Interpreting the Israeli Elections

Submitted by Marjorie Stamm Rosenfeld (United States), Jan 28, 2013 at 22:09

Why are these Iranians talking about Israel's "illegal occupation" of the West Bank? This is not Palestinian land. It's land to which the Jews were given title by the 1920 San Remo Resolution, the 1922 Mandate for Palestine, and the 1924 Anglo-American Treaty (which incorporated the Mandate word for word).

What's more, Article 80 of the U.N. Charter preserved the rights of peoples under previous legal instruments. The Mandate for Palestine called for the Jews not only to settle closely on the land in Palestine from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, "including state lands and waste lands not required for public purposes," but to be encouraged to do this. The Jews (and now Israelis) have a right to settle on all vacant land in Palestine not owned by individual Arabs. Most of the land in Palestine was public land belonging to the Ottoman Turkish (not Arab) government, not privately owned land. The Jews are settling on their own land! That is not a war crime! There are 22 Arab states in the world and 56 Muslim states. The Jews have one tiny state, that's 1/640th the size of what the Arabs and Muslims have.

I can't see the demands of the Arabs and Muslims as anything but incredible greed. Let Netanyahu remind the 52 nations of the League of Nations that ratified the Mandate for Palestine and Japan, which signed the San Remo Resolution, as well as the United States, which ratified the Mandate via the Anglo-American Treaty, of their obligations under these legal instruments. Said instruments have never been amended or abrogated and are still in force.

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