Orwell's Nineteen-Eighty-Four - Themes, Motifs, & Symbols

http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/1984/themes.html

George Orwell's Nineteen-Eighty-Four
Themes, Motifs & Symbols

Themes

Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work.

The Dangers of Totalitarianism

1984 is a political novel written with the purpose of warning readers in the West of the dangers of totalitarian government.

Having witnessed firsthand the horrific lengths to which totalitarian governments in Spain and Russia would go in order to sustain and increase their power, Orwell designed 1984 to sound the alarm in Western nations still unsure about how to approach the rise of communism. In 1949, the Cold War had not yet escalated, many American intellectuals supported communism, and the state of diplomacy between democratic and communist nations was highly ambiguous.

In the American press, the Soviet Union was often portrayed as a great moral experiment. Orwell, however, was deeply disturbed by the widespread cruelties and oppressions he observed in communist countries, and seems to have been particularly concerned by the role of technology in enabling oppressive governments to monitor and control their citizens.

In 1984, Orwell portrays the perfect totalitarian society, the most extreme realization imaginable of a modern-day government with absolute power. The title of the novel was meant to indicate to its readers in 1949 that the story represented a real possibility for the near future: if totalitarianism were not opposed, the title suggested, some variation of the world described in the novel could become a reality in only thirty-five years.

Orwell portrays a state in which government monitors and controls every aspect of human life to the extent that even having a disloyal thought is against the law. As the novel progresses, the timidly rebellious Winston Smith sets out to challenge the limits of the Party’s power, only to discover that its ability to control and enslave its subjects dwarfs even his most paranoid conceptions of its reach.

As the reader comes to understand through Winston’s eyes, The Party uses a number of techniques to control its citizens, each of which is an important theme of its own in the novel. These include:

Psychological Manipulation

The Party barrages its subjects with psychological stimuli designed to overwhelm the mind’s capacity for independent thought. The giant telescreen in every citizen’s room blasts a constant stream of propaganda designed to make the failures and shortcomings of the Party appear to be triumphant successes. The telescreens also monitor behavior—everywhere they go, citizens are continuously reminded, especially by means of the omnipresent signs reading “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU,” that the authorities are scrutinizing them.

The Party undermines family structure by inducting children into an organization called the Junior Spies, which brainwashes and encourages them to spy on their parents and report any instance of disloyalty to the Party.

The Party also forces individuals to suppress their sexual desires, treating sex as merely a procreative duty whose end is the creation of new Party members. The Party then channels people’s pent-up frustration and emotion into intense, ferocious displays of hatred against the Party’s political enemies. Many of these enemies have been invented by the Party expressly for this purpose.

Physical Control

In addition to manipulating their minds, the Party also controls the bodies of its subjects. The Party constantly watches for any sign of disloyalty, to the point that, as Winston observes, even a tiny facial twitch could lead to an arrest. A person’s own nervous system becomes his greatest enemy.

The Party forces its members to undergo mass morning exercises called the Physical Jerks, and then to work long, grueling days at government agencies, keeping people in a general state of exhaustion.

Anyone who does manage to defy the Party is punished and “reeducated” through systematic and brutal torture. After being subjected to weeks of this intense treatment, Winston himself comes to the conclusion that nothing is more powerful than physical pain—no emotional loyalty or moral conviction can overcome it.

By conditioning the minds of their victims with physical torture, the Party is able to control reality, convincing its subjects that 2 + 2 = 5.

Control of Information and History

The Party controls every source of information, managing and rewriting the content of all newspapers and histories for its own ends. The Party does not allow individuals to keep records of their past, such as photographs or documents. As a result, memories become fuzzy and unreliable, and citizens become perfectly willing to believe whatever the Party tells them.

By controlling the present, the Party is able to manipulate the past. And in controlling the past, the Party can justify all of its actions in the present.

Technology

By means of telescreens and hidden microphones across the city, the Party is able to monitor its members almost all of the time. Additionally, the Party employs complicated mechanisms (1984 was written in the era before computers) to exert large-scale control on economic production and sources of information, and fearsome machinery to inflict torture upon those it deems enemies.

1984 reveals that technology, which is generally perceived as working toward moral good, can also facilitate the most diabolical evil.

Language as Mind Control

One of Orwell’s most important messages in 1984 is that language is of central importance to human thought because it structures and limits the ideas that individuals are capable of formulating and expressing.

If control of language were centralized in a political agency, Orwell proposes, such an agency could possibly alter the very structure of language to make it impossible to even conceive of disobedient or rebellious thoughts, because there would be no words with which to think them.

This idea manifests itself in the language of Newspeak, which the Party has introduced to replace English. The Party is constantly refining and perfecting Newspeak, with the ultimate goal that no one will be capable of conceptualizing anything that might question the Party’s absolute power.

Interestingly, many of Orwell’s ideas about language as a controlling force have been modified by writers and critics seeking to deal with the legacy of colonialism.

During colonial times, foreign powers took political and military control of distant regions and, as a part of their occupation, instituted their own language as the language of government and business.

Postcolonial writers often analyze or redress the damage done to local populations by the loss of language and the attendant loss of culture and historical connection.

Motifs

Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, and literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes.

Doublethink

The idea of “doublethink” emerges as an important consequence of the Party’s massive campaign of large-scale psychological manipulation. Simply put, doublethink is the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in one’s mind at the same time.

As the Party’s mind-control techniques break down an individual’s capacity for independent thought, it becomes possible for that individual to believe anything that the Party tells them, even while possessing information that runs counter to what they are being told.

At the Hate Week rally, for instance, the Party shifts its diplomatic allegiance, so the nation it has been at war with suddenly becomes its ally, and its former ally becomes its new enemy. When the Party speaker suddenly changes the nation he refers to as an enemy in the middle of his speech, the crowd accepts his words immediately, and is ashamed to find that it has made the wrong signs for the event.

In the same way, people are able to accept the Party ministries’ names, though they contradict their functions: the Ministry of Plenty oversees economic shortages, the Ministry of Peace wages war, the Ministry of Truth conducts propaganda and historical revisionism, and the Ministry of Love is the center of the Party’s operations of torture and punishment.

Urban Decay

Urban decay proves a pervasive motif in 1984. The London that Winston Smith calls home is a dilapidated, rundown city in which buildings are crumbling, conveniences such as elevators never work, and necessities such as electricity and plumbing are extremely unreliable.

Though Orwell never discusses the theme openly, it is clear that the shoddy disintegration of London, just like the widespread hunger and poverty of its inhabitants, is due to the Party’s mismanagement and incompetence.

