And introduction to “The Jewish People’s Rights to the Land of Israel”
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Background
Consider a typical exchange between two students at any University: Ahmed and Yossi
Ahmed George Galloway wants to free Gaza. We fully supp ort him
Yossi Free Gaza from whom? There are no longer any Jews there.
Ahmed The intifada succeeded in expelling the Jew from Gaza. We must continue the intifada until the West Bank is liberated.
Yossi The intifada was terrorism, rockets, suicide bombings against civilians. Do you support terrorism?
Ahmed The intifada is not terrorism. The intifada is legitimate resistance to Occupation. Israel is illegally occupying the West Bank, as it was Illegally occupying Gaza Before. We should expel the occupier.
Yossi We are not occupiers. We have been living in that land for thousands of years.
Ahmed Palestine is an Arab land. Jews came to Palestine from Europe and are foreign to the land. Occupiers must leave and dismantle their illegal settlements. All occupied/colonized lands have been liberated. Palestine is the only one left to be liberated from foreign colonizers.
Yossi - - - - - -? - - - -
The uninformed Yossi is no match to the indoctrinated Ahmed. No one can fill in the last line in a cogent way without referring to the Jewish People’s Rights to the Land of Israel, as they have been recognize in international law. Claiming Israeli security needs won’t do it; justifying the Jewish presence on the tragedy of the Holocaust won’t do it and invoking God’s Covenant won’t doit either.
The key word here is “Occupation”, often expanded into “illegal occupation of Palestinian territories, a four-word phrase that contains three blatant falsehoods. The simple truth is that no one is an occupier of his own land. And yet, the crucial, Internationally recognized title of the Jewish people to the land of Israel is rarely mentioned.
2.A deafening silence
The Government of Israel has been silent for decades: the acquired legal rights of the Jewish people were never forcefully asserted. Western diplomats could not be expected to be more forthcoming that the Israelis. And the mainstream media, often enthralled by the pervasive “Underdogma,” perpetuates a distorted narrative.
Taking advantage of this protracted silence on factual evidence, fiction spread wings.
It started with the forging of a hitherto unknown people, the “Palestinians”, with purported national aspirations, and subjected to untold suffering unmatched by any other group. This sham was already apparent when Jeanne J. Kirkpatrick observed: Both American and Israelis have been slow to understand that terrorist attacks are self-consciously political acts, and that the intifada is less an armed uprising than a political melodrama staged daily for credulous Western viewing audiences whose sympathies are quicker than their comprehension.” The “Big Lie” is encapsulated in a statement by Yasser Arafat to the French weekly L”Express in April 1989, where he defended terror attacks against Israel: “We are a people who resist occupation exactly as the French di in the times of Nazism. That which you did, we are also doing.”
(emphasis added).
How could that enormity go unchallenged? The quick answer must be found fifteen years earlier when the General Assembly of the UN said “Yes, to Palestine, and the people of Palestine; Yes, to Palestine Liberation Organization; Yes to the inalienable national rights of the people of Palestine” (as Arafat boasted when he referred to UNGA Resolution 3236 on Nov. 22, 1974m passed ten days after he delivered his first speech at the General Assembly, with a pistol holster on his belt and under the watchful eye of Kurt Waldheim.
Since then, and without any vigorous challenge by Israel, and the Western democracies, Arafat felt he could count on “the worldwide embrace of [the Palestinian] cause”, and he boldly asserted that the UN recognition “demonstrates clearly that the world has unequivocally identified the predator and the prey, the aggressor and the vicim, the gifhter ffor freedom and peace, and the terrorist. This shameless inversion of the truth, which Melanie Phillips admirably described in her latest book, has flourished unimpeded ever since. We saw it in Durban, we saw it in the Goldstone Report, we see it every year in the Israel Apartheid Wek events, and we saw it in the Adbuster article which compared Gaza to the Warsaw Ghetto, and in the designation of Rachel’s tomb as a mosque, courtesy of UNESCO. And scared of confronting the “progressive” sacred cows.
So, why continue keeping silent? Canadians for Israel’s Legal Rights (CILR) – an organization chaired by Goldi Steiner and of which I am Co-Founder – decided to break the silence. Our focus is on the fundamentals: to bring to light factual evidence on the legitimacy of Israel, buttressed by legal documents of International law.
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Details of this book are presented in the following pages:
How the book is structured,
Table of Contents,
Typical page,
Endorsements (excerpts).