Most diplomats and journalists repeat at will that Israel and the Palestinians need to address the “core issues” such as borders and refugees in order to make peace. Yet on both issues, historical and legal fallacies have become the conventional wisdom.
On borders, the conventional wisdom is that Israel must “return to the 1967 borders.” Indeed, the Palestinian Authority (PA) is asking the world to recognize a Palestinian state “within the 1967 borders.” But such “borders” never existed. The 1949 Rhodes Agreements established an armistice line between Israel and Jordan, a line that was defined as “temporary” upon Jordan’s insistence, and that had no political or legal significance so as not to prejudice future negotiations on final borders. The armistice demarcation line represented nothing more than the lines of deployment of the forces involved in the conflict on the day a ceasefire was declared. The line was demarcated on the map attached to the Rhodes Agreements with a green marker pen and hence received the name "Green Line."
UN Security Council Resolution 62 (November 16, 1948) stressed the temporary nature of the armistice lines that were to be maintained “during the transition to permanent peace in Palestine.” This meant, and still means, that future permanent borders would be negotiated in the framework of a peace agreement, and that those borders would be different from the temporary armistice lines. As Judge Steven Schwebel (former President of the International Court of Justice) explained: "The armistice agreements of 1949 expressly preserved the territorial claims of all parties and did not purport to establish definitive boundaries between them." This is why UN Security Council Resolution 242 (November 22, 1967) calls for Israel’s withdrawal “from territories” to agreed-upon and defensible boundaries –not to the temporary and indefensible armistice lines of 1949.
On refugees, the conventional wisdom is that the Palestinians’ claim is legally and historically justified but that its actual implementation would turn the two-state solution on its head. But the Palestinians’ claim on refugees is baseless both legally and historically.
The Palestinians claim that Palestinian refugees are entitled to "return" to Israel according to UN resolutions. This is untrue. The often-quoted UN General Assembly resolution 194 (December 11, 1948), like all General Assembly resolutions, is not binding in international law. General Assembly resolutions are mere recommendations. Resolution 194 states among other things that "the refugees wishing to return to their houses and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so." How would such "refugees" possibly live at peace with their neighbors today, more than sixty years after their parents and grandparents left? As Abba Eban said, "hundreds of thousands of people would be introduced into a state whose existence they oppose and whose destruction they are resolved to seek."
The Palestinians’ claim on refugees is not only legally baseless. It is also historically absurd. The 1948 Arab aggression against Israel created a double refugee problem. About 900,000 Jews were expelled from Arab and Muslim countries, while about 600,000 Arabs fled the British Mandate. For tragic as they were, these two refugee problems only represented about 3% of the world’s refugee population at the time. And while the world’s refugees were all treated by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), it is only for the Palestinians that a special UN agency was created (UNWRA). UNHCR defines a refugee is a person outside the country of his or her nationality as a result of expulsion, but UNRWA extends this definition to the refugees' descendants. Which is why the number of refugees worldwide has decreased from about 60 million in 1948 to about 17 million today, while the number of Palestinian "refugees" has increased from about 600,000 in 1948 to about seven million today.
If the UN were to abandon this double-standard, the "Palestinian refugee problem" would be easily solved. Of the 600,000 refugees from 1948, about 100,000 are still alive, and most of them are old. Israel would have no problem integrating them. Alternatively, if UNRWA's definition of a refugee was to be applied to the 25 million refugees from the partition of India in 1947, to the 15 million German refugees who fled Eastern Europe in 1945, or to the 1.5 million refugees of the 1922 conflict between Turkey and Greece, then dozens of millions of German "refugees" would have to "return" to Poland, and hundreds of millions of "refugees" would have to re-cross the border between India and Pakistan.
The Palestinians want to invade Israel with the descendants (or alleged descendants) of the 1948 Arab refugees, but they won't accept a single Jewish refugee into the Palestinian state that they want to establish. Jews have lived peacefully and uninterruptedly in Hebron for generations. The Arab pogrom of 1929 emptied Hebron of its Jews for the first time in History. But the Arabs deny the rights of the Jews whose parents were murdered in 1929 to return to their homes, while they demand that the descendants of the Arab refugees who fled because of the Arab war of aggression in 1948 return to what is Israel today. This is as absurd as it is immoral.
Which also raises the question of minorities in the framework of the "two state solution." Why should there be an Arab minority in the Jewish state and no Jewish minority in the Arab state? There are Hindus in Pakistan and Muslims in India. About 20% of Israel's citizens are Arabs, but the Palestinians will not tolerate a Jewish minority. Indeed, PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas declared to journalists in Ramallah on December 25, 2010, that there will be no room for Israelis in a Palestinian state.
Western diplomats and journalists must ask themselves why they tolerate this Arab intolerance. They must also be taken to task for laundering Palestinian propaganda. For none of the “core issues” will be solved as long as they are based on historical and legal falsifications.
