RE: ISRAEL: AN OPEN LETTER TO THE WORLD by Roy Isacowitz. 29-6-2015.
Congratulations, Roy, on a most interesting article. Even amusing, if the subject matter was not so serious.
I think that you write well, but for the writing to have any significance you also have to read. History, for instance, unless your obvious bias precludes you from looking at facts.
You write of “Occupied territories” as though referring to the invasions of WW2. Being a writer and not a historian you are probably unaware of the British Balfour Declaration of 1917 in which Britain “viewed with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, provided that nothing was done to prejudice the civil and religious rights of the non-Jewish communities in Palestine.”
I DRAW YOUR ATTENTION TO THE FACT THAT IT SAYS NOTHING OF NATIONAL RIGHTS FOR PALESTINIANS IN A JEWISH NATIONAL HOME. Their rights were to be established elsewhere.
Britain was given an explicit directive to ensure the implementation of the Balfour Declaration. With its incorporation in a resolution passed by the San Remo Conference of 1920, the declaration had become LEGALLY ENFORCEABLE.
THIS DECISION WAS UNANIMOUSLY CONFIRMED BY ALL 51 MEMBERS OF THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS ON JULY 24, 1922, WAS LATER ADOPTED BY THE UNITED NATIONS and, to this day, has never been abrogated.
As recently as April 2010, representatives from Europe, the USA and Canada recognized the importance of the San Remo Resolution, which included the Balfour Declaration, and reaffirmed that the Resolution remains irrevocable, legally binding and valid while recognizing the EXCLUSIVE NATIONAL JEWISH rights to the land of Israel under international law...to the territory PREVIOUSLY KNOWN AS PALESTINE.
IT IS HIGHLY RELEVANT THAT AT THE TIME THE WEST BANK AND PARTS OF WHAT IS TODAY JORDAN WERE INCLUDED AS THE JEWISH HOMELAND.
And even you, Roy, may know that Britain relinquished its mandate and turned the future of Palestine over to the United Nations.
On November 29, 1947, the UN General Assembly voted to divide British ruled Palestine into two states, one Jewish and the other Arab. This decision resulted in the surrounding Arabs and the Palestinians attacking the Jews throughout Palestine as the British withdrew. (British Encyclopaedia)
Israel declared its independence on 14 May, 1948, was recognised by the USA, the Soviet Union, and many other governments.
That 1948 war was Israel’s costliest. Out of a Jewish population of about 650,000, 6373 fell in battle and 30,000 were wounded.
That unprovoked war also led to an estimated 600,000 Palestinians fleeing or being expelled from their homes. Most have not been absorbed by the Arab countries and remain in refugee camps.
Following their defeat by tiny Israel, the surrounding Arab countries attacked, expropriated and expelled their Jewish populations, some of which had been resident there for 2,500 years. Some 700,000 are said to have fled to Israel which absorbed them. Today they are fully fledged citizens and occupy every strata including the government, the judiciary and the army.
Isacowitz claims that Israel is “immune” to world criticism. Hardly. But world Jewry learned to its bitter cost that when the Nazis implemented their persecution and later Holocaust, during which one third of the world’s Jews were murdered, their fellow Christians offered prayers, sympathy and condolences but hardly lifted a finger to stop the massacres. Well over one million Jews served in the Allied forces, but not single bomber could be sent to destroy the gas chambers which were asphyxiating an average of 12,000 children, women and men daily in Auschwitz alone although “MILITARY TARGETS” in the vicinity were demolished .
So, Roy, not you, but we Jews have learned that we have only ourselves to rely on when faced with murderous hostility or war after war in which Israel is condemned without exception.
I could point out the many exaggerations and falsehoods in your article but a few will suffice. You condemn a whole nation for dropping a one-ton bomb on an apartment block in a residential neighbourhood, killing many civilians. You completely omit the fact that the target was the leader of a terrorist faction whose actions had resulted in the deaths of many Israelis. He must have known that Israel had to eliminate him. What was he doing living with his family amidst civilians and so being complicit in their deaths? Using civilians as shields as was common in the war in Gaza is considered a war crime.
You then write of occupation, brutalization, Palestinians “strangled” by road blocks, impoverished, ravaged and violated.
Palestinians have been terrorizing Jews for more than a century, murdering, raping, butchering the wounded on battlefields, using
suicide bombers that killed more than 1,000 men, women and children, drive-by shootings and the launching of14,000 plus missiles from Gaza at residential areas in Israel proper while you complain of a one-ton bomb. Don’t come and tell me that those missiles, the latest of which reached distant Israeli cities, were just toys, fireworks. EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THOSE ROCKETS and MORTARS WAS LAUNCHED WITH THE INTENTION TO KILL AND MAIM!
The 1914 census of Muslims in Palestine was 535,000. The 2008 figure is 1,170,000, an increase of 635,000 and that is despite the so-called Naqba, the exodus after 1948. Polls record that most Palestinians do not wish to live elsewhere despite there being no restraint on them doing so. Despite so-called “occupation, brutalization, strangulation, impoverishment, being ravaged, violated and rampaged!.”
These are facts, Roy, not opinions, and verifiable. What is your problem?
Don Krausz