One of the themes of 1984, inspired by the history of twentieth-century communism, is that totalitarian regimes are viciously effective at enhancing their own power and miserably incompetent at providing for their citizens. The grimy urban decay in London is an important visual reminder of this idea, and offers insight into the Party’s priorities through its contrast to the immense technology the Party develops to spy on its citizens.

Symbols

Symbols are objects, characters, figures, and colors used to represent abstract ideas or concepts.

Big Brother

Throughout London, Winston sees posters showing a man gazing down over the words “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU” everywhere he goes. Big Brother is the face of the Party. The citizens are told that he is the leader of the nation and the head of the Party, but Winston can never determine whether or not he actually exists.

In any case, the face of Big Brother symbolizes the Party in its public manifestation; he is a reassurance to most people (the warmth of his name suggests his ability to protect), but he is also an open threat (one cannot escape his gaze).

Big Brother also symbolizes the vagueness with which the higher ranks of the Party present themselves—it is impossible to know who really rules Oceania, what life is like for the rulers, or why they act as they do.

Winston thinks he remembers that Big Brother emerged around 1960, but the Party’s official records date Big Brother’s existence back to 1930, before Winston was even born.

The Glass Paperweight and St. Clement’s Church

By deliberately weakening people’s memories and flooding their minds with propaganda, the Party is able to replace individuals’ memories with its own version of the truth.

It becomes nearly impossible for people to question the Party’s power in the present when they accept what the Party tells them about the past—that the Party arose to protect them from bloated, oppressive capitalists, and that the world was far uglier and harsher before the Party came to power.

Winston vaguely understands this principle. He struggles to recover his own memories and formulate a larger picture of what has happened to the world. Winston buys a paperweight in an antique store in the prole district that comes to symbolize his attempt to reconnect with the past. Symbolically, when the Thought Police arrest Winston at last, the paperweight shatters on the floor.

The old picture of St. Clement’s Church in the room that Winston rents above Mr. Charrington’s shop is another representation of the lost past. Winston associates a song with the picture that ends with the words “Here comes the chopper to chop off your head!” This is an important foreshadow, as it is the telescreen hidden behind the picture that ultimately leads the Thought Police to Winston, symbolizing the Party’s corrupt control of the past.

The Place Where There Is No Darkness

Throughout the novel Winston imagines meeting O’Brien in “the place where there is no darkness.” The words first come to him in a dream, and he ponders them for the rest of the novel.

Eventually, Winston does meet O’Brien in the place where there is no darkness; instead of being the paradise Winston imagined, it is merely a prison cell in which the light is never turned off.

The idea of “the place where there is no darkness” symbolizes Winston’s approach to the future: possibly because of his intense fatalism (he believes that he is doomed no matter what he does), he unwisely allows himself to trust O’Brien, even though inwardly he senses that O’Brien might be a Party operative.

The Telescreens

The omnipresent telescreens are the book’s most visible symbol of the Party’s constant monitoring of its subjects. In their dual capability to blare constant propaganda and observe citizens, the telescreens also symbolize how totalitarian government abuses technology for its own ends instead of exploiting its knowledge to improve civilization.

The Red-Armed Prole Woman

The red-armed prole woman whom Winston hears singing through the window represents Winston’s one legitimate hope for the long-term future: the possibility that the proles will eventually come to recognize their plight and rebel against the Party.

Winston sees the prole woman as a prime example of reproductive virility; he often imagines her giving birth to the future generations that will finally challenge the Party’s authority.

Posted via email from bobmartin's posterous

Professor Hillel Weiss - What Must Also Be Said

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/11657

Excerpts from Professor Weiss' epic opening speech before the European Parliament Conference meeting on the topic of Peace in the Middle East. Tuesday, May 15th.

From Professor Hillel Weiss

“Ye shall love truth and peace,” says the prophet.

Peace cannot be based on a lie! There is no truth without peace and no peace without truth. This is written is written in the Bible and accepted in natural law. Truth is based on justice whose role is to save the oppressed from the hand of his oppressor.

The question that we face is: Who is the oppressor and who is the victim? Who is the occupier and who is being deprived? For those who are devoted to what is written in the Bible, the issues are clear and simple.

But for now, let us look at international law, which is binding, and begin with a short survey:

Professor Alan Dershowitz, a Jewish liberal, moderate leftist, and lover of Israel, one of the top legal experts in the United States, has again recently condemned the International Court of Justice at Hague for delivering political decisions.

This is in contrast to the International Criminal Court at the Hague which refused to act as a rubber stamp: It did not recognize Palestine as a state and rejected a series of proposed resolutions that Palestinians submitted against Israel for war crimes, during “Operation Cast Lead”.

Dershowitz levels lethal criticism against the UN, among others, as the leader of the double standard against Israel, and regards it as a corrupt organization that aids and abets terror.

And indeed, after three “Durban Conventions” , after the prostitution of the word ‘racism’, and after accepting Libya in 2003 as a member of the UN Commission on Human Rights, much like in May 2012 -  and now in May 2012, accepting Syria to that same position as a leading member of the Commission on Human Rights and the representative of Asia - every honest person must view the UN as a cynical group whose main concern is to protect terrorism.

It is the main cause of the corruption of the ethics of human rights as formulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations itself, the gift to the world of the French Jew, Rene Cassin.

We have mentioned the Jewish contribution to the struggle against racism and we shall again mention that the Torah of the people of Israel, preceding every other monotheistic religion that purports to supplant it, was the first to claim that “There is one father of us all”, blacks and whites, Arabs, Germans, and Jews, and that father is Adam.

And therefore, if there is a non-racist message in the history of mankind, it is in the Torah of the people of Israel.

The religion of Israel is its national religion - and this and only this element is what defines its identity as a nation – and allows every human being the option to convert to Judaism. To be Jewish is not a matter of race or blood.

It is only barbaric peoples, who rummaged around looking for racial purity, who should rightly be called ‘racists’. For example, the Holocaust denier Mahmoud Abbas, who has said more than once that in the Palestine he envisages, there is no room for Jews.

In the same interview that Dershowitz gave to the Israeli newspaper Makor Rishon on April 27 , 2012, he says “Western society has a tremendous problem today with international law, which has become in many cases a source of evil and which serves the hardcore left and Islamist right as ammunition against the democratic values of the West (...)”

The hardcore left was never interested in law and justice. Its ideology permits the use of the law for political purposes. In his opinion, “the State of Israel must create for itself an independent corpus of international law that will be reflected in the decisions of its High Court of Justice and will be based on the principles of international law.”