Sunday, December 26, 2010
Monday, December 13, 2010
The Meaning of Jewish Brotherhood
Yehuda Avner’s new book, The Prime Ministers (Toby Press, 2010), is the most informative, well-written and heart-touching memoir I’ve read in years.
Avner left Britain at the age of nineteen for British Palestine right before Israel’s independence. He joined the Foreign Office and later got a job as an English speechwriter for the Prime Minister –a position he kept under Levi Eshkol, Golda Meir, Yitzhak Rabin, and Menachem Begin. He was a personal witness to those leaders’ intimacy, dilemmas, and decisions.
Levi Eshkol comes out as a character that was borrowed from an Isaac Bashevis Singer novel to lead the Jewish state, almost by accident, at its most fateful hour (“Vus rett der goy?” [What’s the goy talking about?] he asked his aid, in Yiddish, unable to make sense of President Johnson’s Texan babble as the latter was driving high-speed around his ranch).
Golda Meir emerges as down-to-earth and burnt-out grandma who successfully deployed her iron will after the terrifying setbacks of October 1973, but who would rather have been spared the hardships that life had in store for her (“I like nothing better than to sit in an armchair doing nothing” she candidly confessed to Oriana Fallaci).
Yitzhak Rabin reveals himself as a man of impeccable integrity with a strong analytical mind. Jews around the world came to admire him after the Entebbe rescue operation, though some had an awkward way of expressing their admiration (One entry in the Prime Minister’s official guestbook after a party hosted for American Jews reads thus: “I congratulate you on your extraordinary rescue feat. But as a clinical psychologist I detect in you a bashful timid reserve. Diagnostically, I would say you have a depressive personality. Its root cause is an inability to elicit love. You’re in search of a hero. Henry Kissinger wrestles with the same problem”).
As for Menachem Begin, he is the book’s hero. And indeed, he was a Jewish hero, as well as a true gentleman who, while constantly haunted by a dreadful past, was always ready to crack a good joke (“Marriage is not a word, it’s a sentence” he concluded after unsuccessfully trying to help his wife put on her shoes before landing).
The book also has an anti-hero, albeit a discreet one mentioned en passant at the beginning and at the end. He caught my attention for a reason that is relevant to us today.
Yossel Kolowitz was an Auschwitz survivor who had lost his family in the Holocaust, and a haredi Jew who was on the ship that brought Yehuda Avner to British Palestine in 1947. In the inner pocket of his long black coat were two letters –both from relatives of his who lived in Palestine and were offering him a home.
The first letter was from his ultra-Orthodox uncle from Meah Shearim who was asking him, as the sole survivor of his family, to perpetuate the Jewish people’s tradition and establish a God-fearing family in Jerusalem. The second letter was from another uncle, a member of the secular Mishmar HaEmek kibbutz. He was imploring him to join the kibbutz, to “get rid of that yeshiva garb” and become “a new Jew.” Yossel was agonizing about what to do, and the reader is left wondering what happened to him.
But Yossel Kolowitz surprisingly reappears at the end of the book. As Yehuda Avner addresses a crowd of Los Angeles Jews in November 1982, talking about his first sight of Haifa in 1947 from the deck of a ship called the Aegan Star, a man with tinted blond hair known by the audience as Jay Cole interrupts Avner claiming that he too had been on the Aegan Star. He had. It was Yossel Kolowitz.
Yossel, at the end, had opted for the socialist uncle and the kibbutz life. He married and had two sons. He served in the IDF, was wounded during the Six Day War, and decided he needed a break. He chose California, where he made a living as a plumber. Soon, his two sons joined him and made his plumbing business prosper. They too got married, but to non-Jews.
“Don’t think I’m not heartbroken. Of course I’m heartbroken” admitted Yossel to Avner. “I’m forever a survivor. So just keep your opinions to yourself, hotshot, and don’t start telling me what’s right and what’s wrong.”
We are not allowed to judge people whose travails we haven’t experienced, the Ethics of the Fathers (“Pirkei Avot”) teaches us. Surely, no one is entitled to judge Yossel Kolowitz. But there is a lesson to be learned from his personal tragedy.
In truth, Yossel had a choice between two unattractive options. Either continue to live and dress as an eighteenth century Polish Jew and stay out of the Jewish national renaissance after nearly two-thousand years of exile. Or abandon an exceptional culture and civilization, while carrying guilt feelings towards his vanished family.
Yossel had a choice between two bad options because too many Jews at the time were torn apart.
Not that the divisions between the secular and religious, Ashkenazi and Sephardic, etc. have disappeared. But it is time to get pass them. In the Bible, the hatred between Joseph and his brothers was due to a lack of respect and humility. Joseph eventually learned humility after spending twelve years in jail. And his brothers recognized the folly of their jealousy after realizing what pain they had caused to their father. Only after Joseph came to fully admit the true source of his powers, and only after his brothers had learned to love their father more than they hated their brother, could the family be re-united.
