare cottage, or whether it be the Jew who has emerged from a Polish ghetto and is now working in a factory at Tel Aviv, the dominant feeling of both is an overwhelming sense of escape. The champions of Zionism have always held – and on the whole they are now proved right-that a Jew released from an anti-Jewish environment and “restored” to Palestine would not only feel free as he had never felt before but would also acquire a new self­ confidence, a new zest in living from his consciousness that he was engaged in a great constructive task.

Did U.S. Policy Change?

On June 30, 1922, a joint resolution of both Houses of Congress of the United States unanimously endorsed the Mandate for Palestine – the irrevocable right to settle in the area of Palestine – anywhere between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.[6]

On September 21, 1922 – President Warren G. Harding, (the twenty-ninth president 1921-1923) signed the joint resolution of approval to establish a Jewish Homeland in Palestine.

The facts speak for themselves – The truth does not always win, but it is always right.

Eli E. Hertz eli@mythsandfacts.org

[1] For the full text see: http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2006/73895.htm

[2] For the document see: http://middleeastfacts.org/content/UN-Documents/Mandate-for-Palestine.htm

For commentary see: http://www.mythsandfacts.com/Conflict/mandate_for_palestine/mandate_for_palestine.htm#B1.

[3] Eugene V. Rostow Biography at: http://www.law.yale.edu/YLR/pdf/ylr50-2/Rostow.pdf.

[4] For one description of the ‘culture of glorifying death,’ that drives immature adolescents to blow themselves to smithereens fueled by the ‘promise’ of seventy virgins when they get to Paradise, see: Michael B. Oren, “Palestinians Whoop It Up: How can there be peace with a people that celebrates mass murder?” The Wall Street Journal Opinion Journal at: http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110002113. (11593).

[5] Palestine Royal Commission report. July 1937, chap V, 110/556

[6] “Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled. That the United States of America favors the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of Christian and all other non-Jewish communities in Palestine, and that the Holy places and religious buildings and sites in Palestine shall be adequately protected.”