Dershowitz vs. Phillips—Obama & the Settlements

You Can’t Have It Both Ways...Dershowitz vs. Phillips

by Gerald A. Honigman

FrontPageMagaine.com always has interesting stuff--whether you agree with it or not.

Friday July 24th’s Symposium featured a debate between two respected defenders of Israel, Melanie Phillips and Alan Dershowitz.

Back in the ‘70s, I recall a major event at Ohio State University at which Harvard’s Professor Dershowitz was invited to debate a fellow National Lawyers Guild (NLG) colleague at OSU’s law school, Professor John Quigley.

Quigley was/is a well-known anti-Israel (as in its very existence) spokesman who made the rounds spouting such wisdom as “if Jews can have a state, why not Catholics?” I know...I followed him several times to nail his derriere in public.

Now let’s understand something...

The NLG is universally described as a “Progressive/Leftist” organization. Today, that translates into blatantly anti-Israel as well. So, members like Dershowitz have a very hard time dealing with such membership. “Liberal” today isn’t what our grandparents’ “Liberal” was. But, it’s still hard for some to digest that, for too many, today’s “Liberal” is too often also an extreme Leftist, minimally anti-Zionist, and often a closet or open anti-Semite as well.

Before going any further, I don’t need anyone explaining to me the need to care for others. I get that from my own Judaic roots (the Torah, Hebrew Prophets, and so forth) and my own sense of justice G_d thankfully instilled in me. So, I don’t require lectures from the likes of NLG folks.

Now, Dershowitz did not debate Quigly. I seem to recall that the latter refused to engage him. So, someone else was called in for the debate instead. The audience was huge, and the substitute was mediocre.

Okay--enough of a background...

Dershowitz makes some good points as does Phillips in their writings and in their debate; however, there is no doubt that the esteemed Lady has a greater grasp of the realities which Israel faces.

Yet both--Dershowitz far more than Phillips--seem to miss perhaps the key point related to their debate over settlements’ issue and President Obama’s opposition to them.

Paying mere lip service to UNSC Resolution 242 without acknowledging the link between the settlements issue and it is useless.  And that’s exactly what Dershowitz routinely does.

I don’t know for sure, but I’d guess that the good professor may have to travel farther to go from his nice, safe home to work than the state of Israel is in width according to the ‘49 armistice lines imposed upon it in 1949. Most of those lines were merely the points at which the hostilities stopped after about a half dozen Arab armies attacked the nascent Israeli state in 1948. As would become the pattern, the U.N. did nothing to stop the initial Arab aggression, but stepped in only after the Jews had turned the tide to minimize Arab losses.

As has been repeated often, after the Arabs’ renewed attempt at Israel’s destruction backfired badly in June 1967, the much-debated final draft of UNSC Resolution 242 was worded in such a deliberate, precise way as to permit Israel to finally gain secure, defensible, and real borders instead of what has been called the “Auschwitz"/armistice lines which made it nine to sixteen miles wide at its strategic waist, where most of its population and industry are located, that it had prior to then. The latter were just a constant invitation to Arabs to cut the country in half in some future combined assault.

The quotes below have also been presented frequently to make the point. Nevertheless, they have to be resurrected time and again to answer those who demand that the sole, miniscule state of the Jews ignore its own minimal, vital security interests for the sake of creating a twenty-second state for Arabs (and second one in the original 1920 borders of the Palestine Mandate-- Jordan having been created from almost 80% of the total land in 1922).

A reading of Lord Caradon, Eugene Rostow, Arthur Goldberg, and other architects of 242 clearly shows that after the June ‘67 war Israel was not expected to return to the deadly and absurd status quo ante.

Britain’s Lord Caradon...

“It would have been wrong to demand that Israel return to its positions of June 4, 1967, because those positions were undesirable and artificial. After all, they were just the places where the soldiers of each side happened to be on the day the fighting stopped in 1948. They were just armistice lines. That’s why we didn’t demand that the Israelis return to them.”

