Former Palestinian Authority security chief: Gazans not under siege, not lacking anything

But I thought the Gazans were starving and living in the rubble of bombed out buildings, and were under daily attack by evil Zionists...So now we find out they are not lacking anything...but are under siege from Hamas...Uh huh, so it's not evil Zionists abusing these poor people...They are abusing themselves by electing Hamas to power to begin with...but at least they are abused on a full stomach...Allah thinks of everything...

Mr.'Dahlan seems to have made an incredibly forthright commentary.' one might almost guess him to be a "moderate Muslim"(????)

I would be curios what might come out from a conversation between him and Mr. Spencer about the prospects for future developments in the Middle East?

Respectfully yours, TS

Mr.'Dahlan seems to have made an incredibly forthright commentary.' one might almost guess him to be a "moderate Muslim"(????)

I would be curios what might come out from a conversation between him and Mr. Spencer about the prospects for future developments in the Middle East?

Respectfully yours, TS

Palestinians expose "Gaza Flotilla" lies about food aid and "Humanitarian Crisis"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3smJH8jb6M&feature=share

Fitzgerald: Occupation? What occupation?

Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald discusses the tendentious claims that Israel is maintaining an illegal "occupation" of Palestinian land -- claims evidently believed by the President of the United States:

A poster at Jihad Watch recently recommended that readers here acquire “knowledge of the day to day lives of the Palestinians and their experience under occupation."
"Occupation"? What "occupation"? All the territories the Israelis now possess are theirs by legal right -- the right conferred by the League of Nations Mandates Commission, when it carefully defined the territory which would be set aside, from the vast territories in the Middle East that had formerly been in the control of the Ottoman Turks as part of their empire, and which had been won by the Allies. An Arab State, a Kurdish State, and a Jewish state were all promised. The Arabs got their state -- no, in the end, they got far more than their state but rather, in 2005, 22 members of the Arab League, the most richly endowed with natural resources of any states on earth, enjoying the fruits of the greatest transfer of wealth in human history The Kurds did not get their state, because by the time things had settled, Kemal Ataturk was driving a hard bargain and would not permit it. The Jews got the Mandate for Palestine set up for the express purpose of establishing the Jewish National Home, which would inexorably become, all parties realized, in time a Jewish state. It did not seem wrong then, and does not seem wrong now, that the Jews should have a state of their own. They asked only for the right to have no barriers put up to their immigration, and no barriers put in the way of their buying land. That was it. That was the sum total of what they demanded. Until the 1948 war, when five Arab armies attacked, not a single dunam of Arab-owned land (and remember that nearly 90% of the land, in any case, remained the possession of the state or the ruling authority, as in the Mandatory period) was appropriated. No one should dare to write about this subject without having done the research on demography, land ownership, and law.

The Israeli claim to the West Bank (as Judea and Samaria were carefully renamed by Jordan after 1948, in precisely the same way, and for the same reason, that the Romans, nearly two thousand years before, had renamed Judea as "Palestine" and Jerusalem as Aelia Capitolina) is not that of a military occupier, though it is also that. The main legal and historic claim is that based on the League of Nations Mandate, which in turn, was based on a considerable historic and moral claim recognized by the educated leaders of the then-civilized world, who actually knew something of the history of the area, and were not nearly as misinformed as so many have been by the mass media, and the laziness and prejudice of journalists today.
The notion of "occupation" of course evokes imagines of Occupied Paris, or Occupied Berlin, after the war. It implies no justification for the claims of the power with the military presence. But the claim of Israel to the lands it took in 1967 are based, for the Sinai, on the standard rules of post-war settlement, the rules which have obtained for centuries, whereby a victor in a war of defense keeps what he has won. If the Israelis chose not to, or were forced not to exercise that right, it does not mean that the right did not exist. It did, and it applies even more forcefully to Gaza and the West Bank. But the claim there is not based merely on the successful conquest of territory to which otherwise Israel had no claim. It did have a claim, a claim based clearly on the Mandate for Palestine -- and like all the other League of Nations Mandates, was formally accepted, taken over as it were, by the United Nations when it came into being. This is a matter of record. It cannot be undone.