...The law known as “Human Dignity and Freedom” , a Basic Law in the State of Israel, should make it illegal to expel a Jew from his own land, but does not. The entire law was legislated for the “other”. The law was designed for the Arab population but is a dead letter/ a law no longer enforced for the Jews who are known as ‘settlers’. That was what happened with the expulsion of 10,000 Jews from their land which is recognized in international law as the national home of the Jewish people alone, as we shall see shortly.

An American justice provides strong support for our position – a Jew who sits on the Federal Appellate Court, Richard Posner, who wrote a scathing critique of the judicial theory of retired Israeli High Court Justice Aharon Barak. Posner’s critique appeared in an article written on the English edition of Barak’s book Judge in a Democratic Society.

The article was published in the New Republic and in it, Posner attacks Barak in the sharpest language: “Barak establishes a world record for judicial hubris,”(...) He is a legal buccaneer”.  According to Posner, his writing is “to be considered Exhibit A for why American judges should be extremely wary about citing foreign judicial decisions.[…]”

“What Barak created out of whole cloth was a degree of judicial power undreamed of even by our most aggressive Supreme Court justices […]But only in Israel (as far as I know) do judges confer the power of abstract review on themselves, without benefit of a constitutional or legislative provision. One is reminded of Napoleon's taking the crown out of the pope's hands and putting it on his own head.”

Let us return to the central issue: Is a Jew living in Israel in areas that were liberated by the Israeli Army in 1967 indeed a foreign occupier who is violating the Geneva Convention designed to protect human rights, to prevent the theft and dispossession of an occupied people?

And in the Land of Israel under the international law in effect today , is the Jew a foreign occupier of a territory that does not belong to him, but to a state that does not exist and never existed, a state called by the name of Palestine?

In the words of its own heads such as Yassar Arafat, Faisal Husseini, Zuhair Mohsen of the terror organization Al Saika, and even former Knesset member Azmi Bashara - all of it was invented for no other purpose than to be a Trojan horse whose reason for existing is to destroy the state of Israel.

Only a week ago, one of the Hamas leaders from Gaza was photographed imploring Egypt and complaining of the lack of raw materials. He says: We are all brothers. Half of the PA Arab families in Gaza are called al-Masri, meaning from Egypt, and they come from Egypt and the other half from Saudia Arabia. The film may be seen on Youtube.

Dr. Ohana-Arnon, in his article on the origin of the Arab immigrants, says: “Palestinian society is built on a clan or hamula system. The origin of the hamula can be learned from its name: the al-Masri hamula is from Egypt., al-Hindi from India, al-Mugrabi from Algeria, al-Ajami from Iran, al-Turki from Turkey., al-Hawari from Hawara in northern Sudan, now living in Nazareth. Al-Araqi is from Iraq (they settled in the Israeli cities of Tira and Taibeh). Abu-Kask is from Egypt settled (in the inner coastal region) Huran from Mt. Huran – Mt. Druzim south of Damascus, Bushnak from Bosnia (now in Caesarea). Masarwa –from Egypt. Habash from Ethiopia, now in Lod. Barnawi from Borno in Nigeria, now in Jerusalem, Turkeman from the Causcasus.

Not all of the Arabs in the land of Israel are immigrants, but it is foolish to ignore two basic facts: first: that from the late 19th century and until the British mandate, there was a great wave of Arab migration towards Israel, and the second – that in order to create a significant “refugee problem” UNWRA determined in an arbitrary and unprecedented manner that only two years of residence in the country before 1948 is sufficient to define a person as a Palestinian refugee for all of his life, allowing him and his descendants to demand the “right of return.

The world’s enthusiasm for the Palestinian issue does not attest to a sense of justice but to a fervent hatred of Israel. The nations say: “Let us go and destroy them from among the nations, and the name of Israel shall no longer be remembered”. This is the garden-variety brand of anti-Semitism, which must inevitably bounce back to those who launch it, when they will feel remorse and shame. The punishment for nations who try to dispossess the people of Israel from God’s land and take it over is written many times in the Book of Books. I will just refer you to one chapter regarding the nations being judged in the Valley of Jehosaphat, from the Book of Joel, chapter 4:

1 For, behold, in those days, and in that time, when I shall bring back the captivity of Judah and Jerusalem,
2 I will gather all nations, and will bring them down into the valley of Jehoshaphat; and I will enter into judgment with them there for My people and for My heritage Israel, whom they have scattered among the nations, and divided My land.
12 Let the nations be stirred up, and come up to the valley of Jehoshaphat; for there will I sit to judge all the nations round about.
16 And the LORD shall roar from Zion, and utter His voice from Jerusalem, and the heavens and the earth shall shake; but the LORD will be a refuge unto His people, and a stronghold to the children of Israel.
17 So shall ye know that I am the LORD your God, dwelling in Zion My holy mountain; then shall Jerusalem be holy, and there shall no strangers pass through her any more.

This is the question that confronts us here too. Did the Jews conquer a country which was not theirs and mistreat the original inhabitants? Or perhaps it is exactly the opposite: the Arabs’ continuing conquest of the Land of Israel and now of Europe as well is the topic of the discussion.

The foreign occupation is Arab occupation – and it doesn’t matter if it began in the 7th century. The Ottoman conquest was stopped in Vienna in 1683, the Moslems conquered the Iberian Peninsula in 711 and were expelled from there hundreds of years later in the Reconquista. Rome occupied Israel and destroyed the Holy Temple on the Temple Mount in the year 70, expelling al the Jews from their land.

Everything that has been happening since is a continuation of this conquest and occupation. Each time there has been a new conqueror and occupier until the present day when the true owners of the land are finally returning and putting an end to a 2000 year occupation.

The God of Israel who has a design for human history- the God of the universe keeps an account. An account of every Jew who perished in the Holocaust, as well as in Egypt under the Pharaohs who embedded Jewish infants in bricks.

Wherever they hurt, strangled, and slaughtered Jews, the God who keeps accounts will come and when it pleases Him, He will exact payment. About that, we have no doubts...

Gunter Grass is a friend of the radical left in Israel. Grass likes to cite the influence of Israeli writer Amos Oz on the subject of Israel. The Israeli leftists deny the natural and normal right of self-defense to the State of Israel, like Charles de Gaulle who denied Israel the right to the first shot. No one denies Israel its classic right to be the victim.

Even if Israel were destroyed - God forbid - by Iran, it would not have the moral right to make a second strike, according to the Goldstone Report. Just like the Turkish response to our stopping the flotilla to Gaza, so would be the nations of the world’s reaction to an Israeli victory over Iran. That is a very sick thought.

