Robert Bernstein (no relation), the founder of Human Rights Watch, has issued a stinging condemnation of the organization he led from 1978 to 1998. Here’s a taste:
I must do something that I never anticipated: I must publicly join the group’s critics....
When I stepped aside in 1998, Human Rights Watch was active in 70 countries, most of them closed societies. Now the organization, with increasing frequency, casts aside its important distinction between open and closed societies.
Nowhere is this more evident than in its work in the Middle East. The region is populated by authoritarian regimes with appalling human rights records. Yet in recent years Human Rights Watch has written far more condemnations of Israel for violations of international law than of any other country in the region....
Meanwhile, the Arab and Iranian regimes rule over some 350 million people, and most remain brutal, closed and autocratic, permitting little or no internal dissent. The plight of their citizens who would most benefit from the kind of attention a large and well-financed international human rights organization can provide is being ignored as Human Rights Watch’s Middle East division prepares report after report on Israel.
Human Rights Watch has lost critical perspective on a conflict in which Israel has been repeatedly attacked by Hamas and Hezbollah, organizations that go after Israeli citizens and use their own people as human shields....
Leaders of Human Rights Watch know that Hamas and Hezbollah chose to wage war from densely populated areas, deliberately transforming neighborhoods into battlefields. They know that more and better arms are flowing into both Gaza and Lebanon and are poised to strike again. And they know that this militancy continues to deprive Palestinians of any chance for the peaceful and productive life they deserve. Yet Israel, the repeated victim of aggression, faces the brunt of Human Rights Watch’s criticism.
At what point does the MSM stop treating HRW as a neutral source on human rights in the Middle East, and start treating it like the left-wing, anti-Israel, anti-Western organization it has openly become? And at what point do HRW’s liberal, human-rights oriented American donors become tired to enabling this? Maybe the growing dismay of long-time HRW supporters like Bernstein explains why Middle East Director Sarah Leah Whitson decided to expand HRW’s donor base to Saudi elites? Better to take raise money from Saudi princes than to worry about how your growing loss of credibility among even your natural supporters will affect your fundraising.
Comments are open, but HRW sock puppets are not welcome.
UPDATE: I wonder how long certain liberal bloggers who have been reflexive defenders of HRW without bothering to seriously investigate the bill of particulars against it (e.g.) can continue to repeat things like “the idea that HRW is some kind of Israel-bashing organization is nonsense” now that the founder and former longtime director has said just that.
And see my response to criticism by Kevin Jon Heller. Heller also claims that be referencing “Saudi princes” I was subtly trying to imply that HRW takes money from the Saudi government. I’m glad Heller has such faith in his mind-reading skills, but allow me to state categorically that I don’t believe that HRW would knowingly ask for, or accept, money from Saudi Arabia or any other government. As I’ve explained in detail before, the danger is that if an organization like HRW gets dependent on funds from prviate individuals in an authoritarian regime, the organization will have strong incentives not to upset that regime, lest the regime cut off its private sources, as authoritarian regimes (unlike liberal regimes) have the power to do.
Heller is correct, though, that my original post misleadingly suggested that I knew for a fact that HRW has taken money from Saudi princes, rather than has expressed its desire to raise money from Saudi elites, presumably including Saudi princes who don’t hold government positions. I’ve amended the post accordingly.
Dan says:
Congrats. I am truly glad that you found such an ally here. HRW, bluntly, blows.
In fact, I agree with you quite often, but your tone and pissant attitude toward those who disagree with you (even if they are flat-out wrong) make it hard to actually like your writing. The other Mr. Bernstein, even title aside, is 100x more effective than you are because he writes with a tone of sadness, not elitism or schaudenfraude (which I probably misspelled, and you’ll probably make fun of me for misspelling). The lesson you should learn here is not that you were right — indeed, you most often are — but that you were not effective enough on your own *in spite of the fact* that you were right both factually and morally.
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October 20, 2009, 6:32 amBob from Ohio says:
Never of course. Media is very lazy. Having a group like HRW around makes it easy to get a quick quote on “human rights” issues without doing any work.
There is a guy in NYC who has been quoted consistently for years as “man on the street”. The usual suspects are on the network talk shows no matter how wrong they are all the time. Its just easy to go to a few sources all the time, it beats working.
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October 20, 2009, 7:45 amPeteP says:
There’s a faction of people, including HRW, ACLU, the UN’s HRC, Amnesty International, etc, that like to blow their smoke and make their noise in the safest ( for them ) way possible.
They pretend to be concerned about a range of issues ( death penalty, human rights, poverty, gay rights, religious freedom, women’s rights, etc etc ), and yet they choose to focus on Israel and the US to the exclusion of all others as targets of their angst and vitriol. They don’t DARE try to go after the REAL abusers in this world — too dangerous for the little chicken-s***s.
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October 20, 2009, 7:52 amWidmerpool says:
David, unlike the first commentator, I raise my voice (or at least scribble upon my keyboard) in support of your take-no-prisoners tone. I am tired, saddened and disappointed (not to mention, filled with regret) every time I must be subjected to yet another commentator who is saddened and disappointed with some expressed point of view. I don’t know when this response became the recognized default of urbane and cosmopolitanal [n.b.: misspelling intended] commentators, but I find it quite wussyish. So, keep on snarkin’.
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October 20, 2009, 8:04 amHauk says:
Count me among the wussyish commentators who thinks that DB’s tone undermines his message roughly 95% of the time.
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October 20, 2009, 8:43 amGramarye says:
I tend to agree with the criticism leveled both at HRW and at DB’s tone. That said, the former is substantive, while the latter is merely stylistic. It is possible to disagree vehemently but cordially (and, indeed, lawyers–and, I would think, law professors–are expected to be masters of the art).
In addition, while I agree that Robert Bernstein’s tone made his criticism more effective, that pales in comparison to the fact that he actually directed the organization he’s now criticizing. That is the real reason his criticism is noteworthy; it has almost nothing to do with his writing. It has to do with someone who is rationally expected to have a bias in favor of defending that organization losing faith to such a degree that he’s now attacking it.
Also, contra Widmerpool, I don’t believe that RB’s tone was “saddened and disappointed.” RB was pretty direct, and I didn’t detect a lot of hand-wringing from him.
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October 20, 2009, 9:01 amPseudolus says:
Add it to the list of confirmations of O’Sullivan’s First Law: “All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing.”
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October 20, 2009, 9:04 amDG says:
The problem with HRW is that the sort of folks, in general, who get attracted to human rights work are either naive do-gooders (and I salute them) or doctrinaire members of the hard left. Occasionally, you get whackos like the guy with the Nazi uniform collection, but thats honestly pretty rare.
HRW has all those folks, and has also become lazy and safe in their approach. Criticizing Israel is safe and brings donations. It also brings lots of tasty media exposure. Criticizing Russia or Iran or Libya — or, even worse, Burma, brings none of those things. Instead, you risk your life to get ignored.
Risking your life to be ignored sucks when you can gain the approval of your social and peer group by taking aim at a US proxy like Israel.
I don’t assume everyone working at HRW is a foaming-at-the-mouth anti-semite who wants to destroy Israel. I do think that there are a few of them combined with a heaping helping of the lazy, jaded, and opportunistic. Its a bad combination.
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October 20, 2009, 9:12 amDavid Bernstein says:
“It is possible to disagree vehemently but cordially”
Tell it to HRW, whose spokespeople, as I’ve documented, consistently lambaste all critics (actually, all critics not coming from even further left) in very harsh terms. E.g., head honcho Ken Roth: “We report on Palestine. Its supporters fight back with lies and deception.” Or Middle East director Whitson, on criticism of her fundraising trip to Saudi Arabia: “fundamentally ... racist” [as the person who called this trip to public attention, I take that one rather personally.] Or Whitson on Prof. Avi Bell, who correctly criticized an HRW report on Lebanon, as HRW later (but very quietly) acknowledged: “As for Mr. Bell, if he spent half as much time considering Israel’s wartime conduct as he does condemning Israel’s critics, he might actually be of some help.” Or Whitson on criticism of HRW’s Middle East coverage more generally: “griping and whining”
These are people to whom “cordial” debate is utterly foreign, and for whom vehement disagreement is cause to smear and insult those who disagree.
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October 20, 2009, 9:21 amMark Buehner says:
Who cares about facts when ‘tone’ is in the offing.
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October 20, 2009, 9:45 amdrunkdriver says:
Sheesh– I disagree with Prof. Bernstein fairly frequently, and his “tone” has never bothered me. Some of you people are just delicate little flowers!
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October 20, 2009, 9:49 amGreg Packer says:
Well, just speaking for myself, I think it’s great that people are wising up to HRW’s shenanigans, but like many men on the street, I wish Bernstein didn’t have such a nagging tone in his writing.
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October 20, 2009, 9:51 amrarango says:
I don’t like oreilly’s, olbermanns, madow’s or most talking heads tones, so I dont listen or watch–don’t like DB’s tone, don’t read and move on.
Get a grip.
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October 20, 2009, 9:54 amRichard Riley says:
I’m generally in agreement with DB’s complaints about HRW’s reports on Israel and the Middle East, but a data point contrary to DB’s and Robert Bernstein’s charges is HRW’s website. This morning, there’s actually nothing on the home page about Israel or the Middle East until you scroll down to the “Middle East/N. Africa” subsection near the bottom of the page. Of course, once you’re there, you can click on plenty of anti-Israel agitation of the kind that DB and Robert Bernstein complain about. But the two Bernsteins’ position suggest that HRW’s overall organizational focus is skewed toward Israel-bashing. At least based on what the organization itself chooses to emphasize on its website, I wonder if that’s really true.
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October 20, 2009, 9:55 amJust Dropping By says:
At what point does the MSM stop treating HRW as a neutral source on human rights in the Middle East, and start treating it like the left-wing, anti-Israel, anti-Western organization it has openly become?
I would assume that it would be at the same point that the MSM stops treating MEMRI as a neutral apolitical news aggregator service and starts treating like the mis/disinformation outlet for Israeli intelligence that it is.
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October 20, 2009, 10:06 amThe Unbeliever says:
The open vs closed society distinction summarizes so many problems with HRW’s approach (and that of other NGOs), it is surprising they manage to operate without acknowledging it. That distinction drives every aspect of a society, from economics to sources of legitimate authority to domestic security issues. Trying to draw equivalence between human rights problems in an open society and a closed society, even when the two are geographically and culturally close, is simply absurd.
And for what it’s worth, I’ll throw a vote in favor of DB’s tone. A chronic problem deserves chronic “nagging”, not sporadic musings of “hmm, I wonder if there is the potential that maybe something might possibly be slightly amiss”.
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October 20, 2009, 10:21 amtroll_dc2 says:
1. David Bernstein’s tone:
I agree with those who do not like David Bernstein’s tone, and he should not like it either. He is writing not to HRW types here (for the most part); rather, he is writing to people whom he wants to persuade that he is right. The problem is that his take-no-prisoners approach is so offputting that I and others simply skim or do not read his posts at all, thus defeating the very reason for writing them. It is possible to use strong language and still be readable. I recommend reading this column by Mark Bowden.
2. Why Israel is such an easy target:
Israel is mostly an open society; it is thus easy to gather data, to talk to dissidents and other unhappy people, and to see things for yourself. So an observer does not have to do much work to be in a position to understand what is going on. But the Arab countries are a different story, to put it mildly. They range from autocratic regimes to police states. Information is censored or just not revealed, people do not talk freely, and access is limited. It is hard to get good data. So an observer knows much more about what is going on in Israel than elsewhere. An objective observer would take this into account in rendering judgments, but I gather than HRW do not do so.
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October 20, 2009, 10:26 amCharles says:
I agree with your points about HRW, but can we limit the use of the term mainstream media. It has such a varied definition that it becomes meaningless, and in most cases just means, “what I hear that I don’t like.” I certainly could not say what it means in this context.
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October 20, 2009, 10:29 amPragmaticist says:
HRW must be virtuous because it has a virtuous name. QED.
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October 20, 2009, 10:38 amcookiemonsta says:
So, is it true that HRW does not criticize Iran or Arab countries?
Or is the gist of these posts that HRW disproportionately criticizes Israel, when there are so many other targets more worthy of criticism?
Looking at the publications on their website: http://www.hrw.org/en/publications, I see this:
“Freedom to Create Associations: A Declarative Regime in Name Only” criticizing Morocco.
“No Tally of the Anguish” criticizing India.
“The Way Forward” criticizing Sudan.
“Denied Dignity” criticizing Saudi Arabia.
“They Want Us Exterminated” criticizing Iraq.
“Human Rights and Saudia Arabia’s Counterterrorism Response” criticizing Saudi Arabia.
“Rockets From Gaza” criticizing armed Palestinian groups.
“Hostages to Peace” criticizing armed Somali groups.
“What Did I Do Wrong” criticizing Indonesian Special Forces.
“Foreign Workers Abused” criticizing Saudi Arabia.
And so forth.
It appears that the Bernsteins are irked because HRW criticizes Israel at all, not because HRW actually ignores the rest of the world and only focuses on Israel.
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October 20, 2009, 10:51 amA. Zarkov says:
This comment is out of order. “Tone” is purely subjective, and I doubt if anyone cares whether you like DB’s writing. This kind of comment adds nothing to the discussion.
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October 20, 2009, 11:05 amno relation says:
Kevin Jon Heller apologium in 5.. 4.. 3.. 2..
Then again he’s busy defending Karadzic, so might not have the time to issue one.