We Jews need to remember and internalize the meaning of Jewish brotherhood. For the sake of Yossel, let us learn the lesson of Joseph.
Avner left Britain at the age of nineteen for British Palestine right before Israel’s independence. He joined the Foreign Office and later got a job as an English speechwriter for the Prime Minister –a position he kept under Levi Eshkol, Golda Meir, Yitzhak Rabin, and Menachem Begin. He was a personal witness to those leaders’ intimacy, dilemmas, and decisions.
Levi Eshkol comes out as a character that was borrowed from an Isaac Bashevis Singer novel to lead the Jewish state, almost by accident, at its most fateful hour (“Vus rett der goy?” [What’s the goy talking about?] he asked his aid, in Yiddish, unable to make sense of President Johnson’s Texan babble as the latter was driving high-speed around his ranch).
Golda Meir emerges as down-to-earth and burnt-out grandma who successfully deployed her iron will after the terrifying setbacks of October 1973, but who would rather have been spared the hardships that life had in store for her (“I like nothing better than to sit in an armchair doing nothing” she candidly confessed to Oriana Fallaci).
Yitzhak Rabin reveals himself as a man of impeccable integrity with a strong analytical mind. Jews around the world came to admire him after the Entebbe rescue operation, though some had an awkward way of expressing their admiration (One entry in the Prime Minister’s official guestbook after a party hosted for American Jews reads thus: “I congratulate you on your extraordinary rescue feat. But as a clinical psychologist I detect in you a bashful timid reserve. Diagnostically, I would say you have a depressive personality. Its root cause is an inability to elicit love. You’re in search of a hero. Henry Kissinger wrestles with the same problem”).
As for Menachem Begin, he is the book’s hero. And indeed, he was a Jewish hero, as well as a true gentleman who, while constantly haunted by a dreadful past, was always ready to crack a good joke (“Marriage is not a word, it’s a sentence” he concluded after unsuccessfully trying to help his wife put on her shoes before landing).
The book also has an anti-hero, albeit a discreet one mentioned en passant at the beginning and at the end. He caught my attention for a reason that is relevant to us today.
Yossel Kolowitz was an Auschwitz survivor who had lost his family in the Holocaust, and a haredi Jew who was on the ship that brought Yehuda Avner to British Palestine in 1947. In the inner pocket of his long black coat were two letters –both from relatives of his who lived in Palestine and were offering him a home.
The first letter was from his ultra-Orthodox uncle from Meah Shearim who was asking him, as the sole survivor of his family, to perpetuate the Jewish people’s tradition and establish a God-fearing family in Jerusalem. The second letter was from another uncle, a member of the secular Mishmar HaEmek kibbutz. He was imploring him to join the kibbutz, to “get rid of that yeshiva garb” and become “a new Jew.” Yossel was agonizing about what to do, and the reader is left wondering what happened to him.
But Yossel Kolowitz surprisingly reappears at the end of the book. As Yehuda Avner addresses a crowd of Los Angeles Jews in November 1982, talking about his first sight of Haifa in 1947 from the deck of a ship called the Aegan Star, a man with tinted blond hair known by the audience as Jay Cole interrupts Avner claiming that he too had been on the Aegan Star. He had. It was Yossel Kolowitz.
Yossel, at the end, had opted for the socialist uncle and the kibbutz life. He married and had two sons. He served in the IDF, was wounded during the Six Day War, and decided he needed a break. He chose California, where he made a living as a plumber. Soon, his two sons joined him and made his plumbing business prosper. They too got married, but to non-Jews.
“Don’t think I’m not heartbroken. Of course I’m heartbroken” admitted Yossel to Avner. “I’m forever a survivor. So just keep your opinions to yourself, hotshot, and don’t start telling me what’s right and what’s wrong.”
We are not allowed to judge people whose travails we haven’t experienced, the Ethics of the Fathers (“Pirkei Avot”) teaches us. Surely, no one is entitled to judge Yossel Kolowitz. But there is a lesson to be learned from his personal tragedy.
In truth, Yossel had a choice between two unattractive options. Either continue to live and dress as an eighteenth century Polish Jew and stay out of the Jewish national renaissance after nearly two-thousand years of exile. Or abandon an exceptional culture and civilization, while carrying guilt feelings towards his vanished family.
Yossel had a choice between two bad options because too many Jews at the time were torn apart.
Not that the divisions between the secular and religious, Ashkenazi and Sephardic, etc. have disappeared. But it is time to get pass them. In the Bible, the hatred between Joseph and his brothers was due to a lack of respect and humility. Joseph eventually learned humility after spending twelve years in jail. And his brothers recognized the folly of their jealousy after realizing what pain they had caused to their father. Only after Joseph came to fully admit the true source of his powers, and only after his brothers had learned to love their father more than they hated their brother, could the family be re-united.
We Jews need to remember and internalize the meaning of Jewish brotherhood. For the sake of Yossel, let us learn the lesson of Joseph.
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