Professor Alan Dershowitz said in his interview: “First I want to say that those Israelis are not only the greatest enemies of Israel; they are also the most dangerous”. He mentions names and adds: “These are all people who wrap themselves in the Israeli flag just so they can burn it”.

The State of Israel has been radically poisoned by accusations of occupation until it does not notice that it itself has been occupied by groups of assimilated or kowtowing Jews.

That is not to mention the anarchists who criticize us every day of the year organized and funded by authorities who turn a blind eye and abandon the army to their provocations. Israel has wittingly and unwittingly opened its gates wide to all that seek her destruction. And that is not just a metaphor. Other examples are encouraging the illegal African immigrants who come to Israel by the thousands, flooding the country

But look at yourselves in Europe today. How did you get to where you are? Was it those ideologies that deny nationalism under the guise of multiculturalism, inventing the obligation to identify with the legitimacy of the enemy’s narrative and obliterating truth as a basic tool of human existence.

Have they not destroyed morality, law, science, and the economy?

Have they not destroyed the culture of the West?

The radical left argues that nationalism, all nationalism, is the religion of the murderers. Now all over Europe we are hearing more and more voices of regret over the multicultural tactic which means Europe surrendering without firing a shot. That is the main reason that the Right is winning elections in European countries such as France, and the reason that I was invited here.

But those sleeping European leaders continue, they still continue to encourage the establishment of a Palestinian state with all the enormous resources they possess. They invest hundreds of billions into a black hole. As long as this contradiction exits, Europe will continue to turn into Eurabia.

Cosmopolitan perceptions open the doors of Europe to millions of work immigrants and give them the rights of citizens. Very soon there will be no Europe, as your host city proves. Why is the false claim that “Islam is shaking off the post-colonial conquest in Europe” not accepted in Europe, and why is it applied to Israel as an occupying nation? What is this double standard of morality?

Indeed, one of the examples of international law in the view of universal justice is found in the Bible. Certainly an enlightened individual would ask himself what is the validity of the Bible. What is the validity of God? Has he left His job or changed the rules and forgot to inform us?

Is the Bible the last refuge of the scoundrel? Church heads in the Middle East as well as extreme rightwing Islamists maintain that the Jews of today have no connection to the nation mentioned in the Bible! And indeed these things are examined every day.

The very fact that there are six million Jews in the Land of Israel today organized into a state and not like ashes that were spewed out at Auschwitz and scattered over the continent is perhaps proof that God’s power is greater than the power of all the enemies of Israel from within and from without. If so, who is right? Does justice represent only the entity by whose hand it is suppressed? Does it represent only might and woe to the vanquished?

In 1947 the Arabs refused the UN General Assembly proposal to partition the Land of Israel into two states. A recommendation which was not accepted as a decision. It was refused and the seven Arab countries launched a war against the State of Israel on its first day of existence. Israel had accepted the recommendation to partition. The Arabs were defeated in battle as usual.

But Jordan illegally occupied the territory that was designated for an Arab state that didn’t exist and never had. This occupation was recognized only by Pakistan and Great Britain. When Jordan was defeated in 1967, and expelled from the territory by the State of Israel, the territory reverted to its original owners both according to the Bible and to positivist international law of today.

What is interesting here is international law and Israel did restore to itself the territory that Britain had received as a mandate in 1920 from the League of Nations at the San Remo Conference, a mandate for a Jewish homeland in the Land of Israel. Without infringing upon the personal rights and religious rights of the non-Jewish inhabitants of the land, namely the Arabs. That is the legal status to this day.

Appearing on the website of the Land of Israel loyalists is a document, written by Yoel Lerner, a student of the legal expert Howard Grief together with Gedalia Glazar, that shows the continuity of international law and conventions on this subject.

The one who conquers territory from a conqueror wins that area. We Jews say that what is called potentially Palestine under the partition proposal known as resolution 181 was purified through Abdullah father of Hussein and with the defeat of his son , and his willing surrender of the West Bank in 1988. And the Peace Agreement between Israel and Jordan 1994, according to which Jordan gave up all her claims in the west bank.

We are not occupiers in our own homeland. That was also said by Netanyahu in his speech to both Houses of Congress last year. The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs says the same thing, thanks to the organization that we have established “the Land of Israel Loyalists” developed by legal scholars Howard Grief, Eliav Shochetman, and Talya Einhorn.

However, because Israel law has been occupied by the left, and for other psycho-political reasons, Israel has generally refrained from using these arguments because it feels that rights which are based on the Bible are not suited to an enlightened state.

The State of Israel’s obsessive pursuit of peace, peace until the last Jew, is a dangerous compulsion that inflames the hatred of our enemies and intensifies all future war.

At times it seems that for an unattainable peace, Israel is prepared to risk the lives of its citizens and to hand over its God-given land to its enemies, not only as a recognition of the value of peace but as a desire for legitimacy which it seeks from the nations of the world, especially from its neighbors. King David, the poet of the psalms, related to this in his psalm about neighbors and peace, for example in Psalm 120:

1 A Song of Ascents.
In my distress I called unto the LORD, and He answered me.
2 O LORD, deliver my soul from lying lips, from a deceitful tongue.
3 What shall be given unto thee, and what shall be done more unto thee, thou deceitful tongue?
4 Sharp arrows of the mighty, with coals of broom.
5 Woe is me, that I sojourn with Meshech, that I dwell beside the tents of Kedar!
6 My soul hath full long had her dwelling with him that hates peace.
7 I am all peace; but when I speak, they are for war.

That is why the State of Israel has been making a mistake ever since it was established when it makes so-called peace its top priority as an attainable goal, instead of decisively defeating the enemy that sees peace as only a strategy to improve their ability to destroy us.

Islam is rife with concepts involving deception such as Hudna and Tahadia which are proof of Mohammed betraying the tribe of Qurayish and his treachery against the tribes of Jews at Khayber as a symbol of his ethics in dealing with my people, the people of the Book.

To this very day the Battle of Khaybar serves as source of inspiration for Moslem soldiers in their wars, especially against Israel. During the first intifada the demonstrators shouted slogans like “Khaybar Khaybar ya yehud, Jaish Mihammad sa-yaud” meaning “Remember Khaybar, Jews, Muhammad’s army will yet return” or “Khaybar, Khaybar Jews, to Palestine we will yet return”.

Therefore one cannot sign any peace treaty with followers of Muhammad. No hudna or tahadia can be the basis of negotiations. Who in the Jewish side negotiating even tactically on the basis of these concepts can assume responsibility for the consequences of these so-called agreements, such as for example, the peace treaty with Egypt which is collapsing now with a great crash.