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October 20, 2009, 11:08 amDotar Sojat says:
Just Drop By Kos or DU. You’ll fit in just fine.
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October 20, 2009, 11:09 am803,2 says:
A reflexively anti-HRW blogger decrying reflexively pro-HRW people? What else is new?
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October 20, 2009, 11:17 amTone Loc says:
Exactly. He’s not dealing with the Girl Scouts here.
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October 20, 2009, 11:20 amroad2serfdom says:
My political philosophy is derived entirely from taking into account the tone of people on each side. Facts and logic are useless compared to the leading objective criteria for analysis of an issue, tone.
If only Israel could take a more apologetic tone to the fact that they are placing innocent Israeli civilians at the specific locations where suicide bombers understandably want to blow themselves up in peace, I could take their objections more seriously.
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October 20, 2009, 11:25 amKirk Parker says:
Salute them for what? Help them get over their delusions, yes, of course... but salute???
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October 20, 2009, 11:35 amDG says:
{It appears that the Bernsteins are irked because HRW criticizes Israel at all, not because HRW actually ignores the rest of the world and only focuses on Israel.}
No. They don’t like HRW because HRW spends an inordinate amount of their time criticizing Israel. They also do it in a very different way than the manner in which they criticize, say, Sudan.
When there is an allegation of Israeli wrongdoing (which is pretty much continuous), the Palestinians know who to summon — HRW and their compatriots. Evidence — frequently flimsy and manufactured — is presented and then immediately accepted by HRW who then announces their “findings” to the media. They don’t investigate or probe, they don’t carefully examine the evidence — they rush to condemn. Real investigations of human rights issues take months or years and require credible witnesses and evidence. HRW generally requires this when probing other topics, but not Israel — they want to be the first face in front of the media.
It would be easy to blame the Palestinians for this — after all, they are usually the ones lying or manufacturing evidence. Those who wish to be honest usually end up dead. However, propaganda is a legitimate method of conducting warfare — more so than most Palestinian combat techniques. HRW needs to be a skeptical investigator, rather than being overly credulous. There, they fail.
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October 20, 2009, 11:35 amMichelle Dulak Thomson says:
Just Dropping By:
Can you clarify your point about MEMRI? Obviously they are not a “neutral apolitical news aggregator service,” in the sense of aiming to provide a “representative” selection of material. But “mis/disinformation outlet” suggests falsification — either forged material or deliberately faulty translation — and I’ve not seen either thing alleged against MEMRI.
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October 20, 2009, 11:38 amcookiemonsta says:
“No. They don’t like HRW because HRW spends an inordinate amount of their time criticizing Israel.”
What percentage of their reports relate to Israel?
I’ve heard your point before. It seems easy to objectively confirm, but I’ve never seen it done.
What is an “inordinate amount of time”?
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October 20, 2009, 11:40 amDG says:
People hate MEMRI because they expose something that people don’t want to see. The wonderful thing about MEMRI is that they are not, in fact, really cherry picking. They are only sampling a tiny amount of the nasty stuff out there.
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October 20, 2009, 11:42 amDG says:
{What percentage of their reports relate to Israel?}
DB has already posted that data, previously. Do your own research. I also suggest consulting Mr. Google, my trusted research assistant.
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October 20, 2009, 11:45 amKyle says:
I’m appalled. How DARE a neutral organization like HRW say anything bad about OUR allies. Doesn’t HRW get it?! We are ALWAYS right! We could never be wrong.
We weren’t wrong when we slaughtered the natives of our country. We weren’t wrong when we enslaved a racial group just because they were black. We weren’t wrong when we sequestered the Japanese in internment camps. And we weren’t wrong when we displaced the Palestinian natives to make way for OUR Jewish allies.
That’s why we created neutral organizations like HRW—they let us impose our ideologies on the world. They are supposed to let us “feel good” about fighting our vicious enemies (i.e., those who have oil that we want). HRW, go back to being neutral. Attack our enemies. But leave our allies alone.
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October 20, 2009, 12:33 pmRyan Waxx says:
Count me among the people who think that people who can only find time to complain about tone would NOT have suddenly agreed with the OP had he been less forceful. Rather, in classic passive-aggressive fashion they would have found some OTHER non-substantive thing to criticize with, continuing to sadly, sadly mourn their inability to agree, because of the rhetorical sins of the OP...
Look, cut the passive aggressive CRAP, either HRW are cranks, or they aren’t. Weather or not the OP is measelymouthing to your personal satisfaction level isn’t going to change the facts on the ground, and the sooner you realize that... well lets just say there’s little chance of that happening, so why continue?
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October 20, 2009, 12:48 pmeyesay says:
According to Wikipedia, “The current executive director of Human Rights Watch is Kenneth Roth at a salary of $350,000.” Does it bother anyone that Human Rights Watch collects $50 and $100 at a time from tens of thousands of hard-working middle-class people in order to pay its executive director more than twice the salary of a U.S. senator?
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October 20, 2009, 12:51 pmGramarye says:
DB writes:
Absolutely true, but they’re not here. If they were, I’d tell them the exact same thing–the style of their rhetoric debases their credibility even on the substance of their arguments. It does this because it naturally leads a skeptical but interested observer–particularly an attorney, which should be of particular concern to authors on this blog–to start asking what information the author with a clear axe to grind may be omitting (even if the answer to that is “none consciously”).
Of course, if those people were here, I’d be also attacking them on the insubstantial substance (oxymoronic as that may be) of their arguments, too. My point here is that I agree with both you and Robert Bernstein on the substance, but RB was the more devastating attack because it was substantially more likely to persuade people who might otherwise be HRW supporters (which may include more readers of this blawg than you realize).
So what if the HRW people are uncivil? All that does is alienate potential supporters as well. I’m betting that not too many people who weren’t already anti-Zionists by inclination were much moved by all the “lies and deceit” folderol that the HRW principals have spouted, and for which you’ve rightly taken them to task in the past.
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October 20, 2009, 1:01 pmAriel says:
Many people have alleged similar nonsense, but they’ve never been able to prove any of it. People have accused them of mistranslating, but they’ve always been shown to be wrong.
The only unfortunately true part of your statement is that the MSM treats MEMRI as anything — MEMRI is rarely quoted in the MSM at all.
***
Prof. Bernstein,
Count me as another fan of both your tone and your posts.
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October 20, 2009, 1:03 pmCan't find a good name says:
It should be noted that one of the subjects on MEMRI’s web site is “Reform in the Arab and Muslim World,” which consists primarily of translated articles in which Arab writers endorse things like normal relations with Israel and greater support for democracy and human rights. MEMRI is not trying to portray the Arab world in a uniformly negative and hostile way.
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October 20, 2009, 1:37 pmanon says:
David, I have some homework for you that I think would help you make your point more broadly.
1. How many organizations have been founded such that later on, a founder had to make a statement denouncing the organization for overreach.
2. Now was the denunciation for being a) more liberal, b) more conservative, c) just being a bunch of tards with no common sense?
Human Right’s Watch
MADD
Greenpeace
Whole Earth Catalog(?)
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October 20, 2009, 1:53 pmraoul says:
Both sides engage in hyperbole but the fact is that Gaza remains a cesspool. To see how this type of situation may engender terrorism read Glenwald’s account on that reporter who was kidnapped in Afghanistan.
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October 20, 2009, 1:56 pmLN says:
This is so wrong I don’t know where to begin. First off, it appears to me that David Bernstein cares about Human Rights Watch for one and exactly one reason — they are critical of Israel. This complaint that HRW only criticizes Israel seems ludicrous coming from people who simply ignore everything HRW does that is not related to Israel. It seems disingenuous to pretend that the key issue is that HRW does not criticize Russia or Burma or whatever, when HRW does in fact point out human rights abuses in these countries and no one here really gives a shit. This is about Israel.
Secondly, as someone who leans left, I’m really moved by a plea that HRW is really not objective but “a left-wing, anti-Israel, anti-Western organization” and should be treated as such. Give me a break.
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October 20, 2009, 2:02 pmA. Zarkov says:
They will keep on being an “anti-Israel, anti-Western organization” until they are made to suffer for it. Then they will stop.
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October 20, 2009, 2:09 pmLN says:
And the left-wing part?
I believe that HRW is a Western organization. Are you saying that they hate themselves? Maybe they loath themselves. Or maybe they are (wittingly or unwittingly) plotting to undo the basic civilization that feeds and shelter us. Maybe they are trying to stab us in the back after sapping our precious bodily fluids.
If you want to say anti-Israel, just say it. The rest is obfuscatory nonsense.
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October 20, 2009, 2:14 pmDilan Esper says:
You can argue back and forth about Human Rights Watch, but HRW never killed anyone. Meanwhile, people are dying, being bombed, being tortured, being forced out of their homes, etc., in the Middle East. And that stuff’s more important than the issues with the credibility of HRW that Professor Bernstein and some others keep harping on.
I have a very measured view of this. A lot of what Israel does is in fact justified as a result of terrorism. (Not all of it, but a lot of it.) And it’s really easy for folks who don’t live there to be constantly criticizing a country which is facing frequent attacks on its civilian population.
However, there’s also a land grab underlying a lot of this that is not justified, and many conservatives in Israel would just as soon keep the threat of terrorism and rocket attacks around as a convenient excuse for not negotiating to end the land grab and give up territory that they don’t really want to give up.
But that’s the issue. Not whether HRW does or doesn’t criticize the Arab world enough. Professor Bernstein can post about HRW every day from now to kingdom come, and it wouldn’t establish that HRW’s reports on Israel are inaccurate (or accurate, for that matter).
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October 20, 2009, 2:26 pmYankev says:
No, like France’s Channel 2, they are content to incite others to kill instead. And to advocate criminal penalties against those who try to defend civilians against being killed.
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October 20, 2009, 2:37 pmDilan Esper says:
No, like France’s Channel 2, they are content to incite others to kill instead.
In no world but a warped one is issuing reports about alleged human rights violations a form of “incitement”.
Really, this is the Paranoid Style of politics writ large.
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October 20, 2009, 2:56 pmAnne Herzberg says:
NGO Monitor has documented since 2003, HRW’s disproportionate reporting on Israel relative to other Middle East countries. Please see our detailed analysis at http://www.ngo-monitor.org/article/experts_or_ideologues_systematic_analysis_of_human_rights_watch
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October 20, 2009, 2:58 pmAndrew says:
As a self-identified liberal who reads VC, I think we need to find a new way to describe groups like HRW. While it is easy to say that they are “left-wing” because there is a faction of liberal idealists within the organization, it’s support of authoritarian regimes and practices at the expense of a liberal government is certainly not left of center on the ideological scale.
It is sort of the same confusion surrounding the ideas of communism. In theory, communism would be very left-wing because it would result in an egalitarian society that actually has a limited government role. In practice, communist regimes have been right-wing authoritarian regimes that reduce individuals to being wards of the state.
I tend to agree with other commentators that would describe HRW as anti-western in its crusade against Israel, but I get confused when it actually lives up to its founding and calls out the actions of authoritarian, non-western regimes.
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October 20, 2009, 3:16 pmyankee says:
The whole concept of universal human rights is a Western one. Just looking at HRW’s homepage shows no shortage of criticism of non-Western countries. The section on “Europe/Central Asia” does include some criticism of Western European nations, but there’s more on Eastern Europe and Russia. U.S. policy gets its own section, but this makes sense since the U.S. is (by far) the world’s dominant military and economic power. The critical articles are also things like “Act on Immigration Detention Reform,” which is quite a contrast with, e.g. “Nepal: Years of Terror, then Broken Promises”
I will grant you that HRW is anti-Israel, but calling them “anti-Western” is completely baseless.
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October 20, 2009, 3:20 pmchris says:
@A. Zarkov: If your post from 2:09 is intended to be taken literally it is a terrorist threat of torture. I think you probably didn’t intend that, it was just rhetorical hyperbole; but what *are* you actually advocating? And why the violent imagery?
Meanwhile, I find it hard to take seriously anyone who says:
And they know that this militancy continues to deprive Palestinians of any chance for the peaceful and productive life they deserve. Yet Israel, the repeated victim of aggression, faces the brunt of Human Rights Watch’s criticism.
A neutral view of the I/P conflict, this is not. Yet this is the source that’s supposed to convince me that HRW is biased, in the face of, for example, cookiemonsta’s link demonstrating that HRW criticizes all and sundry?
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October 20, 2009, 3:23 pmDavid Bernstein says:
Some commenters here seem to be either new or have not been paying attention, so here is a link to my extensive series of posts, with many additional links, documenting HRW’s anti-Israel bias. Of particular note is that HRW’s top Middle East staff were actively engaged in anti-Israel political activism when HRW hired them to be “objective” reporters on the human rights in the Middle East. This is much worse then them being, as some commenters suggest, lazy leftists who find it easy and convenient to criticize Israel. It rather suggests that they were hired precisely because they were expected to be hostile to Israel.
Also, one reason to single out Israel is because it’s Israel. Another reason is that Israel is unpopular in the broader world and therefore an easy target. But if you successfully apply absurd norms about limiting self-defense, as in the Goldstone Report, to Israel, they become normative “international law” for the U.S. and the rest of the West, fulfilling a far-left agenda of essentially rendering the West by necessity pacifist/defenseless against terrorism et al.
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October 20, 2009, 3:27 pmAriel says:
Would it be too much to ask for evidence that “many conservatives in Israel” want this? That’s a pretty strong allegation, which I’d venture is unfounded.
