Defund, Denounce, Deport, Disarm, Disband!
Posted on 03/21/2002 2:09:33 PM PST by anapikoros
A redefinition of the Middle East conflict occurred last week when Secretary General Kofi Annan of the United Nations called Israel's occupation of lands acquired in the 1967 Six Day War "illegal." A new and provocative label of "illegality" is now out of the chute and running loose, ready to wreak damage. The worst prospect is that Palestinians will dig in with a new feeling of righteousness and believe that the international community will force Israel to withdraw from its "illegal occupation."
In Middle Eastern politics, memory enables each side to nurture its grievances but there is little collective memory that might facilitate negotiations on the basis of shared assumptions. Few seem to care anymore that the 1967 war was a war of self-defense for Israel or that United Nations Security Council Resolution 242 referred to withdrawal from "territories" rather than from "the territories" — a crucial distinction that shows that the resolution does not necessarily require withdrawal from all of the land occupied in 1967. In this time of crisis and forgetfulness, using the term "illegal" is destructive and dangerous. For the uninformed, the discussion will start with the secretary general's labeling of the occupation as a violation of law.
Later Security Council resolutions — numbered 446, 452 and 465 — do indeed condemn Israel's policy of building settlements in the occupied territories and declare that these settlements have "no legal validity." Yet these rebukes against Israeli policy were about the settlements — not about the legality of the occupation. And even then, the Security Council stopped short of actually saying that all settlements are illegal. Some of the settlements might be acceptable under the language of Resolution 242, which recognizes that Israel has the right to live within "secure and recognized boundaries."....... article continues here
Never mind the fact that about 3/4 of the governments represented in that august body, the United Nations, are "illegal" themselves...
They won the war. They were wrongly attacked. They hold territory won in that war that they need to better protect themselves from future attacks from those who rabidly hate them and desire to bring about their utter extermination.
Maybe there was some resolution in the UN that technically made Israel's occupancy of this land illegal (by a political body naturally repugnant to natural law), but I'm not aware of it. If someone knows something I don't, I'd appreciate being brought up to speed.
It's so ridiculous to hear any spokesperson of the UN carping about "legitimacy" or "legality." MOST of the representatives in the so-called General Assembly are from dictatorships or totalitarian regimes.
The Town Council of Nashua, New Hampshire has more moral authority than the entire body of the UN, as far as I'm concerned.
I'm very tired of hearing conservatives characterized as self-serving and incompassionate. We're anything but. We are the voice of reason amid a cacophony of mindless rhetoric, struggling always to undo the hateful and moronic indoctrination of the American and the world populations, to wake everyone up to reality.
And I daresay, we're the first to sacrifice for the greater good. I'm proud to be a conservative and proud that so many of my fellow Americans remain so today.
Defund, Denounce, Deport, Disarm, Disband!
UN resolutions are not International Law. If the Pali's thought they had a case (that the "occupation" is illegal) they would have long ago bought it before the World Court.
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