April 10, 2024
Israel needs to fight its legal battles in the multi-front war
The war on Israel’s third-front, Yisrael Medad, April 10, 2024, Jerusalem Post
Israel needs better-trained warriors on its third-front battles.
Israel, Jews and indeed Zionism, have faced for over a century a multi-front war. The campaigns in this war have been fierce, vicious and injurious even if at times no blood is shed. And they are ongoing.
They have been waged on battlefields and conference rooms; in halls of powers and campus quadrants; in courtrooms and trenches; in newspaper columns and television broadcast.
The first front is, of course, that of the military effort designed to kill Jews and to eradicate Israel. From murderous riots outside Jaffa Gate in April 1920 to Hebron’s Jewish Quarter in August 1929 to the 1948 War of Independence and all successive battles since, from Fedayeen to Fatah, to Hamas and Hezbollah.
The second front is the diplomatic efforts to deny Zionism its legitimacy and Israel its raison d’etre. The front is shared by the information public diplomacy engagements where there are, according to Binyamin Netanyahu, “people who can’t put two words together [in English]”.
The third front, the focus of this column, is that of the legal assault on Israel, employing claims of law to deny the national rights of Jews by pushing a line that the Mandate for Palestine itself was a legal error, at best, and that Israel has no rights to Judea and Samaria.
One recent instance is what Melanie Phillips termed “a contemptible letter…a disgrace to the legal profession”. She was referring to a letter sent to the United Kingdom’s Prime Minister and signed by 600 British lawyers. They asserted Israel is breaking international law and potentially committing genocide in Gaza. As Ms. Phillips pointed out, their ability to quote correctly from the January ruling of the International Court of Justice was not only a failure but in doing so, they misrepresented the Court’s findings, essentially lying.
On a previous occasion, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International simply redefined the term “apartheid” in order to have in applied to Israel in its new form. NGO-Monitor released a report in December 2021, authored by Joshua Kern and Anne Herzberg, titled “False Knowledge as Power”. It addressed the legal vacuum that existed and how it permitted the charge of the apartheid calumny to invade the debates over Israel’s policies and provided a full analysis based on international law. That campaign is ever ongoing.
A recent post, a rebuttal and a rejoinder at the prestigious OpinioJuris blog is worthy of attention. The prestigious blog seeks to inform discussion of international law by and among academics, practitioners and legal experts. It is read in 70+ countries daily on the average. The posts have been cited by international and domestic courts, international arbitrators, and government officials.
Dr. Alonso Gurmendi Dunkelberg of Kings College touted that Israel possess no sovereign claim to Judea and Samaria, that is, the “West Bank” a la Dunkelberg. His arguments were refuted by Kohelet’s Avraham R. Shalev and were countered by Dunkelberg, all this over a two-month exchange.
While my legal training is limited, it quickly became obvious that Dunkelberg’s knowledge of history was central to his interpretation of law. Moreover, that knowledge was one of a rigid ideological approach and a misrepresentations of history while his background is Latin America. He had armed his view with illegal ammunition.
To deny Shalev’s assertion that Zionism is not a “colonial endeavor”, Dunkelberg points to the 1899 established “Zionist Colonial Trust” and Ze’ev Jabotinsky writing in 1923 about Zionism’s “colonising aims”. That, of course, is etymological claptrap.
The term colonization there and then used was simply a synonym for “settlement”. Kibbutzim were “colonies”. Zionists engaged in resettling Jews on their national land, planting it and rebuilding it. Moreover, they were required to do so by buying it back from Arabs and others who had themselves occupied the country, conquering it centuries earlier.
In another section, he argues on behalf of “Arab Palestinians” and their rights as if they existed as a distinct people. Yet, at the time, those Arabs themselves denied Palestine’s independence. Orientalist Philip Khoury Hitti was active in 1918 in an anti-Zionist Arab-American movement. The group lobbied for the establishment of a Greater Syria and at the 1919 peace conference, they asked that Palestine not be independent and not detached from Syria.
The First Palestinian Congress of January-February 1919 resolved: “We consider Palestine as part of Arab Syria…we desire that our district Southern Syria or Palestine should be not separated from the Independent Arab Syrian Government”. The King-Crane Commission was also so informed. The Emir Feisal, the most senior Arab diplomat, meeting with Chaim Weizmann in January 1919, accepted that there would be an Arab state and a Palestine for the “Jewish people”. Article VII of their agreement recognized a “Zionist Organization”.
In arguing that Israel was created “in Palestine” but itself is not “Palestine” nor did “Palestine” disappear, Dunkelberg conveniently ignores the existence of Jordan in Palestine territory in a colonial maneuver by Great Britain. In addition, in his logic, the Ottoman Empire somehow wasn’t a colonial empire, occupying Judea, the Jewish national homeland but rather possessed sovereign rights that should only be transferred to Arabs, not Jews.
Despite never existing as a separate, distinct state entity with an Arab character in any form, Dunkelberg suggests the territory cannot have a Jewish national identity. Ignoring that a Palestinian nationality was specifically legislated in 1925 so that Jews could obtain naturalization status, Dunkelberg traipses through a purposeful misreading of history to the downgrading and disadvantage of the legal rights of the Jewish people.
His method is shared by many other denigrators of Zionism and is but a form of a totalitarian newspeak. As George Orwell wrote in his 1946 essay, Politics and the English Language, “if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” And as he added, “debased language…is in some ways very convenient.”
Israel needs better trained warriors on its third front battles.
The writer is a researcher, analyst, and opinion commentator on political, cultural, and media issues.
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MEDAD'S WORDS 