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October 20, 2009, 3:41 pmAriel says:
You do know about the Mohammed Al-Dura incident, right? I suppose you could call a complete fabrication “reporting on human rights” but it was also certainly a form of incitement. Kind of like the Mohammed cartoons, where they added the two extra, more inflammatory ones — maybe that’s “reporting,” of a fashion, but it’s certainly incitement.
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October 20, 2009, 3:44 pmyankee says:
First, the idea that the “far-left” is praying for more terrorist attacks the U.S. is just absurd. The far left is overwhelmingly concentrated in the major U.S. cities that would be targets.
If what you really mean is that the standards of what constitutes a war crime should depend on whether one is acting in “self-defense,” you don’t support the concept that there are such things as war crimes at all. The whole point of the concept of war crimes is that we’re supposed to be able to say that some things are off limits even if we disagree about who the “aggressor” is.
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October 20, 2009, 4:20 pmDavid Bernstein says:
I have yet to find a single critic of Israel’s alleged “disproportionate” (and therefore illegal) response to the rockets emanating from Gaza who is willing to state what a proportionate (and therefore legal) response would be. I therefore have to assume that any response that would have any hope of stopping the rocket attacks would be considered disproportionate, which in turn means that Israel, and other similarly situated countries, have no right to engage in self-defense from terrorism.
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October 20, 2009, 4:32 pmDilan Esper says:
Also, one reason to single out Israel is because it’s Israel. Another reason is that Israel is unpopular in the broader world and therefore an easy target. But if you successfully apply absurd norms about limiting self-defense, as in the Goldstone Report, to Israel, they become normative “international law” for the U.S. and the rest of the West, fulfilling a far-left agenda of essentially rendering the West by necessity pacifist/defenseless against terrorism et al.
This is loony. You really think the agenda of the left is to empower Muslim terrorism? Come on, Professor Bernstein, you are smarter than that.
As I said, I think the case for Israeli self-defense is pretty strong (though some Israeli actions I think have crossed the line, I think reasonable people can disagree on this and I certainly don’t want to second guess people who have to protect civilians from rocket attacks and bus bombings). But the Palestinian cause is also pretty strong, and the norms against using disproportionate force and the West not stooping to the tactics of its enemies are pretty strong too.
You don’t seem to get that there are a lot of people who think that human rights norms are pretty important, and that it is especially important that Western democracies don’t get in the business of violating them. That’s one of the reasons why Bush’s torture policies were so offensive to many people.
“Far left agenda”? Come on, Professor Bernstein, you’re better than that.
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October 20, 2009, 4:42 pmDilan Esper says:
Would it be too much to ask for evidence that “many conservatives in Israel” want this? That’s a pretty strong allegation, which I’d venture is unfounded.
Ariel:
Given that the Likud Party platform is basically “Palestinian terrorism makes territorial concessions impossible under any circumstances”, I don’t think my characterization was in any way unfair. The Israeli right still contains plenty of people in the coalition who believe in Greater Israel, as well as security hawks, and the beauty of this platform is that it allows security hawks to basically tacitly pursue a Greater Israel policy.
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October 20, 2009, 4:44 pmDavid Bernstein says:
Not “the left.” The “far left.” And not to “empower Muslim terrorism,” but to ensure that all international conflicts are dealt with by Western powers by “peaceful” means. The effect, but not the intent, of taking the military option away is to “empower Muslim terrorism,” among other things.
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October 20, 2009, 5:08 pmLeo Marvin says:
What troll_dc2 says said. The question, David, is do you want to persuade the open-minded undecideds or do you want to preach to the choir? Or do you think the audience that’s open to persuasion is just as amenable to Ken Roth’s tone as it is to a more measured, civil one?
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October 20, 2009, 5:22 pmVader says:
Have we forgotten that almost every Nazi aggression in the years before 1940 was preceded by charges that the nation targeted for the aggression had violated the rights of ethnic German minorities? I think that qualifies as “incitement.”
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October 20, 2009, 5:27 pmcookiemonsta says:
“I have yet to find a single critic of Israel’s alleged “disproportionate” (and therefore illegal) response to the rockets emanating from Gaza who is willing to state what a proportionate (and therefore legal) response would be.”
Regardless of “proportionality,” isn’t the intentional targeting of civilian food storages illegal?
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October 20, 2009, 5:31 pmDilan Esper says:
Have we forgotten that almost every Nazi aggression in the years before 1940 was preceded by charges that the nation targeted for the aggression had violated the rights of ethnic German minorities? I think that qualifies as “incitement.”
Wait a second. It is, of course, true that the Nazis used allegations of oppression of German minorities to justify conquest. But the oppression itself either happened or it didn’t happen, and if it happened, it wasn’t “incitement” to report on it. By your logic, it would be “incitement” to report on repression of black civil rights protesters in the South in the 1950’s and 1960’s, because that might lead other people to commit violent acts.
You can’t define a world where any negative portrayal of Israel’s acts is “incitement”. That’s just irresponsible and a recipe for whitewashing even legitimate criticism of Israel.
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October 20, 2009, 5:35 pmYankev says:
Which is why Arabs do not need security guards in their restaurants, mosques, and supermarkets to keep out Israeli suicide bombers. And why Arab buses do not have to keep watch for bombs disguised as abandoned packages. And why Arab children can walk in Jewish neighborhoods without fear of having their throats slit. And why Arab families can sit down to dinner without fear that a random Israeli will burst through the door, shoot the parents in the face at point blank range in front of the children, and then bash the childrens’ heads in with a rock or a rifle butt. In short, the average Arab is in little danger of being killed by an Israeli unless the Arab is committing an act of violence or being used as a human shield by someone else who is, or is caught in a cross-fire initiated by another Arab, or is in an active combat zone. Of course, that won’t keep HRW or UNHRC from calling the terrorist a civilian.
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October 20, 2009, 6:00 pmBarbara Skolaut says:
When pigs grow wings.
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October 20, 2009, 6:01 pmYankev says:
Is it? Of course,whether it is or not, you seem to be illustrating Prof. Bernstein’s point.
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October 20, 2009, 6:02 pmSteve says:
Of particular note is that HRW’s top Middle East staff were actively engaged in anti-Israel political activism when HRW hired them to be “objective” reporters on the human rights in the Middle East.
This is like arguing that one cannot be a credible critic of Israel if one has a history of criticizing Israel. It makes no sense. I suppose HRW’s reports on human rights abuses in, say, the Sudan have no credibility unless they were written by people who had no opinion on conditions in the Sudan prior to joining HRW. During the Cold War, I bet HRW’s reports on the USSR were written by people who had a history of anti-Soviet activism. What a scandal!
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October 20, 2009, 6:02 pmHarryEagar says:
‘You really think the agenda of the left is to empower Muslim terrorism?’
Yes, that’s exactly what I do think. For example, I think that was the motive for giving Obama the peace prize. The board was trying to foreclose the possibility of an American attack on Iran. Their motive, as I suppose they would express it, was to prevent international warfare, but their agenda is to empower Muslim terrorism.
‘Protect the authentic revolution’ is the way they would put it.
On the other point, I have read Professor Bernstein’s posts on HRW and Israel for a time, and although I don’t recall his stating it exactly this way, I detect that a big part of his objection to HRW is that it publishes obviously phoney allegations against Israel.
It doesn’t publish (so far as I have seen) a lot of obviously phoney allegations against anybody else.
If that isn’t part of Bernstein’s gripe, it is a gripe of some other people. HRW seems mighty eager to put the worst construction on Israeli behavior, and less so about everybody else in the world.
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October 20, 2009, 6:03 pmDilan Esper says:
Yankev:
Actually, these reports that you are calling incitement are all about documenting situations where Israeli forces harmed Arab CIVILIANS. In other words, these are people who, just like the Israeli villagers shelled by Hezbollah rocket attacks or the innocent Israelis on a bombed bus in Tel Aviv, were just going about their lives when they were shot at and injured and killed by Israeli military forces.
These things happened. They may be justified (as I concede, a close question), but they happened. Neither the average Arab NOR the average Israeli is in much danger of being killed in the conflict, but plenty of average Arabs AND average Israelis are in fact being killed. Indeed, more Arab civilians have died in the conflict than Israelis.
And you can’t call all these Arab civilians “terrorists”. That’s another convenient dodge by the Israeli right wing. There is no evidence that these Arab civilians were engaged in terrorism. They just made the mistake of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
In other words, there is a live issue here as to whether Israel’s actions have harmed civilians to a greater degree than militarily necessary. And attacking HRW doesn’t change this fact.
Documenting Arab civilian deaths is the correct thing to do, whatever HRW’s motives. (Documenting Israeli civilian deaths is also the correct thing to do.) Why are you opposed to telling the truth?
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October 20, 2009, 6:08 pmYankev says:
I agree, and I have not done that. I will assume that you are either unfamiliar with the Al Durah affair and the flaws in the Goldstone report, or that you misunderstood my objection.
I DO consider it incitement to knowingly publish false charges, as France’s Channel 2 did. And to recklessly and uncritically accept without investigation charges made by sources with a known history of making wild and false charges, as in the case of the Goldstone commission, whose impeccable sources included a PA official who has in the past charged Israel with, inter alia, distributing chewing gum laced with a drug that turns Arabs into sex fiends, as part of Israel’s plot to destroy Palestinian society. It is also incitement to report what happened and mislabel it — e.g. labeling the use of white phosphorus as a war crime if it is used in a manner permitted by international law.
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October 20, 2009, 6:11 pmLeo Marvin says:
Unfortunately, by squandering its claim to objectivity on Israel, HRW has rendered itself more an agent of continuing “that stuff” than ameliorating it. Its reports are now only useful to Israel’s enemies and to the small but influential Israeli faction you mentioned, which holds HRW up as proof that Israel should expect from the international community exactly nothing it doesn’t extract from its enemies by force. So in a sense, the best thing for human rights in the Arab-Israeli conflict would be for HRW to disappear, removing that distraction from the real needs you pointed to. But I doubt that’s possible until it really sinks in in some quarters that HRW is dead and buried as an agent for positive Mideast change.
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October 20, 2009, 6:17 pmneurodoc says:
I think you miss a very important dimension when you focus on a possible means (“to ensure that all international conflicts are dealt with by Western powers by ‘peaceful’ means”) rather than the ultimate goals those means are intended to serve. The “far left” of whom you speak are really about handicapping Western powers, and most especially Israel because in their eyes it is the persisting embodiment of Western colonialism/imperialism/racism, so as to rebalance the world according to their Leftist, redistributive notions of what is just. Edward Said set out the “truth” for many of them with his notion of “Orientalism,” in much the same way that Sayyid Qutb inspired a great many jihadis with his Islamist writings.
It isn’t about Muslim terrorism per se, nor about eschewal of war by the West for that matter (while the West’s enemies wage war by all the means at their disposal, however nasty those may be); it is about that rejiggering of the world at large, even when the immediate attention may be on one particular theater of the global conflict. Ultimately, it is about much more about different values than the means employed, though it is mostly the Left that espouse that obscenity, “One man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter.”
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October 20, 2009, 6:17 pmraoul says:
DB: Read Yglesias commentary on the issue– the bottom line — current Israel policy and its right wing supporters show a double standard– and frankly– they do not have an answer except killing more civilians which begets more terrorism. But until they recognize this they will be no end to war. The U.S. should begin disengaging so Israel can reap the rewards of its own actions, only then will they see the light; but now the U.S. serves as an excuse for Israel to continue its illegal activities and the U.S. continues to reap its rewards– an incredible way to treat an ally. I think the right wingers in Israel should also support disengagement, that way they would not need to concern themselves with what we think.
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October 20, 2009, 6:21 pmneurodoc says:
Edit wasn’t finished and saved before my comment posted. I added:
It is much more about values than the means employed toward achievement of the desired ends, though it is almost always from the Left that we here that obscenity, “One man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter.”
And again, I will recommend the movie The Baader Meinhof Complex for its look at an expression of the really way out there “far Left.”
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October 20, 2009, 6:27 pmAriel says:
The Likud Party Platform calls for the establishment of a Palestinian state. That’s not Greater Israel, by any stretch of the imagination. You could argue that some people in the coalition believe in Greater Israel. Your argument was not that, though. Your argument was that “many conservatives” are fine with “the threat of terrorism and rocket attacks” in furtherance of their goal to keep land. “Many” suggests some quantification, and a willingness to have terror and rockets to keep land suggests a deep bloodlessness. If anything, I wouldn’t be surprised if some (a small number) of conservatives were willing to fight and destroy the enemies in the territories to keep the land. I don’t think there would be many who want to keep the terrorism as a way to hold on to the land. It’s pretty insulting that you would even suggest such a thing — it really suggests a dark view of their character. If you have solid evidence that there are “many” conservatives who believe that, great — produce it.
Your argument in this latest post is that the Likud type platform allows security hawks to pursue a Greater Israel policy. Such an argument is not really plausible to those who know what Greater Israel means — it would include the Sinai as well as the currently disputed territories, and then some. There are no conservatives in the government — not even the fringe National Religious Party — who believe in this.
There are some people who believe you can’t trade land for peace with people who don’t want to make peace with you. That seems rather like common sense to me, but maybe I’m a Greater Israel type, then.
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October 20, 2009, 6:58 pmDilan Esper says:
Unfortunately, by squandering its claim to objectivity on Israel, HRW has rendered itself more an agent of continuing “that stuff” than ameliorating it.
