Israel has now been at war with Hamas for six months. One would think that the nations that have proscribed Hamas as a terrorist organisation – and in particular the USA, the EU Britain and Australia – would be delighted that Israel is about to rid the world of this barbarous, blood-thirsty murderous entity once and for all.
But no. The pressure that these Western nations – along with the UN, the EU, and the International Court of Justice – are putting upon the State of Israel could easily cause them to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. It is almost as if they want Hamas to survive and live another day, in order to fulfil their founding Charter to destroy the Jewish state, and to murder as many Jews as possible. Ideally, Hamas would like to complete what Hitler started.
Moreover, polls among the Arab population in ‘the West Bank’ and in Gaza indicated that the rape, the butchery and the wholesale murder of Jews that Hamas perpetrated on 7th October had around 80% approval rating.
And now, half a year on from the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, the above-mentioned nations, many of which would call themselves “friends of Israel” are wanting to unilaterally recognise a Palestinian state in ‘the West Bank’ with ‘East Jerusalem’ as its capital – even without a Final Status Agreement between the Palestinian Authority and Israel which ‘Oslo’ mandated – and, more importantly, without the agreement of the government and the overwhelming majority of the people of Israel.
This comes at a time when the PLO – the authority behind the PA – is seeking reconciliation with Hamas that would include the proscribed terrorist organisation in a future Palestinian government.
Not only would the imposition of a Palestinian state be a reward for the most iniquitous act of terrorism ever committed against the Jewish state, but it would also be illegal in international law. Andrew Tucker, Director-General of The Hague Initiative for International Cooperation (Thinc.), says in the soon-to-be-released Part Two of the documentary series Whose Land?: “Even today there is such a thing as ‘State Sovereignty’. The sovereignty of nation states is still fundamentally part of International Law and underlines the United Nations Charter in every way.”
In the last 90 years the Arabs living west of the Jordan River – today known as ‘the Palestinians’ – have been offered their own state alongside the Jewish state at least five times, starting with the Peel Commission of 1937 during the Mandate, then the UN Partition Plan of 1947, and then a further three times following the signing of the Oslo Accords. They have rejected statehood every single time, and resorted to violence against the Jewish state.
In the opening sequence of Whose Land? Issa Salman, who was Chairman of the Jerusalem Teachers’ Association at the time of the last offer of statehood, said on PA Television in November 2014: “In our schools, we teach what our religion and conscience dictate: ‘That Jerusalem is Arab and that Palestine – from north to south, from the River to the Sea – is Islamic Palestinian Arab, and will remain so in spite of the damned occupier.’”
The following month in another clip translated by Palestinian Media Watch, Tawfiq Tirawi, a member of the Fatah Central Committee was quoted as saying on Al-Mayadeen TV in Lebanon: “Don’t you dare think there is even a single Palestinian, whether he supports the two-state solution or another path, who would agree to these settlements being part of Israel.” He was not referring to the ‘settlements’ as those in ‘the West Bank’ because he goes on to say: “No. Haifa, Jaffa, Acre and Nazareth are Palestinian, despite the Americans and the Israelis.”
These two quotes, which are entirely in line with what UNWRA teaches Palestinian children, come from officials in the Palestinian Authority, Israel’s supposed peace partner under ‘Oslo’. Clearly, they are not in the slightest bit interested in the ‘Two-State’ paradigm that is once again being rammed down Israel’s throat by the West. Moreover, the West completely ignores the fact that the Palestinians vehemently assert that the Jewish presence in any part of the Land of Israel is ‘The Occupation’ and ‘illegal’.
When it comes to international law, the only illegal occupation of the land west of the Jordan River that has taken place in the last 76 years was during the 19 years immediately after the rebirth of Israel, when five Arab nations invaded the nascent Jewish state with the intention of destroying it. To quote Andrew Tucker again: “Jordan, Syria, Egypt had no claim to Jerusalem or the ‘West Bank’ – on the basis of any doctrinal principle of international law.”
International Lawyer, Dr Cynthia Day Wallace, a Senior Fellow at Thinc. confirms this: “The Arab rejection of Resolution 181 precludes the Arabs from any legal claim they might otherwise have to that territory. And, moreover, the Arabs have actually not even recognised the right of the Jewish people to have a sovereign state.”
Ever since the Six-Day War of 1967, many of the Western nations, including both the Australian and British governments, along with the UN and the EU refer to ‘The West Bank’ and ‘East Jerusalem’ as “Occupied Palestinian Territory”. Whose Land? Part Two, which is entitled The Law of Occupation and the Status of Jerusalem asks whether this widely used accusatory mantra has any basis in international law, or is it simply anti-Israel propaganda?