Whatever else one wishes to say about the West Bank or Gaza, the word "occupation" is a tendentious, and cruel, misnomer. What it seeks to imply, what it seeks to implant in the minds of men, is clear: Israel has no rights here. This is nonsense. This is the very reverse of the truth. Read the Mandate, and the Preamble to the Mandate, for Palestine. Then read the records of the Mandates Commission -- and especially how they reacted when the British unilaterally announced that the terms of the mandate would not be applied to Eastern Palestine -- that is, the consolation prize given to Abdullah of the Emirate of Transjordan.

Read it, and understand it.

Posted by Hugh on October 21, 2005 7:33 AM| 61 Comments

"...a pro-Hamas Sudanese minister who visited Gaza recently told him that he wished that Sudan had as much basic goods as the Strip...."

And whose fault is the lack of goods in Sudan? Or is he "wishing" and "hoping" that Sudan can get on the list of UN welfare states.

Sudan tried to "help" the people of Gaza by bringing some to Sudan and building houses for them, for which effort they were given money by the UN, just as they are for Ethiopian refugees. Not sure why, but the Gaza people went home after a while. Maybe they didn't like it there, or maybe they behaved badly and were sent home: does anyone here know?

This will help those who want to understand the political rights granted by the mandate, in trust, to vest when the Jews in Palestine had attained a population majority. In 1917, while the Jews had had a plurality of the population since 1845, and a majority since 1863, they were only 60,000 out of 600,000 population in all of Palestine that was the subject being considered for the grant of political or national rights at that time. The opponents of the Balfour policy, that was adopted by the WWI Allies at San Remo in April, 1920 and dignified as International Law, claimed that it would be antidemocratic for a ten percent minority to have sovereignty over a population of 600,000. Were they wrong? I don't think so. Look what happened in Syria where the French gave sovereignty to a small minority of Alewites. So, the question was how to give the Jews political rights over Palestine and not create an antidemocratic government? The answer was provided on June 19, 1917, a couple of months before the Balfour Declaration was published. It was in the form of a memorandum of the British foreign Office. It was written by Arnold Toynbee, later an antisemite, and Lewis Namier. It agreed with the "antidemocratic" argument in principle, but said that as the grant of political rights would be applied in the Balfour Policy, the argument was "imaginary". That is because the political or national rights, i.e. the rights of self government, of political self determination, were to be given to the Jews in trust, not to vest until the Jews had attained a population majority in Palestine. England and America were named as possible trustees. That this prediction was carried out was later contirmed in London after WWI by Winston Churchill, and by the former Prime Minister at the time of the Balfour Declaration, David Lloyd-George who said it at the Paris Peace Conference. I have heretofore written up all of this in a two part op ed printed in a very conservative newspaper published in Israel. You can find it at: Part 1: http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/11408
Part 2: http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/11412

So the Balfour Plan was a two step procedure. First a National Home while the immigration from the diaspora was going on intended to give the Jews a population majority in Palestine. Then a reconstituted Jewish state when the government would no longer be antidemocratic and had established unified control and the ability to carry out a stable government. This is much like the two step procedure currently being considered by the Arabs for Palestine. First establish a government in part of Palestine West of the Jordan River, and then use it to take over all of it, the so called "Greater Goal". The Greater Goal of the Balfour Declaration was a Jewish state but the immediate goal was a National Home with the tacit condition that it would become a state when population majority was achieved. However the trustee, England, abandoned its trust in 1948, before this occurred. Nevertheless, by 1950, the Jews had attained a population majority in the area it occupied under the Armistice Agreement. And its assertion of Independence in 1948 had been approved by the UN.