This is dead wrong, Leo. If HRW is indeed a partisan outfit in these matters (and I am not conceding that it is), that would make it no different than a myriad of other NGO’s that issue various reports about the conflict from partisan perspectives. Indeed, it is hard to know why ANY NGO’s should be assumed to be particularly destructive to the cause of peace in the Middle East, in that every party’s atrocities and alleged atrocities are so widely studied and documented that even if HRW or any other particular NGO disappeared from the scene, things wouldn’t change at all. Nor would anyone’s behavior, for that matter– just about every actor in the region feels that what it is currently doing redounds to its strategic benefit– NGO reports aren’t really the issue.
The only reason one would want to remove HRW from the scene is to attempt to decrease the volume of the criticism of Israel. Whether that is appropriate or not depends totally on the merits of the criticism– if the criticism of Israel is justified, it isn’t a good idea to shoot the messenger. If it is not justified, it’s probably a better idea to just rebut it.
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October 20, 2009, 6:58 pmDilan Esper says:
Ariel:
You are being way too dense here. You can search the archives of Haaretz and the Jerusalem Post and find plenty of Israeli political commentators making the point that this is what Likud is doing.
And your point about “Greater Israel” is just silly and semantic. Plenty of folks on the Israeli right support maintaining permanent Israeli control of the West Bank, i.e., a “Greater” Israel. Whether or not they support the full conquest of biblical Israel is not the point. The point is they don’t respect the Palestinians’ right to the West Bank. And Likud caters to those folks with their “a Palestinian state is fine in theory, but in practice no territorial concessions can be made because of terrorism” platform.
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October 20, 2009, 7:04 pmTweets that mention The Volokh Conspiracy » Blog Archive » Bernstein (Robert!) Denounces Human Rights Watch: -- Topsy.com says:
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Human Rights News and Jesse Fornear, canislibertatis. canislibertatis said: Human Rights Watch under heavy criticism http://bit.ly/1aehlc [...]
Ariel says:
Dilan Esper,
That still leaves aside my common sense argument — you can’t give land for peace for people who don’t want peace. But never mind that.
I don’t think it’s a plausible reading of the Israeli political situation. Ariel Sharon was described as one of these Greater Israel types by your Ha’aretz and Jerusalem Post commentators, who proved to be dead wrong. He withdrew from Gaza and a couple of towns in Samaria. Benjamin Netanyahu, when last Prime Minister, was also described as one of these Greater Israel types by the same commentators, and he was the one who reluctantly gave over control of territory to the PA.
My point on Great Israel is not silly, but it almost certainly is semantic. Words have meanings. A is A, going back to Aristotle. We could call a lesser Greater Israel, Greater Israel, as you propose, but then we’re not using the words in their recognized meanings.
There was a time when you could plausibly argue that the Israeli right did not favor peace or territorial concession. I don’t think that’s plausible any more, as above. If you’re going to nevertheless assert it, would it be too much to ask for how many people, roughly, assert the position that you’re so sure they’re asserting, in the face of their contrary actions?
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October 20, 2009, 7:40 pmA. Zarkov says:
chris says:
@A. Zarkov: If your post from 2:09 is intended to be taken literally it is a terrorist threat of torture. I think you probably didn’t intend that, it was just rhetorical hyperbole; but what *are* you actually advocating? And why the violent imagery?
There are many ways to suffer.
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October 20, 2009, 8:08 pmsaid bedjaoui says:
The accusations of Robert Bernstein are from a jewish sionist who was at the Head of the Human Right Watch organization for a decade. His goal was to instrumentalize this organisation to put pressure on arabic/muslim countries and serve Israel.
I believe that most american people are really naive and probably they think that the world is listening to their voice when speaking about the danger of Iran, Hamas, Iraq, Syria (and what’s the next arabic/muslim country to be destroyed ?) whilst making silence about the crimes of Israel and about the desastrous effect of the global warming.
China is the power to come up and will balance the desastrous sionist politics of USA/Israel. By the way who holds the leash ? USA or Israel?
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October 20, 2009, 8:19 pmLeo Marvin says:
David Bernstein,
I’d have thought if you were going to use a sock puppet you’d come up with a subtler name than “said bedjaoui.”
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October 20, 2009, 9:17 pmDilan Esper says:
That still leaves aside my common sense argument – you can’t give land for peace for people who don’t want peace.
That’s reductive. Some Palestinians don’t want peace. (Some Israelis don’t, either.) Some do. The question is whether the ones that don’t can succeed in torpedoing any agreement. It might surprise you, but I actually suspect that the answer may be “yes” and the real reason I favor continued negotiations is to try and change this dynamic by convincing the Palestinians that a peace process can deliver more for them than Hamas can. But I don’t want Israel to compromise its security by agreeing to something that will just be blown to smithereens by Hamas bombs.
That said, though, the reality is that both Ariel Sharon and Bibi Netanyahu are pretty canny operators more than they are anti-peace ideologues. But many in the Likud party are, in fact, opposed to peace, and Netanyahu is certainly NOW preaching the “we can’t make any deals with the Palestinians” line.
The key is the settlements, really. The reality is that even if Israel has to keep lands as a security buffer against Palestinian attacks, they should not be colonizing them, as the settlements are not only an obstacle to present peace but also an obstacle to any future peace even if a more reasonable Palestinian polity emerges in the future. In other words, they make an apartheid system a self-fulfilling prophecy over the long term. And there are plenty of elements of the Israeli right who want either that or a “transfer” of Palestinians. The problem is, Bibi doesn’t have the guts to say no to them.
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October 20, 2009, 9:44 pmAriel says:
First off, I should say I’m happy to hear that you’re reasonable in believing in something other than the peace of the grave.
Like they were in Gaza? The Sinai? Samaria? Israel has repeatedly demonstrated that settlements can be uprooted. The truth is exactly the opposite — the settlements are a great tool to pressure the Palestinians to negotiate. They make it appear as though there are facts on the ground, suggesting to the Palestinians that they will get a better deal if they compromise sooner. This is a bit illusionary, but certainly not moreso than the good cop / bad cop game that the Palestinians have purposely cultivated at least since the Soviet sponsorship of the PLO. (For backup on the point of the good cop / bad cop routine, see Pacepa’s Red Horizons.)
To the extent that certain settlements, like the Ariel area, or the greater Jerusalem area, are more fully integrated with Israel, they may change the contours of a final settlement. That’s what happens when you choose war over peace — the settlement agreement may shift away from your favor.
Finally, the settlements are not at all the problem that they are made out to be for one very important reason. If you truly believed the Palestinians would be willing to make peace, you, and the Israelis, would be perfectly happy having the settlers continue to live in a Palestinian state. There is no reason the state needs to be Judenrein that I can think of, assuming the Palestinians wanted peace. As you noted above, you’re not sure that they do, and I’m quite sure that they do not, so I’m quite sure that this would not work, but it’s logically inconsistent. The only way they have problems with Jews among them is if they have a problem with Jews.
Unlike most of our arguments back and forth, this is falsifiable. If Bibi didn’t have the guts to say no, transfer would have started.
There may be some elements on the Israeli right who want transfer, though I haven’t heard of any who want an apartheid system. But the transfer elements are, so far as I know, not in the government in Israel, suggesting that Bibi did manage to say no.
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October 20, 2009, 10:54 pmThom says:
Kyle, look at a map prior to the creation of Israel and see if you can find a Palestinian nation. There was a region that Jewish people lived in for centuries that the Romans gave the name Palestine to but even the Arabs, when they controlled it, didn’t give ‘Palestinians’ a nation out of the land. I may be wrong but the Romans got the term from the enemies of Israel, the Philistines. No, we weren’t wrong in that instance no matter how much you want to justify homicide bombers murdering innocent Israeli men, women and children.
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October 21, 2009, 1:20 ampro bono lawyer says:
This is a real shame (not Bernstein’s denunciation, but HRW’s apparent bias). As a sometime user of HRW reports in asylum cases, etc, I wish they wouldn’t jeopardize their overall mission by letting even the appearance of bias undermine their credibility. Currently, there are not too many other good sources of information in some of the countries that HRW has reported on. I hope they find their way again, there are too many people relying on them.
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October 21, 2009, 2:00 amRicardo says:
This argument is simply dishonest. How would most Americans react if illegal immigrants from Mexico started building walled off compounds and claiming that the compounds were under Mexican sovereignty where only Mexican law applies and that Americans have no right to enter? I’m sure you will respond that there is no Palestinian state so the comparison is not valid but that is simply begging the question.
Those who want a Palestinian state can in good faith argue that Israelis should not be moving to any areas that could be under the sovereignty of that country until after it is established and has time to make rules concerning foreign residents. Israeli citizens have no more right to establish a home outside the internationally accepted borders of Israel than any other nationality.
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October 21, 2009, 3:17 amYankev says:
Has it occurred to you that these commentators may be deliberately distorting the positions of their opponents as partisan tactic, just as many commentators here in the US do? No, of course not. Apparently Israelis are to be discounted when they say they want Israel wants peace, but are to be believed uncritically when they say Israel is looking for excuses to avoid making peace. Why not look at what Likkud actually says and does, and not at what its domestic political opponents — let alone those in the US, Europe and the Middle East who use the name Likkud as an insult — accuse it of doing?
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October 21, 2009, 9:29 amAriel says:
Ricardo,
There’s nothing dishonest about it. One difference, and an important one, as you pointed out, is that there is no Palestinian state, as yet. There are certain communities, such as Hebron, which even the most Zionist folks do not believe will end up as part of Israel if there ever is a final settlement. Yet the Palestinians demand that those Jews leave their homes as well. Your argument might be more valid regarding other communities, that might or might not be over the borders — I still think it’s wrong there, but for different reasons. Even for those communities, if the Palestinian state included them in a final settlement, don’t you think the folks there would fear for their lives? Wouldn’t their fear be justified? But the Palestinians won’t even let it get to that — they want their land to be Judenrein as an initial matter. That should tell all but the most obtuse something about their intentions.
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October 21, 2009, 9:30 amRaha Wala says:
You should link to Kevin’s posts if you are going to cite to them. It’s common blogging courtesy, and it helps the reader locate the material to which you are referencing.
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October 21, 2009, 9:36 amYankev says:
Yes, that must be why the Arab League attacked in 1948 to wipe out the nascent statue — the Arabs foresaw that there would be settlements 19 years alter. And that’s why there were 19 years of terrorist incursions, acts of war by Egypt in 1956 and — joined by other Arab states — in 1967. And why Fatah was formed in the early 1950s and the PLO in 1964; they all foresaw that Israel would win a defensive war in 1967 and establish settlements on previously unimprovbed land purchased from the record owners, occupying less than 5% of the disputed West Bank and Gaza, and 95% of which would be located within 5 miles of the 1949 armistice lines.
Apartheid? Let’s see, under Apartheid, blacks could not attend schools, but Israel established mandatory univesal public education, for boys and girls, when it took over the territories. There were no colleges or universities in those territories until the Apartheid Israelis; now there are, and they are attended by Arabs. They are not safe for Jews to attend, though Arabs attend Israeli universities. Blacks could not be doctors, let along practice in White hospitals, and could not be treated in White hospitals. Jewish doctors practice alongside Arab doctors in Israeli hospitals, and both treat Jewish and Arab patients. Jews cannot enter Arab villages safely, and are generally not treated in hospitals there. Blacks could not own land in white towns, nor live there except as servants. Arabs can and do own land and live anywhere in Israel, but it is a capital offense under Palestinian law for an Arab to sell land to a Jew, Jews are barred by Palestinian law from living there, and the Palestinian parties demand that no Jews be allowed to live in their future state. The supposed moderate Fatah, as well as Hamas, writes drivel about Tel Aviv and Sderot being settlements built on the ruin of former Arab villages. I could go on, but I doubt it would matter.
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October 21, 2009, 9:44 amneurodoc says:
Can you point us to a reliable map showing those “internationally accepted borders of Israel” or can you tell us where exactly that border runs? When you speak of “internationally accepted borders of Israel,” are you saying that those are borders that Israel’s Arab neighbors do not dispute? When/where were those borders agreed to, and exactly which countries recognize those “internationally accepted borders of Israel” to which you refer? I’ll be most interested in your answer, because I thought Israel’s borders were an unsettled matter both from Israel’s perspective and the world’s.
Also, would you address yourself to Hebron. That if you are not aware is a place of great religious significance to observant Jews, one that was continuously inhabited by Jews for millenia until many of them, including women and children, were brutally butchered in the course of one murderous rampage by their Arab neighbors in 1929, and not resettled by Jews until after the ’67 war. You think Jews living in Hebron must go too?
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October 21, 2009, 10:06 amDilan Esper says:
Like they were in Gaza? The Sinai? Samaria? Israel has repeatedly demonstrated that settlements can be uprooted. The truth is exactly the opposite – the settlements are a great tool to pressure the Palestinians to negotiate. They make it appear as though there are facts on the ground, suggesting to the Palestinians that they will get a better deal if they compromise sooner.
This isn’t right. Uprooting the settlements has been very painful and contested (with minor battles between the Israeli army and Jewish settlers) even in lands that weren’t very important to Israel. Uprooting the settlements in the West Bank, which many Israelis see as part of the heart of Biblical Israel, is a much, much more difficult operation.
And even if this were not true, it is certainly how the Palestinians see things, a notion confirmed by the fact that every time Israel DOES offer peace, it generally seeks to annex the major settlements to Israel rather than uprooting them. For this “negotiating tactic” to work, you have to convince the Palestinians that if they play ball and stop the aggression, the settlements will be uprooted. The settlements look too permanent for that to happen.
To the extent that certain settlements, like the Ariel area, or the greater Jerusalem area, are more fully integrated with Israel, they may change the contours of a final settlement. That’s what happens when you choose war over peace – the settlement agreement may shift away from your favor.