Peace is not a strategy. 

In conclusion, I will relate in brief to the status of the Jewish people in the Land of Israel under international law. This is in complete contradiction of the false and malicious propaganda that is poisoning the entire world as though the Jewish people, acting through its representative the State of Israel, is acting in violation of international law.

It began with the Balfour Declaration in 1917 through the Weizmann-Faisal Agreement in 1919, which is the only Jewish-Arab peace agreement, then to the important resolutions of the San Remo Conference in 1920 where the international community gave the Jewish people a national homeland which included both banks of the Jordan River.

Great Britain, acting according to its standard norm, betrayed this idea in 1922 and tore off the east bank of the Jordan from the Jewish national homeland. Even after this deed of “perfidious Albion”, the resolution was approved - that the entire west bank of the Jordan belongs to the Jewish people as a national home.

According to senior jurists, this decision is in effect and binding to this very day. It was ratified among other places in Article 80 of the UN charter which recognized all of the resolutions that under the Mandate had given rights as binding resolutions.

In contrast, the 1947 partition plan was a recommendation of the UN Assembly only and remained a recommendation which was even rejected by the Arabs who responded by launching a war against Israel that very day to annihilate it. This is what caused the refugee problem which they carefully preserve to this day to use as a weapon against the state of Israel and the Jewish people and to rob the public funds.

The claims that the State of Israel is violating the Fourth Geneva Convention under which one is prohibited from expelling a population and settling another in its stead are propaganda slogans with no basis in law. As one of the top legal experts in the world has said, this is the irony of the absurd, because Israel expelled no one from the occupied territories of a state.

The 'settlers' went joyfully to settle in their own land as part of the Divine process of Redemption ...

Those who call themselves Palestinians are not a people and they have no state. No one displaced them. Indeed, the opposite is true – Israel rehabilitated them and gave them a chance to live normal lives. The only ones in the Middle East who live this way, in what is known the Arab space, act in submission to incitement and extreme ingratitude, and use their usual culture of falsehood to fight Israel.

The Middle East has indeed collapsed.

The San Remo agreements fell because the artificial states that were created as a result of the temporary victory of the Allies in World War I was obliterated by everything that happened in the Middle East.

States like Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Iraq are in various stages of disintegration mainly because of their own tribal rivalries and internal religious wars.

The West did manage to maintain the situation for some one hundred years through a system of bribery. But now the end has come, together with the Arab Spring.

It is still not clear what will happen in Egypt except for chaos, but the West bears heavy responsibility for what is happening in Syria and Iraq. The fall of the Qadaffi regime has repercussions all over Africa and is causing continued bloodshed that no one can solve. The UN as usual shows itself to be a factor that encourages wars and not a peace maker.

Let the Arab and Moslem nationalists return to their national habitat, and the Jews to theirs, as Abraham divided the lands between himself and his nephew Lot and between Ishmael and his brothers, and peace and truth may you love for the sake of G-d's name.

Posted via email from bobmartin's posterous

A Covenant with Death

 טו  כִּי אֲמַרְתֶּם, כָּרַתְנוּ בְרִית אֶת-מָוֶת, וְעִם-שְׁאוֹל, עָשִׂינוּ חֹזֶה; שיט (שׁוֹט) שׁוֹטֵף כִּי-עבר (יַעֲבֹר) לֹא יְבוֹאֵנוּ, כִּי שַׂמְנוּ כָזָב מַחְסֵנוּ וּבַשֶּׁקֶר נִסְתָּרְנוּ.

'We have made a covenant with death, and with the nether-world are we at agreement; when the scouring scourge shall pass through, it shall not come unto us; for we have made lies our refuge, and in falsehood have we hid ourselves';

Isaiah Chapter 28 יְשַׁעְיָהוּ
Verse 15

Posted via email from bobmartin's posterous

Kanamits Offer Peace & Prosperity

Posted via email from bobmartin's posterous

Comments on Naomi Klein's 2009 visit to Palestinazi HQ

Klein, like her comrades in the Jewish Left, fails to mention easily-available historical and legal facts that don't support her premise.

In "The Herd of Independent Minds", Harold Rosenberg identifies the malady that afflicts Klein and her comrades.  Quoting from Wikipedia: 

"... the trivialization of personal experience inherent both in mass culture-making and superficial political commitment..." 

"...political posturing in both the mass media and among artistic elites ... [is] actually an avoidance of responsibility..."

Klein's trivialization of the Jewish experience during the Shoah, speaking to crowds of Muslims whose religion and culture are based on ideas indistinguishable from the NSDAP, and her false analogy comparing the Shoah to the situation here in Israel - all of this is narcissistic political posturing that avoids responsibility.  

If Klein were intellectually honest she'd follow Talia Fahima's example and revert to Islam. 

http://www.haaretz.com/news/naomi-klein-oppose-the-state-not-the-people-1.279194

Posted via email from bobmartin's posterous

Selective Attention Test

Funny - but not a joke.

Posted via email from bobmartin's posterous

The Nation May 8, 1948: The British Record on Partition

http://emperor.vwh.net/history/br.htm

VIII. Arab Governments 
behind Invasion of Palestine

==================================================

On February 16, in its first report on security to the Security Council, the Palestine Commission stated:

"(a) The security situation in Palestine continues to be aggravated not only in the areas of the proposed Jewish and Arab States, but also in the city of Jerusalem, even in the presence of British troops.

[. . .]

"(c) Powerful Arab interests, both inside and outside Palestine, are defying the resolution of the general Assembly and are engaged in a deliberate effort to alter by force the settlement envisaged therein."

If the activity of the Arab League, comprising the states of Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Transjordan, all members of the United Nations except Transjordan, were not sufficient evidence that the Arab states as such are in revolt against the November 29th decision of the General Assembly, British Intelligence reports offer proof of the support by Arab Governments of the armed invasion of Palestine by the so-called Arab Army of Liberation.

Posted via email from bobmartin's posterous

Shmuel Katz 1973: #Sinai #Gaza #Jordan #Golan

Between 1949, the year of the Armistice, and 1956, attacks from Sinai and the Gaza area, from across the Jordan and down the Golan Heights, became more frequent and more intense; they were directed mainly at civilians and civilian targets.

In that seven-year period, the Arabs carried out 11,873 acts of sabotage and murder. Israel suffered 1,335 casualties; of these, over 1,000 were civilians.