President Lyndon Johnson summarized the situation this way on June 19, 1967:

“ A return to the situation on June 4 (the day before outbreak of war) was not a prescription for peace but for renewed hostilities.” He then called for “new recognized boundaries that would provide security against terror, destruction, and war.”

Johnson was then backed up by General Earle Wheeler of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and many others as well. Here’s a brief excerpt from Wheeler’s Pentagon document prepared for Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara on June 29, 1967:

“...Israel would require retention of some captured Arab territory to provide militarily defensible borders.”

Keep in mind that on the West Bank, Israel took these lands in a defensive war from an illegal occupant--Transjordan--which subsequently renamed itself Jordan as a result of its 1949 illegal acquisition of non-apportioned lands of the original 1920 Mandate west of the Jordan River that Jews as well as Arabs were legally entitled to live on. Indeed, Jews have thousands of years of history connecting them to these lands and owned property and lived there up until their massacres by Arabs in the 1920s and 1930s. Additionally, many, if not most, of the Arabs themselves were also relative newcomers, pouring in--as the Records of the Permanent Mandates Commission and other documentation show--from Syria, Egypt, and elsewhere in the region.

Once again utilizing Ambassador Dore Gold’s useful summary, here’s what President Ronald Reagan had to say about all of this on September 1, 1982:

“In the pre-1967 borders, Israel was barely 10-miles wide...the bulk of Israel’s population within artillery range of hostile armies. I am not about to ask Israel to live that way again.”

In 1988, Secretary of State George Shultz declared, “Israel will never negotiate from or return to the 1967 borders.”

And even in the 1990s, during the Clinton years (and despite the later pressure brought to bear on Prime Minister Ehud Barak to sweetin’ the pot by offering Arafat far more than 242 called for at Camp David and Taba in 2000), official policy, as expressed by Secretary of State Warren Christopher in 1997, was still that, “Israel is entitled to secure and defensible borders,” a la 242.

The point, of course, is that to take a brush under the rug approach to this crucial issue as Dershowtiz and other “Progressive” supporters of Israel do (other nations have acquired territories far away from home in the name of their own national security interests, let alone Israel, which has historic claims itself to the lands in question and which has been repeatedly attacked from those lands) is to not understand the fundamental importance of the settlements issue now on center stage.

Regardless of the religious argument for Judea and Samaria (i.e., the West Bank), if that didn’t exist, the vision of an Israel finally seeing the travesty of the ‘49 armistice lines rectified demands the creation of those very settlements which are at issue now.

Most, if not all, of the settlements are built on the very high ground areas envisioned and permitted by 242 to create the buffer to give Israel those relatively secure, defensible borders to help protect the heartland of the Jewish State.

Will Arabs “recognize” this--as is also stated in 242?

Of course not...They don’t recognize a Jewish State that is nine-miles wide, let alone anything bigger.

But Israel can’t wait for Arab recognition from either an Arafatian Abbas or Hamas that will never come before it acts. It must draw its final lines which represent a reasonable territorial compromise a la 242 and progress and set policy from there--regardless of the flack that it will surely catch from the assorted worldwide hypocrites and practitioners of the double standard.

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Their Time Is Now...

Hallelujah...It’s About Time!

by Gerald A. Honigman

Finally, at long last, another native people, besides Arabs, is staking its claims to a slice of the justice pie in the Middle East--a region proclaimed by Arabs to be solely their own, despite the presence of scores of millions of native, non-Arab peoples in those lands.

A story by Sam Dagher in the July 10th New York Times reported that Kurds were going ahead staking claims to the huge fossil fuel deposits sitting under land in northern Iraq on which they have lived for thousands of years before an Arab ever arrived there. It was land promised to Kurds as an independent state after World War I, but was aborted on behalf of Arab nationalism in collusion with British petroleum politics--especially after the League of Nations’ Mosul decision in 1925. A united, Arab-dominated Iraq arose instead in the British Mandate of Mesopotamia, with the oil of the Kurdish north attached to it. The British miltary helped suppress the Kurds’ response to this.

As I have written for years now, while the dreams of a viable, federal Iraq looked good on paper, in reality, they were most probably merely American pipedreams--as well-intentioned as they were.