This statement is really offensive. The settlements weren’t put there by God. They didn’t show up there. They were put there by Israeli leaders, in violation of international law and against the wishes of Israel’s backers as well as a substantial portion of its population. The logic of this argument is no better than the logic of Hamas supporters saying “terrorism is what happens when you don’t give back land that doesn’t belong to you”. Nothing just “happens”. People do things that are wrong and illegal, and then they blame them on the other side’s intransigence.
Settlements are what “happens” when a government decides to break the law and put obstacles up to peace. The fact that the Palestinians have for too long terrorized innocent Israeli civilians is not a justification for this. Indeed, unlike the knotty self-defense questions when it comes to Gaza, this isn’t even a close question.
Finally, the settlements are not at all the problem that they are made out to be for one very important reason. If you truly believed the Palestinians would be willing to make peace, you, and the Israelis, would be perfectly happy having the settlers continue to live in a Palestinian state. There is no reason the state needs to be Judenrein that I can think of, assuming the Palestinians wanted peace.
This ignores both the history of the region and the power dynamics. Indeed, it’s the Israeli equivalent of the Arabs’ argument for a “one state solution”. The reason there needs to be two separate states is the parties don’t get along. Now, if they magically could get along, you could do a lot of things in terms of Jews and Arabs living together. And in a perfect world, Jews and Arabs would live together. But the Middle East is not a perfect world, so we have to separate them.
Further, the power dynamics are not equal here. The Palestinians have no power to build settlements inside Israel proper. Not even people who lived there pre-1948 can go back now. So what you are arguing is essentially that Israel should get to change the demographics of the West Bank to hold onto more territory, but Palestinians have no reciprocal right with respect to Israel. I would suggest to you that if you really want to get into the weeds on issues of terrorism, this is the sort of thing that causes ordinary people who would normally not support terrorism to cast their lot with the terrorists. Because when the political and diplomatic processes are heavily skewed against your interests, terrorism looks more and more attractive to people. (Note this DOES NOT justify terrorism– again, as I noted earlier about settlements, terrorism doesn’t just fall from the sky, and Palestinians are responsible and cupable for murdering Israeli civilians. It simply shows how a tactic that might seem in Israel’s short-term interest can in fact perpetuate the conflict and make peace more difficult.)
There may be some elements on the Israeli right who want transfer, though I haven’t heard of any who want an apartheid system. But the transfer elements are, so far as I know, not in the government in Israel, suggesting that Bibi did manage to say no.
It’s not that he can’t say no on transfer. He can and does. He can’t say no on settlements, even though settlements will inexorably lead to either apartheid (because it will leave Bantustans in the West Bank and unequal rights for Palestinians) or transfer. In other words, he says no to transfer while his actions make transfer more likely as an ultimate solution.
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October 21, 2009, 1:40 pmDilan Esper says:
Apartheid? Let’s see, under Apartheid, blacks could not attend schools, but Israel established mandatory univesal public education, for boys and girls, when it took over the territories. There were no colleges or universities in those territories until the Apartheid Israelis; now there are, and they are attended by Arabs. They are not safe for Jews to attend, though Arabs attend Israeli universities. Blacks could not be doctors, let along practice in White hospitals, and could not be treated in White hospitals. Jewish doctors practice alongside Arab doctors in Israeli hospitals, and both treat Jewish and Arab patients. Jews cannot enter Arab villages safely, and are generally not treated in hospitals there. Blacks could not own land in white towns, nor live there except as servants. Arabs can and do own land and live anywhere in Israel, but it is a capital offense under Palestinian law for an Arab to sell land to a Jew, Jews are barred by Palestinian law from living there, and the Palestinian parties demand that no Jews be allowed to live in their future state. The supposed moderate Fatah, as well as Hamas, writes drivel about Tel Aviv and Sderot being settlements built on the ruin of former Arab villages. I could go on, but I doubt it would matter.
Yankev, re-read my statement. I was not talking about Apartheid now, but Apartheid in the future. Settlements make it more likely (unless there is a transfer), because you will have large communities of Jews living in the West Bank who will have their own roads, really nice schools, businesses, favorable taxation, the franchise, etc., whereas Arabs will live in Bantustans where they will be subjected to pass laws, unfavorable conditions, etc. And we are talking about the West Bank, not Israel proper (Israeli arabs are treated admirably well in Israel proper).
In other words, continue with the settlements and you make either transfer or apartheid an inevitability.
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October 21, 2009, 1:45 pmDilan Esper says:
Also, would you address yourself to Hebron. That if you are not aware is a place of great religious significance to observant Jews, one that was continuously inhabited by Jews for millenia until many of them, including women and children, were brutally butchered in the course of one murderous rampage by their Arab neighbors in 1929, and not resettled by Jews until after the ‘67 war. You think Jews living in Hebron must go too?
I’ll say it.
1. Religion doesn’t count for anything. God isn’t in the business of making land grants.
2. The fact that people lived in a place a long time ago is irrelevant as well. Many, many cultures got kicked out of their lands. Are we going to give all the Native American lands back? Conquest was a terrible business, but it happened.
3. Same thing with 1929. Indeed, the arguments made by the Israeli right about 1929 aren’t much different than the arguments made by Hamas about 1948.
4. You can certainly shape a final peace agreement in such a way that Jews remain in Hebron and Arabs receive something in exchange. Indeed, you can do that with many settlements, though each time you do this you make it more difficult to create a contiguous Palestinian state. But certainly nobody has a “right” to live in Hebron because of their ethnicity. If Israel decides that it is not in its interest to have Jews continue to live in Hebron, Israel has every right to kick them out as part of a peace agreement.
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October 21, 2009, 1:49 pmgreenfeld says:
they “human right group” bunch of lier and support murder . they are thieves and crock .
the best i can say thatthey support murder ,
what a double standard by this communist red socialist .that killed million
the palstinian that attacking israel with they support of this dirty “human right group” Israel responding to” Palestinian freedom fighter murder” now human right group attracting Israel that stand up for murder. yes protecting you dirty socialist jew
change your name to” human right support murdering group ”
yes this what you dirty arab murder supporter .
some one have to stand against this sick minded mr berstein and i will
greenfeld meir
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October 21, 2009, 2:10 pmEMB says:
You can use <a href=“the url here” rel=“nofollow”>text</a> to link to a web page without contributing any PageRank to it on Google.
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October 21, 2009, 3:03 pmAriel says:
Dilan,
First a comment on your most recent reply and your last one. In your last one, you say conquest is terrible, but it should be accepted. In your most recent reply, you talk about all of the baneful sides of the settlements. Is it that Jews are not allowed to keep the fruits of their conquest but Arabs are? When the Arabs conquered Hebron and threw the Jews out it was ok, but when the Jews build settlements in land they’ve conquered it’s bad — please square that circle, unless there’s some non-biased reason I’m not seeing that makes it ok.
The settlements in Sinai looked very permanent as well. They were still uprooted.
I didn’t say that they were. I said that one function they have is to act as a negotiating chit to make it increasingly clear that the Palestinians will not get as much land, if they don’t try to compromise. As an aside, there’s nothing offensive about such a statement. And it certainly does a whole lot less harm than terrorism.
What international law was violated?
You don’t have to blame the other side’s intransigence. But if the other side is intransigent and you recognize it, you need to try to find a way to convince them otherwise. In the olden days, it would probably mean bombing their population centers, see, e.g., Tokyo in WWII. Nowadays, we don’t do that — but if you want to take away Israel’s one tool to try to pressure the Palestinians to negotiate, what incentive will they ever have to negotiate? Instead, they will prefer their current strategy of bomb and talk or perhaps shift more to bombing — there’s nothing they lose from bombing.
Again, they are not obstacles to peace. They have been uprooted when peace is promised, or even when it is not. Settlements are a distraction. A building is not an obstacle to peace. Setting up a terrorist, murdering ideology, reinforcing it through weekly government-sponsored sermons, broadcasting it through televisions, encouraging it through martyrdom posters — those are obstacles to peace. The lack of war is peace. Buildings have nothing to do with that, one way or the other.
This is an argument the transfer advocates make as well. Unlike them, you are only willing to transfer Jews. They are only willing to transfer Arabs. But Jews have been transferred, from Morocco to Iran, they have been, to a degree or another, transferred to Israel. Now, you want to further transfer Jews, but are afraid of doing so with Arabs.
Fair enough. But here’s the thing — said political and diplomatic processes are not heavily skewed against them. They refused a state in 1948, choosing war to drive the Jews into the sea, when their land would be much bigger and better than what the Jews would get. In 1967, in response to their loss, they issued the Three No’s — no peace, no recognition, no negotiation. End result: no state. All of the Clinton offers were blown off. The Road Map — ignored. The Saudi peace plan — refused to meet with the Israelis. The Annapolis summit — forgotten. They’ve had every opportunity under the sun to take what you think they want — and they’ve refused it. Maybe that’s because it’s not what they really want. And maybe the terrorism is their way to get what they really want — dead Jews, and ultimately Israel. They say it every day, from every mosque or TV station or on their website. They’re crystal clear.
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October 21, 2009, 3:44 pmYankev says:
Kol ha-kavod. The umos ha’olam refuses to believe Jews when they say they want peace, no matter how much they back up their words with actions. The umos ha’olam refuse to believe that Hamas, Fatah and the other yemach she’mam want to exterminate Jews and Israel, no matter how often the yemach she’mam say it and no matter how much they back up their words with actions.
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October 21, 2009, 4:38 pmHuman Rights Watch denounced by its own founder « Internet Scofflaw says:
[...] Watch denounced by its own founder Robert Bernstein, the founder of Human Rights Watch, castigates the organization he founded for its attacks on [...]
Dilan Esper says:
First a comment on your most recent reply and your last one. In your last one, you say conquest is terrible, but it should be accepted. In your most recent reply, you talk about all of the baneful sides of the settlements. Is it that Jews are not allowed to keep the fruits of their conquest but Arabs are?
Not at all. It’s that Israel has not, in fact, taken the West Bank as a prize of conquest, nor can it. Because that would require giving rights to West Bank residents, which could destroy the Jewish character of Israel. I, by the way, do not think Israel should do this– the one state solution can’t work. But because Israel has explictly NOT decided to just make the West Bank a part of Israel, the question becomes how is Israel going to give the West Bank to the Arabs.
The other thing about the taking of the West Bank is that it is much more proximate. It didn’t happen nearly as long ago as those other things you mention. Indeed, this principle works both ways– Arabs who want to reverse 1948 are just as unrealistic as Jews who want to control biblical Israel.
The settlements in Sinai looked very permanent as well. They were still uprooted.
No, they didn’t look as permanent as those in the West Bank. Have you seriously seen the infrastructure that Israel has built there? And the separation barriers? And the highways? Plus, the West Bank is religiously important to some Israelis, which the Palestinians can reasonably infer will make it very difficult for settlements to be removed. Finally, we have a record of years of peace talks and even peace-minded Israeli governments have continued to build settlements and have never really offered to dismantle them even as part of a final status agreement. So the Palestinians certainly have every right to see West Bank settlements as more than negotiating tools.
What international law was violated?
I think you are asking this question in bad faith or to start a flame war about international law. Suffice to say, international law does prohibit colonizing occupied territories.
In the olden days, it would probably mean bombing their population centers, see, e.g., Tokyo in WWII. Nowadays, we don’t do that – but if you want to take away Israel’s one tool to try to pressure the Palestinians to negotiate, what incentive will they ever have to negotiate?
How are settlements the Israelis’ “one tool”? You have attacks on Hamas leaders. Targeted assassinations. Reoccupation. Cutting off aid and supplies to territories controlled by Hamas. Reprisals by Israel’s allies against Hamas’ international sponsors.
There’s plenty of tools in the Israeli toolkit.
This is an argument the transfer advocates make as well. Unlike them, you are only willing to transfer Jews.
What the ****? This is the most disgusting accusation you could ever lob at someone. I am not in the ethnic cleansing business, Ariel. I am not Hitler or Milosevic. You need to withdraw this offensive accusation immediately. I am not proposing that we “transfer” Jews. I am saying that the Israeli government is going to have to give up territory if it wants to get peace, and that as part of that process, it will need to dismantle settlements. When your OWN government dismantles the settlements that it allowed you to create in the first place as part of its policy, you are not being ethnically cleansed.
Really, we can’t have civil discussions about the Middle East when conservative supporters of Israel lob this sort of garbage at anyone who dares to criticize Israel’s settlement policy. Until you learn the difference between ethnic cleansing and the peace process, you are hopeless.
Fair enough. But here’s the thing – said political and diplomatic processes are not heavily skewed against them. They refused a state in 1948, choosing war to drive the Jews into the sea, when their land would be much bigger and better than what the Jews would get. In 1967, in response to their loss, they issued the Three No’s – no peace, no recognition, no negotiation. End result: no state.
The Palestinians and their sponsors made some really stupid decisions. But you also need to know that the claim that Israel shouldn’t have been created in 1948 on land populated by Arabs was quite strong. This is the classic “we didn’t land on Plymouth Rock, Plymouth Rock landed on us” problem. The international community created an ethnically-identified state in a place where a lot of people of a different ethnicity were living. It was, in fact, very necessary to create that state as an insurance policy against anti-semitism. But it was created on top of people who were already living there. And then that state proceeded to drive a number of those people into exile, while others left voluntarily.