Shmuel Katz, Battleground: Fact and Fantasy in Palestine, p. 7

http://www.shmuelkatz.com/ViewAllArticlesAtOnce.aspx

http://www.shmuelkatz.com/Articles/BattlegroundFactandFantasyinPalestine.pdf

Posted via email from bobmartin's posterous

"Let all the poison that lurks in the mud hatch out!"

Muslims all over the Middle East are out for blood. They're in a rage after learning that some of their leaders have, for years, actually been trying to make peace with Israel.

The Muslim Brotherhood, literally an extension of Nazi ideology, has apparently taken control in Egypt. TMB's origins are bound up in the activities of Haj Amin al-Husseini, the "Grand Mufti" of Jerusalem. Some might be aware that this demonic man's house was recently returned to Jewish hands.  See Jews in the Home of the Mufti: Historic Justice.

At the same time that TMB was taking over Egypt, something strange happened in Yaffo, Muslims and Marxist Jews marched in the streets chanting death threats to "Jewish settlers", vowing to "liberate" Yaffo. All in the name of Democracy, of course. 

In current (2011) Newspeak, "Democracy" means what Judenrein meant in 1933. 

There were many more Islamic outbursts in the Middle East, and it's all of a bloody 1,429-year-old  piece.

The poisons in the mud are hatching out, for sure. 

The fury in the Muslim world is being reported as a reaction against tyranny. It is not. 

A far more tyrannical power is taking control, flexing its muscles and sharpening its blades for the final genocidal assault on the embodiment of evil (Jews and Israel).

And most of the world is cheering them on.

Watching the melee in Egypt, H.P. Lovecraft's descriptions of the maddened worshipers in Call of Cthulhu come to mind. One would be hard pressed to find a better description of the Koranic Jihadi perspective.

That cult would never die till the stars came right again, and the secret priests would take great Cthulhu from His tomb to revive His subjects and resume His rule of earth. The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. 

 

To paraphrase H.P. Lovecraft: In his house at Mocka, dead Allah waits, scheming.

Posted via email from bobmartin's posterous

ICC Elements of Crimes

https://tinyurl.com/w9ka5fj

WHEN WILL THE ICC START ENFORCING LAWS AGAINST ISLAMIC INDIVIDUALS AND ORGANIZATIONS FOR THEIR UNRELENTING TERRORISM, AGGRESSION?

Eric Hoffer on ridicule, denunciation, and irreverence

From The True Believer

It is easy to see how the faultfinding man of words, by persistent ridicule and denunciation, shakes prevailing beliefs and loyalties, and familiarizes the masses with the idea of change. 

What is not so obvious is the process by which the discrediting of existing beliefs and institutions makes possible the rise of a new fanatical faith. 

For it is a remarkable fact that the militant man of words who "sounds the established order to its source to mark its want of authority and justice"* often prepares the ground not for a society of freethinking individuals but for a corporate society that cherishes utmost unity and blind faith. 

A wide diffusion of doubt and irreverence thus leads often to unexpected results. 

The irreverence of the Renaissance was a prelude to the new fanaticism of Reformation and Counter-Reformation. 

The Frenchmen of the enlightenment who debunked the church and the crown and preached reason and tolerance released a burst of revolutionary and nationalist fanaticism which has not abated yet. 

Marx and his followers discredited religion, nationalism, and the passionate pursuit of business, and brought into being the new fanaticism of socialism, communism, Stanlinist nationalism, and the passion for world dominion.

*[Pascal]

Posted via email from bobmartin's posterous

Equity and gender feminism

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Equity_and_gender_feminism&printable=yes

Equity feminism and gender feminism are terms coined by scholar Christina Hoff Sommers in her 1992 book Who Stole Feminism?,^[1] which she uses to distinguish between what she describes as two ideologically distinct branches of modern feminism.

Sommers describes equity feminism as an ideology rooted in classical liberalism, and that aims for full civil and legal equality for women. Experimental psychologistSteven Pinker^[2] expands on Sommers to write, "Equity feminism is a moral doctrine about equal treatment that makes no commitments regarding open empirical issues in psychology or biology."

Equity feminism

Sommers contends that "Most American women subscribe philosophically to the older 'First Wave' kind of feminism whose main goal is equity, especially in politics and education".^[1] However, Sommers also argues that equity feminism is a minority position in academia, formalized feminist theory, and the organized feminist movement as a whole, who tend to embrace gender feminism.

Feminists who identify themselves with equity feminism include Jean Bethke Elshtain, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Noretta Koertge, Donna Laframboise, Mary Lefkowitz, Wendy McElroy, Camille Paglia, Daphne Patai, Virginia Postrel, Alice Rossi, Nadine Strossen, Joan Kennedy Taylor, Cathy Young, and evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker.^[2]

Gender feminism

In contrast to equity feminism, Sommers coined the term "Gender feminism" to describe what she contends is a gynocentric and misandric branch of feminism. Gender feminists typically criticize contemporary gender roles and aim to eliminate them altogether.^[1] In current usage, "gender feminism" may also describe feminism which seeks to use legal means to give preference to women in such areas as domestic violence, child custody, sexual harassment, divorce proceedings, and pay equity. Psychologist Steven Pinker^[2] described three defining pillars of gender feminism:

Gender feminism is an empirical doctrine committed to three claims about human nature. The first is that the differences between men and women have nothing to do with biology but are socially constructed in their entirety. The second is that humans possess a single social motive -- power -- and that social life can be understood only in terms of how it is exercised. The third is that human interactions arise not from the motives of people dealing with each other as individuals but from the motives of groups dealing with other groups -- in this case, the male gender dominating the female gender.

Sommers argues that gender feminism characterizes most of the body of modern feminist theory, and is the prevailing ideology in academia. She argues that while the feminists she designates as gender feminists advocate preferential treatment and portraying "all women as victims", equity feminism provides a viable alternative form of feminism to those who object to elements of gender feminist ideology.

Similarly, Nathanson and Young^[3] use the term "ideological feminism" to describe a dualist school of thought rooted in Marxist theory. Marxism's concept of perpetual conflict between working-class proletariat and capitalist Bourgeoisie has been replaced with feminist theory that posits perpetual exploitation of women by men, or by a patriarchal power structure. "In short, the names have been changed but not the ideology." Additionally, Nathanson and Young contend that ideological feminism is "profoundly anti-intellectual" and furthermore that:

Directly or indirectly, many ideological feminists have repeatedly argued that women are psychologically, morally, spiritually, intellectually and biologically superior to men. This was more explicitly expressed in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth than it was gain in the 1980s. That mentality is now pervasive -- not only in academic circles but in popular culture as well, where it will no doubt endure far longer.