Long ago, Arab nationalism won out over a multi-ethnic Iraqi nationalism in the land, and hundreds of thousands of Kurds have been slaughtered by Arabs. Arabs have spoken of any Kurdish independence as the creation of another Israel; i.e., how dare anyone but themselves stake any political claim in the region.  Keep in mind that one half of Israel’s Jews were refugees from so-called “Arab"/Muslim lands.

The Times reported that Susan Shihab, a member of Kurdistan’s parliament, said she no longer had faith that the rights of Kurds under the federal constitution from 2005 would be respected.

She has a lot of company in this line of thought--including anyone who has objectively followed the quest of non-Arab peoples for any semblance of respect and equality in “Arab” lands.

Berbers in North Africa are now being told that they must name their children with Arab/Islamic names, and both they and Syrian Kurds are not even allowed to use their own non-Arab languages --as just a few of too many other examples of this blatant Arab racism. And the same United Nations still having hissy fits over Israel’s security fence (designed to keep Arabs from murdering its kids), continues to act deaf, dumb, and blind about the Arab subjugation of tens of millions of non-Arab peoples.

The West and the current and last several American administrations in particular are and have been determined to create the Arabs’ state #22, their second one in the original 1920 Palestine Mandate. Jordan was created from the lions’ share of the land after 1922.

That that new Arab state, run by Mahmud Abbas and his “moderate” Fatah, will no doubt be hostile to its tiny Jewish neighbor and sees “negotiations” only in terms of its earlier, openly-professed Trojan Horse and destruction-in-phases scenario planned for Israel is a given.  Hamas, to its credit, is simply more honest and won’t even indulge in word games regarding the acceptance or rejection of Israel.

Despite this, the world is intent on shoving what will likely be yet another Arab terror base down Israel’s throat--but this time, Tel Aviv, Israel’s Parliament, main airport, main seaport, Jerusalem, most of its population in its narrow nine to fifteen mile wide waist, and so forth will become the main Arab targets (this time courtesy of American arms)--not more remote areas like Sderot in the south, after Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza several years ago. Recall the ten thousand rockets and mortars launched from Gaza against Israeli civilian centers after that withdrawal. There’s a lesson to be learned from that by anyone with functioning neurons...

Unlike Arabs vis-a-vis “their” kilab yahud Jew dogs, Kurds don’t want to deprive Arabs of their own just, due rights and have never terrorized Arabs. The problem has always been that most Arabs define their rights in terms which negate any at all for everybody else.

Where, for example, is it written that Arabs are entitled to have sole claim, with the exception of Iran, over all of the region’s fossil fuel deposits?

The oil in the region around Kirkuk sits on Kurdish land. It is as Kurdish as the Arabian Peninsula’s is Arab. That Saddam and his Sunnis forcibly Arabized the area earlier did not change this.

The Kurds have learned their lessons from the not-so-distant past regarding America, the Brits, and their Arab neighbors. Both the Brits and America used and abused Kurds repeatedly for their own interests--then abandoned them to Arabs who slaughtered them en masse soon afterwards.

Shi’a Arabs have recently been more tolerant towards Kurds than their Sunni counterparts because they needed Kurds as a counterweight to Sunnis who repeatedly blow the Shi’a apart. But, thanks to America’s overthrow of Saddam, the Shi’a are now in the ascendancy, and they too have no intention of granting any non-Arabs their just due. Kurds know this, and hence the current developments as reported in The New York Times.

If the world’s roadmap insists that Arabs must have a 22nd state, then it is certainly well overdue for thirty-five million truly stateless Kurds to at long last gain their one.

Anything less--despite the potential problems (and there won’t be problems creating a latter-day Arafatian Fatahland or Hamastan?)--will be sheer, nauseating hypocrisy.

On January 5, 2010, my book dealing with this overall topic will be released for the new book year. It is titled, The Quest For Justice...The Arab-Israeli Conflict In Greater Perspective.

Please watch for it. It is not just another book about the Middle East.

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