I don’t think if the international community came in and declared a Palestinian state in Tel Aviv and the Jewish Israelis said “we don’t accept it” and went to war, that you would be saying that the Israelis had to accept it. And I still don’t think you would say it even if the Jewish Israelis lost the war and were driven out of the territory.
The fact of the matter is, 1948 happened and is irreversible. But that doesn’t mean the Palestinians didn’t get a very raw deal. The international community, for its own purposes, declared someone else’s state on their land. I suspect that most people would support going to war under those circumstances.
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October 21, 2009, 5:45 pmYankev says:
You are mistaken, sir. Ehud Barak offered exactly that, with the exception of a miniscule number of “settlements” (in the US, we call them suburbs) contiguous or nearly so to Jerusalem or to other parts of pre-1967 Israel, for which the Arabs would be given an at least equivalent area in pre-1967 Israel, contiguous to the land occupied illegally from 1948 to 1967 by Egypt, Jordan or Syria, as the case may be. He even threw in the Old City of Jerusalem. This was exactly the type of border adjustment contemplated by UNSC Resolution 242. Arafat responded by launching the second intifada.
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October 21, 2009, 7:50 pmLeo Marvin says:
Dilan,
Right around the same time another former British colony was ethnically/religiously partitioned into India and Pakistan. That partition created 12.5 to 15 million refugees who fled/abandoned/were driven from their homes. All those people got a raw deal, as did the 800,000 — 1,000,0000 Jews who fled/abandoned/were driven from their homes in the countries that surround Israel. Of those four groups that the international community gave states which exiled some and to which other exiles fled, only one continues to demand the right to return to their original homes. Is that because the Palestinians were the only ones who got a raw deal, or because they were the only ones unwilling to accept the existence of their enemies’ state, even at the cost of rejecting their own?
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October 21, 2009, 8:03 pmcookiemonsta says:
“Of those four groups that the international community gave states”
The international community gave India a state? Lol.
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October 21, 2009, 8:34 pmDilan Esper says:
You are mistaken, sir. Ehud Barak offered exactly that, with the exception of a miniscule number of “settlements” (in the US, we call them suburbs) contiguous or nearly so to Jerusalem or to other parts of pre-1967 Israel, for which the Arabs would be given an at least equivalent area in pre-1967 Israel, contiguous to the land occupied illegally from 1948 to 1967 by Egypt, Jordan or Syria, as the case may be
This isn’t really correct. I believe the Barak plan left nearly 200,000 Jewish settlers in the West Bank.
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October 21, 2009, 8:48 pmDilan Esper says:
Right around the same time another former British colony was ethnically/religiously partitioned into India and Pakistan. That partition created 12.5 to 15 million refugees who fled/abandoned/were driven from their homes. All those people got a raw deal, as did the 800,000 – 1,000,0000 Jews who fled/abandoned/were driven from their homes in the countries that surround Israel. Of those four groups that the international community gave states which exiled some and to which other exiles fled, only one continues to demand the right to return to their original homes. Is that because the Palestinians were the only ones who got a raw deal, or because they were the only ones unwilling to accept the existence of their enemies’ state, even at the cost of rejecting their own?
That’s not true at all, Leo. Members of all of those groups have sought their homes back or compensation. But to the extent it is true, it’s because unlike the Pakistanis or Indians or the Jews who were driven out of Arab countries, the Palestinians didn’t get a state.
Look, Leo, we’ve been through this before. If you were a Palestinian driven from your home in 1948, you would hate Israel too. The lack of empathy of many supporters of Israel for Palestinian suffering is shocking and contemptible.
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October 21, 2009, 8:53 pmAriel says:
Suppose the Arabs were successful in conquering Israel. Would they give rights to the Jewish citizens, er, subjects of the new regime? What about Israeli conquest makes it necessary to give rights to the residents?
You’ve also evaded the question quite carefully. When the Arabs conquered Hebron in 1929, killing the Jews therein, you said that’s it, game over, for the Jewish presence there. They didn’t give rights to any Jews there. They either killed them or forced them to flee. This meets your approval. Would a similar Israeli action meet your approval? Or, again, is it ok for the Arabs, but not the Israelis?
No, they didn’t look as permanent as those in the West Bank.
I’ll grant that they didn’t look as permanent as the current structures. But I wouldn’t grant that they weren’t thought of as permanently as the current settlements *at that time*.
Sinai is too. You may have heard about that whole mountain, 10C, wandering in the desert thing. That’s where it happened.
Sinai, Gaza show that it can be done. Barak, as mentioned above by Yankev, showed that it could be done. Unlike some other areas, I think this is a question of fact.
Not asking in bad faith or to start a flame war. International law does not prohibit colonizing disputed territories. To have them be occupied, you’d have to identify the party which is being occupied — there was no predecessor state that occupied them that maintains any claim to them. The Jordanians and Egyptians have both forsworn their interests in the relevant lands.
None of these tools indicate that if you don’t make peace soon, the peace deal you will get will be worse than otherwise. All of them are band-aids, temporary fixes.
In the comment I replied to here, you said that Jews and Arabs need to be separated. There are three ways this can be accomplished:
(1) Transfer Jews
(2) Transfer Arabs
(3) Transfer some Jews and some Arabs
There really are no other possibilities.
You made this comment in reply to my comment about there being no reason to think that Jews could not live among Palestinians, if there was a peace deal. You said that would not be possible, because they need to be separated. I gathered, from the context of our discussion, that you meant that Jews should be moved, because you’ve been critical of the right wing Israelis who advocate transfer of Arabs. I may have read this wrong. If so, please let me know how, and I’d be happy to apologize.
Do you mind explaining to me the truth of this statement? It’s not self-evident to me that:
(1) If gov’t A transfers people A, it’s not ethnic cleansing
(2) If gov’t B transfers people A, it is ethnic cleansing
That’s the distinction you’re trying to make, and I’m not quite sure I understand it. Is it that if your country is willing to transfer its own people, that makes it ok? So when the Bosnians transferred some of their own people, mostly to consolidate their lines, that was not transfer?
I’ll note that I’m using the word “transfer” and not “ethnic cleansing” precisely to be less offensive. I think that there can be relatively peaceable transfers, like the transfer of Jews out of Gaza.
Part of the problem I have with the peace process is precisely that: everyone assumes that the end state will involve dismantling Israeli settlements, because the Palestinians cannot be trusted to live with Jews among them. If that’s really true, what peace is at the end of the tunnel? It’s a fundamental contradiction in the “process.”
There’s a kernel of a reasonable argument here. But then they went to war — and when you lose wars, you may lose territory. Tough noogies.
You’re right. I would not accept it. But if Israel went to war over it, and lost, then, while I would hope such a thing would never happen, it would be what it is. Any future return to Israel by the Jews would have to wait.
There’s also one major difference between the Israelis and the Palestinians: this is our ancestral homeland. To juice up the number of Palestinians, the UNRWA has to define them as any person living in Mandatory Palestine for as little as two years, and all of their descendants. No other refugee population in the world is defined as loosely. It’s precisely because many Arabs were recent migrants to the territory now known as Israel, coming because of the opportunities the industrious early Zionists were introducing, that the definition of Palestinians is so broad. Palestinians don’t even speak the same dialect of Arabic, that’s how dissimilar they are from each other.
From your keyboard to God’s metaphorical ears. I don’t believe that you’re right, about it being irreversible. With Hezb’Allah on the north, Hamas on the south, and, eventually, a PA state on the east, the Israelis will be in tough straits, even discounting the Iranians and Syrians. I don’t think 1948 is irreversible at all — I think it’s only a matter of time. But here’s the key point — to the extent we can put off that vile day, I think we should. And that means a strong Israel, ready to defend itself against the various enemies it has, and will have.
Many of the vilified settlements were constructed to cover key routes into Israel, to make it harder for conventional forces or terrorists to come into Israel. That’s exactly why they’re so hated by the Palestinians, and the people for whom they are proxies. Israel is 9 miles wide at its narrowest point, the place where a tank army could cut the country in two. The settlement of Ariel, and surrounding settlements, is there precisely to make that harder. That’s the other purpose of the settlements. And that’s why Israel can’t give up the settlements unless there is going to be peace. But any situation in which the Arabs would reject the settlements staying would also suggest non-peaceful intentions. That’s a bit of a Catch-22. In sum, we’re agreed, I believe, on the point that Israel will not give up all of the settlements, under any circumstances, even if we disagree about whether that is desirable.
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October 21, 2009, 10:04 pmjcm says:
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October 21, 2009, 10:45 pmThe America Who Hates Being American says:
Fuck Israel. . . . Fuck it’s allies. . . . Fuck all ya’ll people that need “neutral” organizations to give them a reason to feel good about slaying the “backwards” nations...
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October 21, 2009, 11:24 pmneurodoc says:
After a war of aggression launched by Germany, the victorious Allies occupied Germany until it was completely pacified and a new government installed there. Likewise, after a war of aggression launched by Japan, the victorious United States occupied Japan until it was completely pacified and a new government installed there. Those were clearly “occupations” by any definition, the conquering forces having no colorable territorial claims to assert.
How could Israel, though, similarly “occupy” land (“Palestine”) which never in the course of history existed as anything remotely resembling a sovereignty; which has to this day no agreed upon borders; which had been part of the undivided Ottoman Empire under the rule of non-Arabs for hundreds of years until three decades before when the Ottoman Empire came to an end and the British took control of the territory; and which for the previous 19 years the Jordanians ruled without much protest by the inhabitants or other countries, though only a couple recognized what amounted to Jordanian annexation of the West Bank (and Egyptian control of Gaza)? Did Jordan, which only 25 years earlier was itself created de novo out of a contiguous piece of the former Ottoman Empire by the British, who established a hereditary monarchy, parachuting in someone to their own liking to rule there as a king, come to have a claim superior to Israel’s in ’48 or at any other time over the West Bank? Did League of Nations, the United Nations, or anyone else ever allow that Jordan might have some claim to territory beyond its established and uncontested borders? (BTW, when Jordan made everything they held at the conclusion of the ’48 war judenrein, including parts of Jerusalem and other places that Jews had long inhabited, were they “decolonizing” ccupied territory?
Rather than accuse your interlocuters of either bad faith or seeking to start a flame war over international law, how about addressing yourself to who was/is an “occupier”? And tell us, if you will, where you believe Israel’s borders should be, whether the truce line after the Arab armies were defeated in ’48 (pre-’67 border or so-called Green Line), what the Israelis conquered after defeating the Arab armies again in ’67, or where, and why you think your choice is the right one. (Ricardo alluded to “the internationally accepted borders of Israel,” but didn’t specify where exactly he thought those were, and I’m sure I don’t know because I don’t think the borders have ever been “internationally accepted,” least of all by those who have refused Israel’s right to exist.)
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October 22, 2009, 12:02 amyankee says:
If the Palestinian territories are not “occupied,” what are they? If they are part of Israel, Israel is an apartheid state. If they’re not part of Israel, what could they be if not “occupied”?
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October 22, 2009, 3:09 amYankev says:
Among how many Arabs? Oh, the horror of Arabs having to tolerate Jews living amongst them. More to the point, the Arabs would have received land in pre-1967 Israel as part of their state, equal to the amount of land that those 200,000 Jews were living on. The point remains that any time the Arabs have been offered the choice of a state next to a Jewish state or continuing their war to exterminate the Jewish state, they have chosen the latter.
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October 22, 2009, 9:36 amDilan Esper says:
Suppose the Arabs were successful in conquering Israel. Would they give rights to the Jewish citizens, er, subjects of the new regime?
No. And you know what? The human rights records of most Arab countries are apalling. Israel is better than that. And it should be.
More generally, though, I don’t understand this form of argument. Oppression is oppression. The fact that Arab governments do a lot of things that are very oppressive is not a license for Israel to do something oppressive. The person who is oppressed isn’t going to say “well, it’s justified that I suffer because after all, the Arab governments are worse than Israel”.
You’ve also evaded the question quite carefully. When the Arabs conquered Hebron in 1929, killing the Jews therein, you said that’s it, game over, for the Jewish presence there.
That’s not what I said. If the Middle East were more peaceful, there certainly could be a Jewish presence in Hebron, just as we could move more Palestinians back into the homes they lost in Israel in 1948.
But we don’t have that peaceful Middle East. We have a Middle East where we have to separate Jews and Arabs. And that means that having Jews live in Hebron is an obstacle to peace.
Now, you could still construct a peace that included Jews living in Hebron. But you would need to have negotiations and Israel would have to give up something in exchange, and the more Hebrons you permit, the more the Palestinian state becomes noncontiguous and difficult to sustain.
Not asking in bad faith or to start a flame war. International law does not prohibit colonizing disputed territories.
The territories are not disputed. That is a lie told by the Israeli right wing. Israel does not claim and cannot claim these territories belong to it, so there is no “dispute”. They belonged to Jordan, Israel occupied them, and annexed Jerusalem. Israel was entitled to annex the rest of the territories too and did not.
Since Israel decided not to annex the rest of the territories, it is an occupying power. There is no international law classification for territories that are “disputed” but where the sovereign makes no actual sovereign claim over them. Accordingly, since Israel decided not to annex the territories, it can’t settle them.
This is actually clear as day, everyone knows it, and the Israeli right wing arguments to the contrary are in complete bad faith and are just a made up position to justify illegality. They are the equivalent of the Bush torture memos.
None of these tools indicate that if you don’t make peace soon, the peace deal you will get will be worse than otherwise.
But you don’t get to violate international law and do that. You see, Israel could also say “if you don’t make peace now, we will cut off the testicles of your children one by one”. That would make any peace deal in the future worse than one now. But it would also be illegal.