Professor Avi Bell, an international lawyer who is one of the main participants in the documentary, points out: “When people think about occupation in ordinary conversation, what they mean is ‘a regime that has no business being there’ – like the Nazis in France. That is what they have in mind when they think about ‘occupation’. That is not the way that international law looks at ‘Occupation’.”
Dr Alan Baker is a long-time legal advisor to the Israeli government. He is also a co-author of the Levy Report, which is the blueprint of Israel’s policy for the Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria. He states: “The term ‘Occupied Palestinian Territories’, which is used in virtually every General Assembly resolution in the UN, and in every statement by every major politician throughout Europe – and British leaders – is a political term that the majority of those countries voting in favour of these resolutions have adopted, and it has become ‘lingua franca.’ Everybody uses it without thinking that it has absolutely no legal basis whatsoever.”
Both Dr Cynthia Wallace and Professor Eugene Kontorovich discuss the Law of Belligerent Occupation which originated in the 1907 Hague Convention. They both conclude that there is no occupation in the so-called ‘West Bank’.
Dr Baker, who was one of Israel’s negotiators in the ‘Oslo Accords’, goes on to tell us: “There has never been any legal commitment, legal document, treaty, agreement, contract or formal binding resolution that has determined that the territories belong to the Palestinians – or that they are under Palestinian sovereignty, or that they are Palestinian.”
Without doubt, when it comes to the persistent lie surrounding ‘Occupied Palestinian Territories’, the ancient Jewish capital city is at the very heart of the conflict. This especially applies to the Temple Mount in the Old City – the city to which Christians believe the Lord Jesus Christ will return – and He will not be returning to a city which is the capital of an Islamic Palestinian state, but to the capital of the restored nation of Israel, as predicted by the Prophets! Consequently, the re-writing of history by the Palestinians and the nations of the world (including UNESCO), along with the distortion of international law, is the chief weapon used to deprive Israel of its capital city. Indeed, Jerusalem has become a burdensome stone for all nations (Zechariah 12: 2 & 3)
One example is this: the British government does not recognise Israel’s sovereignty over any part of Jerusalem, including what is politically known as ‘West Jerusalem’ where the Knesset and most government offices are located. A statement from the British Consulate in Jerusalem (which is there for the Palestinians, not Israelis) said that the British government recognises “Israel’s de-facto authority” over West Jerusalem. The Australian Labor government recently adopted a similar position. All this despite the fact that the British Mandate, which is an international treaty, recognised the right of the Jewish people to re-constitute their historic National Home, of which Jerusalem has been the capital city since King David’s time. This right is still valid in international law today. To rescind that right would be a violation of the Law of Estoppel.
So, what is this all about? Itamar Marcus, who is founder and CEO of Palestinian Media Watch, gives us a profound truth: “The problem is not land, and the problem is not Israel. The problem is our essence as Jews.”
Dr Mordechai Kedar, who is an expert in Arab and Islamic culture and a former IDF military intelligence officer, makes another observation: “The [Palestinians] know that Jerusalem is a weak link in the chain, because they know that Jerusalem is actually the centre of the Jewish people, and without Jerusalem there will be no Israel. Because without Zion there is no Zionism, and Israel will vanish. The struggle over Jerusalem is actually the criterion which will determine whether there will be a Palestinian state or not.”
As Dr Kedar points out, the loss of Israel’s ancient capital city to ‘the Palestinians’ – a people who had no national identity before the formation of the PLO in the 1960s, and certainly no verifiable history in Jerusalem – would rip the heart and soul out of the Jewish people. Like Hamas, the PLO Charter still calls for the destruction of the Jewish state through ‘armed struggle’ – i.e. terrorism – which is ongoing to this day. The formation of a hostile terrorist state in Israel’s heartland would, without doubt, be an existential threat to the State of Israel.
By calling for the unilateral establishment of a ‘State of Palestine’ with Jerusalem as its capital on Israeli sovereign territory, both the British and Australian governments – along with the Biden Administration in the US – are aiding and abetting the dismemberment of the only Jewish state in the world. In Whose Land? our team of international lawyers – together with the esteemed Colonel Richard Kemp – use established and universally applied principles of international law – to clearly present Israel’s legal right to sovereignty over the whole of Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem in a way which any rationally thinking audience can receive. For those whose souls are riddled with Jew-hatred, that could be a different matter. But then, God can perform miracles!
We are in the process of organising a series of public screenings of the feature-length documentary of Whose Land? Part Two around Australia during the second half of April. Please pray that cinemas and other venues will resist any intimidation and threats by pro-Palestinian activists who want to stop the truth from getting out there.
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