Sommers claims Wellesley, Mount Holyoke, Smith, Mills and the University of Minnesota are "extreme" examples of U.S. colleges where gender feminists exert a major influence on curricula.^[4]

See also

• Gender equality
• Individualist feminism
• Liberal feminism
• Postmodern feminism

References

1. ^ ^a b c Hoff Sommers, Christina, Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women (Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, 1995), p. 22
2. ^ ^a b c Pinker, Steven, Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (Viking, 2002), ISBN 9780670031511
3. ^ Nathanson, Paul and Kathleen Young. 2001. Spreading misandry: the teaching of contempt for men in popular culture. McGill-Queen's Press, ISBN 0773522727.
4. ^ Sommers, Christina Hoff (1994). Who Stole Feminism?. Simon & Schuster (Touchstone). p. 91. ISBN 0-684-80156-6.

External links

• This Is What A Feminist Looks Like?

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equity_and_gender_feminism"

Categories: Feminist theory | Women's rights | Feminism and history

• This page was last modified on 1 November 2010 at 16:30.
  
• Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additi

Posted via email from bobmartin's posterous

Napoleon Bonaparte's call for Jews to establish sovereign state in Palestine - April 20, 1799

http://www.mideastweb.org/napoleon1799.htm

Introduction

In 1799, the French armies under Napoleon were camped outside of Acre. Napoleon issued a letter offering Palestine as a homeland to the Jews under French protection. The project was stillborn because Napoleon was defeated and was forced to withdraw from the Near East. The letter is remarkable because it marks the coming of age of enlightenment philosophy, making it respectable at last to integrate Jews as equal citizens in Europe and because it marked the beginning of nineteenth century projects for Jewish autonomy in Palestine under a colonial protectorate. After the defeat of Napoleon, it was largely the British who carried forward these projects, which have in hindsight been given the somewhat misleading name of "British Zionism."

---

Notice - Copyright

This introduction is Copyright 2003 by MidEastWeb http://www.mideastweb.org and the author. Please tell your friends about MidEastWeb and link to this page. Please do not copy this page to your Web site. You may print this page out for classroom use provided that this notice is appended, and you may cite this material in the usual way. Other uses by permission only.

---

Letter to the Jewish Nation from the French Commander-in-Chief Buonaparte
(translated from the Original, 1799)

General Headquarters, Jerusalem 1st Floreal, April 20th, 1799, 
in the year of 7 of the French Republic

BUONAPARTE, COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF OF THE ARMIES OF THE FRENCH REPUBLIC
IN AFRICA AND ASIA, TO THE RIGHTFUL HEIRS OF PALESTINE.
 

Israelites, unique nation, whom, in thousands of years, lust of conquest and tyranny have been able to be deprived of their ancestral lands, but not of name and national existence !

Attentive and impartial observers of the destinies of nations, even though not endowed with the gifts of seers like Isaiah and Joel, have long since also felt what these, with beautiful and uplifting faith, have foretold when they saw the approaching destruction of their kingdom and fatherland: And the ransomed of the Lord shall return, and come to Zion with songs and everlasting joy upon their heads; they shall obtain joy and gladness and sorrow and sighing shall flee away. (Isaiah 35,10)

Arise then, with gladness, ye exiled ! A war unexampled In the annals of history, waged in self-defense by a nation whose hereditary lands were regarded by its enemies as plunder to be divided, arbitrarily and at their convenience, by a stroke of the pen of Cabinets, avenges its own shame and the shame of the remotest nations, long forgotten under the yoke of slavery, and also, the almost two-thousand-year-old ignominy put upon you; and, while time and circumstances would seem to be least favourable to a restatement of your claims or even to their expression ,and indeed to be compelling their complet abandonment, it offers to you at this very time, and contrary to all expectations, Israel's patrimony !

The young army with which Providence has sent me hither, let by justice and accompanied by victory, has made Jerusalem my head-quarters and will, within a few days, transfer them to Damascus, a proximity which is no longer terrifying to David's city.

Rightful heirs of Palestine !

The great nation which does not trade in men and countries as did those which sold your ancestors unto all people (Joel,4,6) herewith calls on you not indeed to conquer your patrimony ;nay, only to take over that which has been conquered and, with that nation's warranty and support, to remain master of it to maintain it against all comers.

Arise ! Show that the former overwhelming might of your oppressors has but repressed the courage of the descendants of those heroes who alliance of brothers would have done honour even to Sparta and Rome (Maccabees 12, 15) but that the two thousand years of treatment as slaves have not succeeded in stifling it.

Hasten !, Now is the moment, which may not return for thousands of years, to claim the restoration of civic rights among the population of the universe which had been shamefully withheld from you for thousands of years, your political existence as a nation among the nations, and the unlimited natural right to worship Jehovah in accordance with your faith, publicly and most probably forever (JoeI 4,20).

Posted via email from bobmartin's posterous

Katz vs Avineri March 16, 1979

Shmuel Katz debates Shlomo Avineri on the Israel / Egypt peace treaty after the 1973 war. This interview was taped on Bill Buckley's Firing Line on March 16, 1979.

http://www.shmuelkatz.com/firinglinevideo.aspx

Posted via email from bobmartin's posterous

Shmuel Katz 2007: On the Rights of 'Settlers'

Through an analysis of British Mandate history, Katz shows that the Jewish settlers are, from the point of view of international law, as legal as any resident of Manhattan or of Shreveport, Louisiana. [or Tel Aviv, Herzliya, Ramat Aviv]

December 28, 2007 

ON THE RIGHTS OF ‘SETTLERS’ 

http://www.shmuelkatz.com/ViewAllArticlesAtOnce.aspx

US Ambassador Richard Jones was recently reported to have asked Supreme Court President Dorit Beinisch about the legal status of the 'settlements.' This is indeed a subject which has long been neglected - or simply ignored. The answer to the question is a simple one, but in view of the obfuscation which has for years gathered around it, it is essential to examine its roots. They lie comfortably in the text of the Mandate for Palestine which was conferred on Britain in 1922 by the League of Nations.  

The Mandate's objective was to facilitate the 'reconstitution' of the Jewish National Home in Palestine. It was intended to serve as the legal instrument for implementing Britain's 1917 Balfour Declaration. 

The essential obligations of the mandatory were to facilitate the immigration of Jews and encourage their 'close settlement' on the land, including state and waste lands. (In accordance with the Balfour Declaration 'the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities' were to be protected.)  