There isn’t an exception to the rules against colonization for colonization projects designed to collectively punish people for terrorism.
You made this comment in reply to my comment about there being no reason to think that Jews could not live among Palestinians, if there was a peace deal. You said that would not be possible, because they need to be separated. I gathered, from the context of our discussion, that you meant that Jews should be moved, because you’ve been critical of the right wing Israelis who advocate transfer of Arabs.
Ariel, I am saying that Jews that were MOVED IN in a deliberate policy to appropriate Arab land can be moved BACK OUT by an Israeli government as part of a peace agreement. That is not the same thing as kicking Arabs out of land that they have lived in for generations. It is also not the same thing as Arab states kicking Jews out of land that they have lived in for generations. These settlers were political pawns in the first place. Moving them back on the chessboard is not a “population transfer” in the noxious sense that some folks propose.
That’s the distinction you’re trying to make, and I’m not quite sure I understand it. Is it that if your country is willing to transfer its own people, that makes it ok? So when the Bosnians transferred some of their own people, mostly to consolidate their lines, that was not transfer?
Here’s a simple way of thinking about it. The Serbs were trying to transfer Bosnian Muslims out of Bosnia. That was ethnic cleansing. However, if the Serbs, at the end of the conflict, transfered the Serbs that THEY HAD TRANSFERRED INTO BOSNIA FOR THE EXPRESS PURPOSE OF PUTTING FACTS ON THE GROUND back out of Bosnia, that’s not the same thing. If you think it is, you are a hopeless apologist for the Israeli right.
There’s also one major difference between the Israelis and the Palestinians: this is our ancestral homeland.
Ariel, (1) that doesn’t matter– I live on land that is the “ancestral homeland” of Native Americans, and that doesn’t give them any rights to get the land back now. People don’t get to live where their ancestors lived 2,000 years ago. (2) It’s worth noting that whoever the Israelites were thousands of years ago, they were very different people from the modern day Jewish / Israeli community, with a very different culture and customs. Indeed, there are many, many descendants of those people who are NOT Jews. We speak too freely about “Jews” (or any group) as if the group now is exactly the same as the group then. It isn’t. Time changes everything and everyone. (3) The land is also the ancestral homeland of many Palestinians. Arab Muslims have lived on Israel and the West Bank for hundreds of years, just like Jews.
From your keyboard to God’s metaphorical ears. I don’t believe that you’re right, about it being irreversible. With Hezb’Allah on the north, Hamas on the south, and, eventually, a PA state on the east, the Israelis will be in tough straits, even discounting the Iranians and Syrians. I don’t think 1948 is irreversible at all – I think it’s only a matter of time. But here’s the key point – to the extent we can put off that vile day, I think we should. And that means a strong Israel, ready to defend itself against the various enemies it has, and will have.
I don’t think that there is really an existential threat to Israel, which is a rich country with nuclear weapons. But I totally agree that Israel should be strong and has every right to defend itself against those who would seek to reverse 1948.
Many of the vilified settlements were constructed to cover key routes into Israel, to make it harder for conventional forces or terrorists to come into Israel. That’s exactly why they’re so hated by the Palestinians, and the people for whom they are proxies.
This is slightly true, but it also makes no sense. There is certainly a strong case for a MILITARY presence in the Jordan Valley. But unless you are Saddam Hussein and like the idea of “human shields”, it’s utterly stupid to put CIVILIANS in harm’s way.
After a war of aggression launched by Germany, the victorious Allies occupied Germany until it was completely pacified and a new government installed there. Likewise, after a war of aggression launched by Japan, the victorious United States occupied Japan until it was completely pacified and a new government installed there. Those were clearly “occupations” by any definition, the conquering forces having no colorable territorial claims to assert.
Neuro, I don’t doubt the legality of the OCCUPATION. But you aren’t allowed to COLONIZE occupied territories unless you annex them, and we didn’t, either in Japan or Germany.
How could Israel, though, similarly “occupy” land (”Palestine”) which never in the course of history existed as anything remotely resembling a sovereignty; which has to this day no agreed upon borders; which had been part of the undivided Ottoman Empire under the rule of non-Arabs for hundreds of years until three decades before when the Ottoman Empire came to an end and the British took control of the territory; and which for the previous 19 years the Jordanians ruled without much protest by the inhabitants or other countries, though only a couple recognized what amounted to Jordanian annexation of the West Bank (and Egyptian control of Gaza)?
The reason it is an occupation is that it was clear that the territories DID NOT belong to Israel. The fact that there are disputes as to who they did belong to is irrelevant. By your logic, if the US invaded the Kiril Islands or Kinmen and Matsu, we would not be an occupying power.
Among how many Arabs? Oh, the horror of Arabs having to tolerate Jews living amongst them. More to the point, the Arabs would have received land in pre-1967 Israel as part of their state, equal to the amount of land that those 200,000 Jews were living on. The point remains that any time the Arabs have been offered the choice of a state next to a Jewish state or continuing their war to exterminate the Jewish state, they have chosen the latter.
Again, Yankev, nobody disputes that the Palestinians have been stupid. But you are still characterizing the Israeli peace offers as more generous than they were.
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October 22, 2009, 3:52 pmYankev says:
This is a lie told by the Arabs and their supporters. The territories did not belong to Jordan. They were a part of the Ottoman Empire that the League of Nations entrusted to Britain with the mandate to create a Jewish state. In 1947, the UN allocated this part of the mandate for establishment of an additional Arab state. In 1948, when Britain withdrew from its mandate, Israel declared independence and Transjordan — which had already been created out of part of the mandate — invaded, along with the Egypt, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. When the armistice was enacted in 1949, a part of the geographic area historically known as Yehuda (Judea, in Latin) was in Transjordanian hands, although it had been set aside by the UN resolution as part of a proposed Palestinian state. Now that it held land on both sides of the Jordan River, Transjordan changed its name to Jordan. Jordan began referring to the area as its West Bank, in part to keep up the myth that Jews were alien to the area. Jordan then annexed the West Bank, but the annexation was not recognized as lawful by Western countries or AFAIK by the UN. It is therefore false to say that the territory is that of another state, never having been under the lawful jurisdiction of any country since the end of Britain’s mandate. There are American lawyers who are expert in international law who will tell you the same thing. This is not, as you like to think, a lie cooked up by the nefarious Israeli Right.
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October 22, 2009, 4:57 pmYankev says:
That is a lie told by the Arabs and their extreme left wing supporters in the West.
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October 22, 2009, 5:01 pmDilan Esper says:
When the armistice was enacted in 1949, a part of the geographic area historically known as Yehuda (Judea, in Latin) was in Transjordanian hands, although it had been set aside by the UN resolution as part of a proposed Palestinian state.
And exactly what legal document (the Bible doesn’t count) gave Judea to the Israelis?
Look, by mentioning the irrelevancy of Yehuda, you gave the game away, Yankev. There isn’t an invisible man in the sky who gave the West Bank to Israel. Sorry, there just isn’t.
There was a British mandate to nonspecifically divide the territory into Arab and Jewish states, and an imperfect UN implementation of that mandate which put the West Bank in the hands of Jordan. Israel never had a legal right to the West Bank, again, unless one believes in sky fairies making land grants.
It is therefore false to say that the territory is that of another state, never having been under the lawful jurisdiction of any country since the end of Britain’s mandate.
I answered this. Kinmen and Matsu are certainly disputed territories between China and Taiwan, but that doesn’t give the US (not a party to the dispute) a right to colonize them.
Israel never had any right to the West Bank. The whole strategy is to hope that if you mention “Judea and Samaria” enough times, the fact that Israel was never given the West Bank will fade into the background.
At any rate, if you REALLY believe that the West Bank belongs to Israel, Israel should annex it. I DON’T believe that for a second. But the logic of the position militates towards a one-state solution, which is precisely why ISRAEL never characterizes the West Bank as a part of Israel.
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October 22, 2009, 5:20 pmLeo Marvin says:
Dilan,
The difference between seeking compensation for the homes and seeking the homes themselves is definitive, and the Palestinians are the only ones seeking the homes on a meaningful scale.
I agree, and my point was that’s because the Palestinians, alone among the four, refused the state that was available. Unlike, say, the Pakistanis, who also had major territorial grievances, but accepted what they considered a flawed state to continue the fight another day, the Palestinians took an absolutist position. They pushed all their chips to the middle of the table, gambling they’d break Israel, without any apparent regard for what would happen if they themselves were broken.
as I’ve always said.
It’s the behavior of certain people on both sides who apparently lack empathy that’s shocking and contemptible. The lack of empathy itself, while regrettable, isn’t. Empathy is hard. If it wasn’t, peace would be easy. That said, I think there’s something about the empathy question that ties back to the OP, but I don’t have time to articulate it now. If I have a minute later on I’ll come back and finish the thought.
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October 22, 2009, 7:21 pmHarryEagar says:
How about we refight the ’67 war, double or keeps?
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October 22, 2009, 8:15 pmAriel says:
The argument was not intended to be a tu quoque, as you have implied it was. Rather, it was intended to point out the soft bigotry of low expectations — we can’t possibly be expected to hold the Arabs to such a standard, because, in your words, “Israel is better than that.” Arabs are human beings too and I think it’s insulting to them to think that they could not treat people with equal and appropriate respect. In fact, I’d suspect that part of the reason they act in the way they do is that no one expects them to act differently. We have to respect “cultural differences,” and all.
I would not ask the conquered Arab to say hey, my lot is better than their lot would be, if the shoe were on the other foot. Rather, I expect us to be able to ask legitimate questions regarding (1) why our expectations of the parties are different; (2) whether the difference in these expectations is problematic; and (3) if it is not problematic, and we really do believe that the Arabs are savages (or a de minimis version thereof), how we can expect the Israelis to make peace with them.
I think that you’re right that we do have to separate the Jews and Arabs. Where we disagree is where the lines should be. I believe we agree that the Arabs are not the peaceful, happy folks we would like them to be.
You think that the proper response to that is for the Israelis to retreat and give up some land, including the settlements, which you say are illegal. I’m assuming that you believe that the Arabs will be mollified by that peace offering and will learn to live in peace as a result of that. There would be no reason for the Israelis to give up the settlements otherwise, right? Perhaps you might argue that the Israelis would have the psychological benefit of complying with your view of international law, but other than that, there would be no interest for them, is that right?
Here’s the problem with this idea, though. The Arabs are not the peaceful, happy folks we would like them to be. They won’t be appeased by this withdrawal, as they demonstrated in the withdrawal from Lebanon. In Osama’s words, roughly, people see a weak and a strong horse, and they prefer the strong horse. If the Arabs see retreat, they’ll smell blood, and they’ll go forward, not relax.
Let’s say I’m wrong, though, and maybe the Arabs will actually make peace this time. Having seen the withdrawals from Lebanon and Gaza, if you were an Israeli, would you be willing to be on that? This is why I believe that ultimately, some of the settlements are going to become part of Israel. Probably not all, maybe not many, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Israel retained Ariel and the surroundings, and Jerusalem and the surroundings.
My view on the likelihood of Arab interest in peace is probably somewhat like your view on the existence of God. Perhaps we can call it the peace fairy? Or the invisible piece of peace in the sky? More on this later.
Even if you were right at one point regarding Jordan — and I don’t believe you were — Jordan foreswore its claims to the territories in the peace agreement with Israel. If disputed territories offends you, perhaps we can call them unclaimed. The name doesn’t matter, so much as that they do not fit the definition of occupied territories.
Incidentally, it’s not just the Israeli right wing that has characterizes the territories as disputed. Even left wing former Israeli Supreme Court Justices have called them disputed, as have American State Department officials. While it’s great fun to describe this as a fantasy of the Israeli right, there are other folks who’ve held it.
Fair enough, I understand what you’re saying and I apologize.
We disagree on the facts, but I see the difference you’re drawing. Here’s why I disagree — some of the settlements are more or less immediately post-1967, so at most many of the Arabs there have on generation on the Jews. While it may be that some of them have been there for longer, it’s not true for the vast majority of them. The migrants went there because of economic opportunities that were being created. I don’t see that as vastly different from being political pawns in that it was others’ actions that led them to be there, not that they had been there for a long time.
Of course I don’t like the idea of human shields. There are multiple issues here, which we may have conflated. One of them is stopping a tank army from the east. Another is making Israel’s narrowest point less narrow. A final one is keeping the terrorists as separated from the rest as possible. The settlements can help certainly for the middle one, but by doing so also help for the others. It’s not as cold-blooded, or Saddamite as you make it out to be.
The results of the 1967 war gave Israel better title to the land than any other country. The Jordanian cession of their rights made Israel’s title better than any other country’s. By analogy to domestic real property law, your title just needs to be better than anyone else who might challenge it for you to win a trespass action.
Finally, I’d also like to make a point about sky fairies and invisible men in the sky. You’ve been pretty good about calling me out when I’ve gone over the line by asking you questions about transfer. I think that these are similar gratuitous insults that don’t advance the discussion. As ridiculous as you may find it that people believe in invisible men and sky fairies, to some people, that’s an important part of their identity. Ridiculing people’s beliefs may feel good, but it’s insulting and nasty.
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October 22, 2009, 9:12 pmAriel says:
The Egyptians just decided not to allow Israeli doctors to travel to Egypt for a breast cancer confab. And that’s a country where there’s a peace treaty!
