An Illegal Arab Settlement in the West Bank?

zhRvN.AuSt.91Another illegal settlement has arisen in the Judea-Samaria (West Bank) territories, the New York Times reports. Surely there will soon be an expression of “deep concern” from the Obama administration, a furious resolution from the United Nations Security Council, and a letter from twelve angry congressmen mobilized by J Street.

Oh, wait. It’s not a Jewish settlement — it’s an Arab settlement. Cancel the outrage!

A feature article in the New York Times on August 31 reports that the Palestinian Authority is building a new settlement called Rawabi. The first 600 apartments are already complete, out of a projected 6,000 units that will house an estimated 40,000 people.

While Jewish communities in the same area, with even larger populations, are called “settlements” by the Times and the rest of the world news media, Rawabi is for some reason characterized as a “town” and a “city.”

Why is one man’s community called a “settlement” and another’s a “town” ?

Because a “settlement” sounds like a foreign implant — something that has no business being there. A “town” sounds normal and natural. Supporters of the Palestinian cause — whether in the news media, the State Department, or misnamed “peace” groups — want to award Judea and Samaria to the Palestinian Arabs. They want everyone to recognize those territories to be “Palestinian.”

The problem they face is that there are three significant obstacles to calling the territories “Palestinian”:  international law, history, and a text of religious history called the Bible.

According to international law, Jews have at least as much right as Arabs to build towns in Judea and Samaria. All of the documents related to the governing of those territories throughout the past century — the Balfour Declaration, the League of Nations Mandate, and so on–specifically endorse the right of Jews to build there. The territories have never been part of a “Palestinian” state which made them legally off-limits to Jews.

And according to the historical record, Judea and Samaria belong to the Jews. That’s why they have been called “Judea and Samaria” since ancient times. The Jews had a sovereign state there for nearly a thousand years, then maintained a continuous presence for the past 3,000 years. Arab roots in the area are remarkably shallow: the vast majority of the Arab residents are the children or grandchildren of migrants from Arab countries who immigrated when the Jews began developing the land in the 1920s and 1930s. The local Arabs traditionally called themselves “southern Syrians” and never claimed any separate “Palestinian” identity until they began using it as a propaganda weapon against Israel in the 1960s.

Tens of millions of Bible believing Christians in America, and many more around the world, join millions of Jews in acknowledging that the Bible repeatedly and unambiguously refers to Judea and Samaria as the heart of the Jewish national homeland. As birth certificates go, that’s pretty strong.

That’s a lot for proponents of the Palestinian cause to overcome. Some of them have used terrorism to try to intimidate Israel into withdrawing. Some have used threats of boycotts and international isolation to frighten the Israeli public and its Diaspora supporters.

And some use the weapon of language to subtly wage war, wielding labels and slogans and assumptions as rhetorical swords to slash their opponents. Exhibit A: The illegal settlement of Rawabi.

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  • http://www.myrightword.blogspot.com Yisrael Medad

    and the term for “settlers” is revenants. http://yisraelmedad.wordpress.com/2006/01/23/revenant-is-relevant/

    • Lightbringer

      Your wordplay in the cited post is great! Thanks for the link.

  • StanleyT

    “According to international law, Jews have at least as much right as Arabs to build towns in Judea and Samaria. ”
    Actually, this statement is not true, and you prove it with your very next sentences. Jews do not have “at least as much right as Arabs”. They clearly have far more rights than the Arabs when it comes to this issue.

    • marlene

      SPOT ON – the land belongs to the Jews. What this anti-israel international law really means: jews have the least right to build towns in arab judea and samaria. it’s obvious that their meaning is to make it clear and accepted for arabs to build on disputed land (disputed by arabs) by saying the jews can too. israeli doesn’t need the lousy internatiional anti-israel community to tell it where they can and can’t build on its own land. like dogs, the arabs mark their spots by peeing on it. ie: what they did to gaza.

      • Vinegar Hill

        marlene…..it is not anti-israeli it is international law…..you don’t seem to understand the meaning of international.

    • Gee

      You are correct and preventing Jews from building and living there is APARTHEID. Something the US, EU, Arabs and UN approve of so long as it is Jews that are being discriminated.

      • Vinegar Hill

        Yes Gee, black is white….

    • Vinegar Hill

      StanleyT…really!!!!!!?????

  • marlene

    we should be outraged since we paid for it.

  • Bert

    No amount of facts, truth or justice will change any minds among Israels enemies and critics. The leadership of Israel, with minuscule exceptions, is corrupt, craven and debased and fear to claim their just rights. They hover between secular and atheist, racked with fear of what the gentiles will think. Barely one Jew of faith in that entire government. The Arabs are strong with boldness and conviction in their cause which includes expulsion or destruction of all Jews in “Palestine” which they boldly proclaim is 100% theirs. Naturally when Arabs build more cities inside Israel to become more zones to exclude Jews the Netanyahu government gets a phone call from Obama to stand down and Netanyahu always caves in. In this manner the Israelis and their faithless government again act to insure that there will be more wars and more Jews murdered. The key question is whether or not they will ever learn.

    • Vinegar Hill

      They will never learn and the end is nigh!

  • Well Done

    All non-Israeli Arabs in the “west bank” and in Gaza, are illegal. They are squatting in Israel. They are the descendants of subsistence farmers who were renting the land. It was never theirs and there was never a country called “palestine”.

    • Vinegar Hill

      Why do you say that? Why do you not offer evidence to support what you write? Perhaps you can’t!

      • DaveGinOly

        In the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, European Jews bought much of the land that later became Israel from its owners, mostly wealthy Egyptians. The “Palestinians” were workers on the land – they never owned it (at least didn’t own those portions purchased by Jews), and never had a nation-state there, or anywhere else for that matter.

        • Vinegar Hill

          I think you have diverted slightly from what was originally said. The Israeli occupation of the West Bank is illegal. See my original comment to which I have yet to receive a response.
          Regarding what you wrote I agree that some Jews bought land in Palestine before the state of Israel was established. I also agree that neither the Jews or the Palestinians had a nation-state during the time period you refer to but I would argue that the Palestinians have a stronger claim to the land which was taken from them by the Zionists/Jews. Part of what I have stated can be confirmed by my references above in my earlier posting.

  • Well Done

    Yes, just about 90% of the world’s trouble areas involve Islam, and most of those involve Islam claiming another country’s land as “moslem soil”. Ask India about all that. “Hindu Kush” means “dead Hindus”; India was fighting Islamist imperialism before America was even called America.

    • Gee

      Muslims were kidnapping and enslaving Americans before the US gained it’s independence

  • Gee

    Last sentence you can lose the probably.

  • Vinegar Hill

    The author claims that Jews have a right , according to “international law” to build settlements in the West Bank. They also refer to the Balfour Declaration, the League Mandate etc. in supporting this claim. This is totally false. The judges of the ICJ have declared this act as totally illegal. A judge of the IDF has declared this act as illegal. The BD and the Mandate have no legal authority giving Jews the “right” top build in the WB.

  • Lightbringer

    Very good article, gentlemen. You have written a concise, well-reasoned piece. It would be nice if you could find it a home with wider circulation.

  • Vinegar Hill

    If you go to the web pages of the ICJ and the ICC at lot of your questions will be answered about international law. I hope that helps.