The vision of the Balfour Declaration was encapsulated a couple of years later by cabinet minister Winston Churchill who wrote 'a Jewish state will arise in our day on the banks of the Jordan.' At that time, too, the League of Nations conferred on Britain a Mandate for Mesopotamia (Iraq); and Mandates for Syria and Lebanon were conferred on France, presaging the establishment of sovereign Arab states. 

Thus did the Allied nations complete the sharing out of the territories they had captured from the Turks in the Great War of 1914-1918.  

ADDED UP, these Arab states-to-be accounted for some 99 percent of the total conquered area. In its capture during the war it may be said the Arabs themselves played practically no part. The so-called Arab Revolt against the Turks, heavily financed by Britain and brilliantly portrayed by T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia), did not in fact take place at all. Eighty percent of the Arabs who fought in the war did so on the side of the Turks. 

The Jewish people not only fielded a Jewish fighting legion in Palestine but also a most effective intelligence service in Palestine and Syria. Nevertheless, when peace came Arab voices were raised against the British 

undertaking to the Jews. 

Balfour admonished them. He pointed out that it was the British who had established an independent sovereignty in Hejaz (the Mandates came two years later), and he added: 

 

'I hope they will remember that it is we who desire in Mesopotamia to prepare the way for the future of a self-governing Arab state and I hope that, understanding all that, they will not grudge that small notch being given to the people who for all these hundreds of years have been separated from it.'  

Yet - in 1922 at the last moment, the British inserted a clause (Number 25) excluding the provision of the Jewish National Home from the area east of the Jordan River. 

 

Zionist protest went unheeded; and so the almost-empty eastern Palestine, renamed Transjordan, ultimately became the Kingdom of Jordan, adding another state to the tremendous Arab domain. The fact that it was a Palestinian state could not be erased, nor that the majority of its inhabitants have come from western Palestine. 

Thus was executed the first partition of the Land of Israel. 

 

THE STATUS of Jewish settlement in what remained of Palestine remained unaffected. But as the years went by, the steady British retreat from their obligations, particularly by severe limitations on Jewish immigration, finally led to the White Paper of 1939. 

Apart from new land laws, it projected that Jewish immigration would be allowed 

at 15,000 souls a year for five years and then completely frozen. There would be no Jewish National Home. There would be an Arab majority, and some form of British overlordship to protect Jewish minority interests. 

 

The White Paper, fiercely attacked in Parliament, was passed - by a reduced majority. But any change in British policy in Mandatory Palestine was subject to the approval of the League of Nations. The League, it was true, had for some years already been seen as an effete body, but its constitutional authority had remained intact. For 

monitoring the progress of the various mandates it maintained a kind of watchdog commission, and considered any proposed changes in the terms of the Mandate, only if approved by the Mandate Commission. 

When in 1939 the British government submitted the White Paper to the commission, it refused its approval on the grounds that it did not conform to the terms of the Mandate.  

Angry British Foreign Office senior officials exchanged notes and discussed among themselves the desperate policy of proposing a change in the Mandate itself. But they were stymied. It was too late - nearly the end of August 1939, and on the first of September World War II broke out.  

The Council of the League of Nations never met again. With it died the White Paper. The Mandate remained the defining document for governing Palestine.  

THE BRITISH government, frustrated, did not relent. It launched a bitter campaign, using diplomatic channels in Europe to prevent Jews escaping and employing the Royal Navy to intercept boats carrying Jewish refugees from Europe and prevent their reaching the Jewish National Home. Indeed, when Churchill was prime minister he wrote 

in an internal instruction that 'the White Paper stands.'

  

The Mandate, however, with its injunction to assist Jewish settlement, remained intact and after World War II was 'inherited' by the United Nations. It was a period of considerable unrest which, despite much repressive effort, the British could not subdue.

 

Under the pressure of a highly effective Jewish underground fighting force (and consequent reactive political pressure at home) the Labor government finally returned the Mandate to the UN (in the spring of 1947).

  

The UN, in a dramatic special session, in effect accepted Britain's resignation and later that year decided to recommend the partition of Palestine between Jews and Arabs. (Not Palestinians. Nobody had heard of such a separate entity.) The Arab states rejected that offer. Thus Palestine, with the rights of Jewish settlement, remained undivided as the Jewish state between the Jordan and the Mediterranean. 

 

The Arab refusal was not a whim. The idea of a non-Arab state (and specifically a hated Jewish state) 'in the heart of the Arab world' was anathema to them. It was reflected by a claim of possession of the whole country. 

Immediately after the UN session, the League of Arab States decided to go to war to destroy the Jewish state at birth.  In the meantime a preliminary campaign of terror was launched against the Jewish community. Then on May 14, 1948, the day the British left, five well-armed Arab states - Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Iraq - invaded the country. 

The losses Israel sustained in that war of nine months exceeded, in proportion of population, the losses sustained by Britain and America in World War I. The invasion success was limited not only by the inordinate valor of the youth of Israel, but in time by the supply of much-needed arms by Czechoslovakia (with Soviet permission) and France.  

HOWEVER, Jordan succeeded in holding on to the eastern highlands (primarily Judea and Samaria) and then even presumptuously announced their annexation. Egypt captured the Gaza 'Strip.' 

It is not irrelevant to mention that in the next 19 years of Jordanian and Egyptian occupation, neither Jordan nor Egypt proposed, nor did the Palestinian Arabs demand from Jordan and Egypt, the establishment of a Palestinian state. To the contrary, Palestinian Arab terror continued to operate as before against Israel. 

 

Then in 1967, Egypt, Syria and Jordan again attacked Israel, again with the repeated announcement that the objective was its 'annihilation.' Israel turned the tables and won the war. 

Soon after that victory, Israel offered the Arabs to hand them all the territory it had regained, in return for peace. At a conference in Khartoum the unanimous Arab reply was: No negotiations. No peace. No recognition.  

So once again Jewish settlement rights had been endangered, and once again had been saved by Arab intransigence. 

 

It was shortly afterward that the movement of Jewish settlers was launched. It is noteworthy that the last defining document that underwrites the legality was the Geneva Convention of 1949. It dealt with occupied territories. 

Its second clause, stating its scope, makes it clear that it does not apply to the Jewish presence in Judea and Samaria - because Jordan was not a sovereign possessor but an illegal invader and similarly was Egypt an illegal invader of Gaza. Israel liberated both areas, restoring them to the territory of the Palestine Mandate of 1922.  

From the point of view of international law these settlers are as legal as any resident of Manhattan or of Shreveport, Louisiana.   

Posted via email from bobmartin's posterous