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October 22, 2009, 9:35 pmneurodoc says:
Are you Humpty Dumpty, so words mean whatever you say they mean, and it must be “occupied” or “apartheid”? You should read and try to follow the responses of Ariel and yankev to Dilan Espar Dilan is under the misapprehension that before June ’67, the West Bank “belonged” to what had only been Transjordan (one side of the Jordan River) before ’48, when it seized and annexed what had been cis-Jordan (the other side of the Jordan River). Anyway, in your view did Jordan “occupy” the West Bank, territory to which it had no legal claim any other country recognized, though Britain later gave a nod of approval? And in your view did Egypt “occupy” Gaza? Or, the Jordanians and Egyptians weren’t “occupiers,” but Israel is? (“Apartheid” is no more than a baseless canard.)
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October 22, 2009, 11:06 pmYankev says:
The League of Nations Mandate. And UN Sec. Council Resolution 242 says that Israel does not have to withdraw from a single cm sq. of the captured lands until there is a comprehensive peace treaty with internationally recognized borders. I think we can agree that hasn’t happened yet. Until then, Israel is under no legal duty to withdraw. When it does happen (which, given continuing attitudes of the Arabs both within and outside of the former Palestine mandate), Israel is obligated to withdraw from whatever portion of the captured lands the peace settlement calls for, and is entitled to retain the rest. This, according to the Britsh and American diplomats who negotiated 242, is precisely why the resolution says that Israel will withdraw from “lands” rather than “the lands”; the definite article was deliberately omitted because of the tacit recognition that the borders would not be the same as the 1949 armistice lines.
Why, because I used the accepted historic geographic name that appeared on maps of the area consistently through the Jordanian invasion of 1948?
There was a mandate to establish a Jewish homeland, without prejudice to the rights of the indigenous population. Britain ceded well over 50% of that mandate to establish what became Transjordan. Yehuda was in the portion that was left.
Israel’s right is at least equal to that of Jordan, the last state to claim jurisdiction over the area, and which, as Ariel has pointed out, has abandoned jurisdiction over the area.
Ariel, calling a position that of “the Israeli right” has no more to do with the Israeli right than calling something “Likkud” has to do with the position of the Likkud party, or “Neocon” has to do with the neoconservative movement. The terms “settler”, or “religious fanatic” or “Religious right”, “Religious setterl” or “ultra-Orthodox” are often thrown about in similar fashion. Or for that matter, “fascist”, “socialist”, “Nazi”, “racist” or “apartheidt”. During the Contract with America years, “liberal” was used in the same way. It is a rather transparent attempt to discredit a position in advance, as if to say that simply by identifying the position with the boogey man buzz word du jour, one has proven that the position is unworthy of serious consideration.
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October 23, 2009, 10:00 amYankev says:
Sorry. Meant to say
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October 23, 2009, 10:01 amAriel says:
Yankev,
I agree that it’s basically a shoot the messenger tactic. I was trying to point out that it’s not true as a factual matter as well.
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October 23, 2009, 11:53 amYankev says:
Ariel, we don’t disagree and I applaud your pointing out the facts. Sadly, there are some to whome facts do not matter.
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October 23, 2009, 1:06 pmDilan Esper says:
I agree, and my point was that’s because the Palestinians, alone among the four, refused the state that was available. Unlike, say, the Pakistanis, who also had major territorial grievances, but accepted what they considered a flawed state to continue the fight another day, the Palestinians took an absolutist position. They pushed all their chips to the middle of the table, gambling they’d break Israel, without any apparent regard for what would happen if they themselves were broken.
This is too reductive, even though I do agree with the ultimate conclusion (which is that the Palestinians blew it in 1948).
It’s very hard to immediately agree to a solution that involves a bunch of your people either giving up their homes or living as a minority likely to face discrimination in someone else’s ethnicly-identified state. And this was made even harder by the fact that the Arab governments, for their own reasons, offered a lot of support for a war against Israel. And, indeed, the Palestinian strategy could have worked– the Arabs could have won the war and won a state for the Palestinians. This strategy has worked before for other peoples who have taken the gamble.
In other words, what one can say is that in retrospect, this was a huge mistake by the Palestinians. But I don’t think you can say that it was unreasonable at the time. The fact is the entire way that Israel was created surely looked extremely unjust to a Palestinian. (By the way, that also distinguishes this situation from India / Pakistan– in that instance, while the Indians and the Pakistanis had many differences, they also had a common enemy in the British and were willing to accept quite a few compromises on both sides in order to drive the British out. Here the Arab governments were offering the Palestinians a one-state solution if they won the war. That was not on the table for Pakistanis and Indians.)
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October 23, 2009, 2:03 pmDilan Esper says:
Finally, I’d also like to make a point about sky fairies and invisible men in the sky. You’ve been pretty good about calling me out when I’ve gone over the line by asking you questions about transfer. I think that these are similar gratuitous insults that don’t advance the discussion. As ridiculous as you may find it that people believe in invisible men and sky fairies, to some people, that’s an important part of their identity. Ridiculing people’s beliefs may feel good, but it’s insulting and nasty.
Ariel, the point about sky fairies and invisible men in the sky is that it is not a basis for a claim that Israel is entitled to land. You will notice that what I said is that God isn’t in the land grant business.
To clarify, what I mean is that God, if She exists, cannot be a basis for determining who is entitled to live where. And the reason is that nobody who worships a different God, or no God, or the same God but who doesn’t believe She made the land grant, is required to obey that. The entirely proper response of an Arab Muslim (or anyone else) to a Jewish claim that God granted the Holy Land to the Jews is “we don’t give a **** what you believe your God did”.
In other words, when we start getting into claims about how significant the Holy Land is for Jews, you have to understand that they are out of bounds. And “sky fairie” sort of makes that point cleanly– you wouldn’t, for instance, accept that a group of believers in astrology are entitled to live on land just because some ancient astrological text provided that the stars were aligned a certain way and this meant that this land belonged to them. You wouldn’t accept that we have to give all the land back to Native Americans because their religious traditions provided that the gods gave them the land.
In other words, things that nobody knows even exist, whether they be sky fairies or God, have no place in determining the issues surrounding a Middle Eastern peace agreement. That doesn’t mean that observant Jews shouldn’t take their religion seriously. They just have to understand that nonbelievers have no obligation to respect any claims made about land therein.
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October 23, 2009, 2:12 pmDilan Esper says:
The League of Nations Mandate. And UN Sec. Council Resolution 242 says that Israel does not have to withdraw from a single cm sq. of the captured lands until there is a comprehensive peace treaty with internationally recognized borders. I think we can agree that hasn’t happened yet. Until then, Israel is under no legal duty to withdraw.
Yankev, you are confusing occupation and colonization. The occupation is clearly legal under 242 and the general law of war. (The League of Nations Mandate is another matter, as it did not provide any binding language as to how Palestine would be divided and therefore cannot be construed as definitive on the question of the West Bank.)
But you aren’t allowed to colonize occupied territory, for obvious reasons. Israel could annex the West Bank and colonize it to its heart’s content, but it can’t refuse to annex it while colonizing it and granting rights only to the Jews living in the colonies, which is what it is doing.
There was a mandate to establish a Jewish homeland, without prejudice to the rights of the indigenous population. Britain ceded well over 50% of that mandate to establish what became Transjordan.
This is the “Jordan is the Palestinian state” argument. But it is wrong. We are talking about the West Bank, which (1) was given to Jordan anyway in 1948, and (2) had and has Palestinians living on it who are not represented by the Jordanian government. In other words, the question is whether West Bank Palestinians get a state, not whether Jordanians get one. And that was left open by the British and the League of Nations.
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October 23, 2009, 2:18 pmDilan Esper says:
One last thing:
Yankev and Ariel both argue that the ambiguous status of the West Bank makes Israel a logical claimant for the land. This is false– as I said, there isn’t a single valid legal document (and again, the Bible don’t count) that says that Israel is entitled to the West Bank.
But even if it were true, it still gets you back to the annexation question. If the West Bank belongs to Israel, Israel can annex it, as it did with Jerusalem based on a similar claim. Israel doesn’t want to annex it, and as it happens, I don’t want Israel to annex it either. It would mean the end of Jewish Israel.
And as I said, Israel, unlike Ariel and Yankev, is careful to NEVER claim that the West Bank is its territory, precisely because they don’t want to annex it.
But in what universe is “don’t annex, just colonize, and ONLY give the Jewish colonizers any rights of citizenship while withholding those same rights from Arabs who already lived there” a permissible solution? Even if we conceded Israel’s right to colonize the West Bank, doesn’t it still have an obligation to treat everyone who lives there the same way and not give special status to one group based on its ethnic background while subjecting the other group to oppression?
I know a lot of Israel’s supporters hate the term “apartheid”, but when it is used by legitimate people (not anti-semites), this is where it comes from. Because that’s basically what life was like in South Africa– if you were white, you had full citizenship and full rights, but if you were black, you only had a limited set of rights tied to your Bantustan and you were subjected to a series of “pass laws” if you tried to venture into white parts of the country.
In other words, Israel’s claim to the West Bank, even if accepted, can’t lead to the conclusion that Israel gets to create a two-tiered society there where Jews are full citizens and Arabs have few rights.
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October 23, 2009, 2:37 pmYankev says:
Wrong. Go back and look at the partition plan of 1947. The UN set that land aside for a Palestinian state in 1947. Transjordan (now Jordan) invaded illegally invaded it and illegally annexed it.
What? If they had NOT launched a war, the “Palestinians” ( a name that Arabs did not apply to themselves until well after 1948) would have had a state immediateluy. Then as now, the goal of the war was not to gain a state for the Palestinians but to deny one, of whatever size and with whatever borders, to the Jews.
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October 23, 2009, 5:29 pmYankev says:
Dilan, I don’t have time to respond to this right now but your analogy to aparheidt is so flawed as to the nature, source, scope and reason for the restrictions, and the term itself is so emotionally loaded (which is why it is so favored by those who seek a violent end to Israel) that it hinders rather than aids any meaningful analysis of the situation. I can’t speak for Ariel, but that is one reason that yes, I hate the term as misapplied to Israel or the situation in the territories.
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October 23, 2009, 5:36 pmDilan Esper says:
Dilan, I don’t have time to respond to this right now but your analogy to aparheidt is so flawed as to the nature, source, scope and reason for the restrictions, and the term itself is so emotionally loaded (which is why it is so favored by those who seek a violent end to Israel) that it hinders rather than aids any meaningful analysis of the situation. I can’t speak for Ariel, but that is one reason that yes, I hate the term as misapplied to Israel or the situation in the territories.
Yankev, I don’t like the term “apartheid” either, for similar reasons (apartheid was a racist system, and the Israelis are NOT racists and indeed afford a great deal of rights to their Arab citizens). But I am telling you that this is where it comes from. You really can’t have a permanent system of pass laws and separate roads and Jews who get to be citizens of Israel and Arabs who have no rights on the West Bank. That cannot sustain itself, and it certainly is going to look like apartheid to a lot of people.
The way I would put it is it’s a system that is going to subject Israel to a lot of legitimate criticism, and is going to get compared to apartheid. And therefore whatever the final outcome of the Arab-Israeli conflict is going to be, it can’t be that.
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October 23, 2009, 7:28 pmLeo Marvin says:
Dilan,
I agree with you that the West Bank would be a demographic albatross if Israel annexed it, and it’s a moral one if they don’t. I think most Israelis understand that and would gladly be rid of it if they weren’t convinced, with good reason, that passing control to the Palestinians would just propel the West Bank down the same road as Gaza.
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October 25, 2009, 5:14 amAriel says:
It may not have been unreasonable. Let’s even grant that it was reasonable. Or perhaps what any thinking person would do. It doesn’t really matter. The question is not whether their conduct was negligent but whether they should be held accountable for their conduct. They had a choice, and they chose war. They should be held accountable for that choice.
There are many other differences. The British were trying to find a way out, there, unlike the Jews, who were trying to establish a country. Gandhi considered it one of his biggest failings that he couldn’t keep the country united, so it was not a foregone conclusion that the two would separate — that’s a real distinguishing characteristic from the Israeli/Arab situation. Gandhi tried a one-state solution, but there was too much tension. The transfer and partition, while horrible, created a relatively stable situation between the two countries.
Here, you’re arguing against yourself. Neither Yankev nor I have invoked your sky fairy regarding Israel’s right to the land. There may indeed be other people who do invoke the sky fairy. I think there’s a sky fairy basis, but I choose not to argue on that basis for exactly the reasons you enumerated — I don’t think it’s convincing to anyone who doesn’t believe in the sky fairy. So I agree with you on the point that it’s not a good argument — and you’ll note, I haven’t made it.
You’re misconstruing my/our argument. We don’t argue that Israel is “entitled” but rather that Israel has the *best title* to the land. It’s a subtle but important difference. If you’d like, you could view it as Israel holding it in trust for the benefit of a peaceful entity yet to be determined. That’s more accurate than saying that the territories are occupied. If they are occupied, who is the occupier occupying? There’s no predecessor state with a claim to be had.
You’re putting the cart before the horse. Those pass laws, checkpoints, and separate roads did not spring up, whole, because Jews are just mean and nasty people. They did not spring up because Jews wanted to keep the Arabs down. They sprang up as a reaction to the Palestinian choice to go to war in 2000.
I appreciate that it seems like apartheid to separate Jews and Palestinians. Again, though, I think it’s a matter of accountability. The Palestinian chose war, so the Israelis tried to make it the least impactful on their people possible. Over a longer term, some people may misguidedly argue that it’s apartheid but I don’t remember the black South Africans donning suicide bombs and exploding among children.
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October 25, 2009, 8:36 am