RUTHFULLY YOURS

If international law is law in the ordinary sense of the term—and not moral posturing, political maneuvering, or personal payback—then it must comprise settled and public requirements, effective and even-handed implementation, and impartial resolution of disputes. The Obama administration’s scandalous decision not to veto U.N. Security Council Resolution 2334 last month suggests that international law at the United Nations is not law in the ordinary sense of the term.

Endorsed by the council’s other 14 members, Resolution 2334 condemns Israeli settlement policy as “a flagrant violation under international law” and recognizes all territory east of “the 4 June 1967 lines” (or the Green Line as it is sometimes called) as lawfully belonging to the Palestinians. The sanctimonious but shoddy justifications that leading U.S. officials have offered — in what appears to have been a well-orchestrated public relations campaign — reinforce the conclusion that the United Nations and its Obama-administration enablers were bent on punishing Israel and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In the process they have accelerated the delegitimization of international law.

Addressing the Security Council to explain America’s abstention, Ambassador Samantha Power stated, “Our vote today is fully in line with the bipartisan history of how American presidents have approached both the issue—and the role of this body.” That’s false.

While previous administrations have criticized settlements as bad policy, it is the Obama administration that deviates from longstanding American practice by maintaining that every last inch of the West Bank—the territory beyond the Green Line held by Jordan on the eve of the June 1967 Six-Day War—is lawfully Palestinian land. In the very 1982 address on the Middle East that Power cites in defense of Resolution 2334, President Reagan declared, “In the pre-1967 borders, Israel was barely 10 miles wide at its narrowest point. The bulk of Israel’s population lived within artillery range of hostile Arab armies. I am not about to ask Israel to live that way again.”

Moreover, the peace agreement that President Clinton negotiated at the July 2000 Camp David summit—accepted by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and rejected by Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat—as well as the December 2000 Clinton parameters envisaged Israel retaining control of population centers beyond the Green Line. So did President George W. Bush’s 2004 letter of understanding to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, which explicitly rejected a return to the 1967 lines.

Power is wrong on legal grounds as well as on security and historical ones. The Green Line is the 1949 armistice line to which Israel and Jordan agreed to end the war begun by five Arab armies invading Israel after it declared independence on the expiration of the British Mandate in May 1948. The armistice lines have no inherent legal significance. Indeed, U.N. Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338—the former passed following the 1967 war and the latter enacted after the 1973 Yom Kippur War—both recognized that the 1949 lines were not sacrosanct. Both provided for Israel to relinquish control of some portion, perhaps a large portion, of the land it seized from Jordan (and Syria and Egypt) in 1967 in exchange for security and peace.

On Sunday evening, when the details of the allegedly Islamic State-inspired truck-‎ramming attack in Jerusalem that afternoon were beginning to take shape, I received a ‎phone call from a friend in distress.‎

Unlike so many of our peers that day, neither she nor I had been directly affected by the ‎terrorist atrocity, in which an IDF officer and three officers’ course cadets were murdered and another ‎‎15 wounded. And she was not suffering from a common form of anxiety experienced ‎when the loved ones of others are killed or injured.‎

‎”I have had it with leftists,” she said.‎

Since she is not exactly a rabid right-winger herself — and though I was deeply upset by ‎the tragedy I had just spent hours reading and writing about — I laughed. What, I ‎wondered, brought this on?‎

She told me that she first learned of the attack from a mutual friend whom she ‎encountered while out running errands.‎

‎”The blood of the victims wasn’t even dry yet, and the only thing that woman had to say ‎was, ‘It’s so awful; now Bibi will go up in the polls.'”‎

Again I chuckled, this time at my friend’s naive outrage at something I have come to take ‎for granted: Whenever something bad happens, including a rainstorm at an outdoor ‎wedding, blame Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and bemoan his electoral popularity.‎

But it is not only members of the Israeli Left who respond to every ill that befalls the ‎Jewish state by bashing it and its leaders. My compatriots on the Right have a similar ‎tendency, albeit from the opposite point of view.‎

Sunday’s attack gave expression to the latest example of this phenomenon on both sides ‎of the political spectrum.‎

To understand the way Israelis — as all human beings — automatically translate every ‎event into the language of their ideology, one has to review the facts of the truck-‎ramming, as they have unfolded, based on security camera footage, eyewitness accounts ‎and other evidence collected at the scene.‎

At approximately 1:30 p.m., a large group of cadets on a weekly educational outing that ‎is part of their training to become officers arrived at the Armon Hanatziv promenade and ‎began to disembark from their buses.‎

The two-state solution, a perverse euphemism for carving an Islamic terror state out of the land of Israel and the living flesh of her people, is in trouble. The solution, which has solved nothing except the shortage of graves in Israel and Muslim terrorists in the Middle East, is the object of grave concern by the professionally concerned from Foggy Bottom to Fifth Avenue.

Obama set up his betrayal of Israel at the UN to “save” the two-state solution from Trump. The media warns that David Friedman, Trump’s pick for ambassador, is so pro-Israel that he’ll kill the “solution.”

But you can’t kill something that was never alive.

The two-state solution is a zombie. It can’t be dead because it never lived. It was a rotting shambling corpse of a diplomatic process. If you stood downwind of the proceedings, it looked alive.

Up close there was only blood and death.

Like the Holy Roman Empire, the two-state solution didn’t solve anything and it wasn’t in the business of creating two states. Not unless you count a Hamas state in Gaza and a Fatah state in the West Bank.

What problem was the two-state solution solving?

It wasn’t the problem of terrorism. Turning over land, weapons and power to a bunch of terrorists made for more terrorism. It’s no coincidence that Islamic terrorism worldwide shot up around the same time.

The consequences of giving terrorists their own country to play with were as predictable as taking a power drill to the bottom of a boat or running a toaster in a bubble bath. The least likely outcome of handing guns to homicidal sociopaths was peace. The most likely was murder. And that was as intended.

The problem that the two-state solution was solving was the existence of Israel; the Jewish Problem.

Spray the two-state solution over an irritating country full of Jews who managed to survive multiple Muslim genocides. Apply and wait for as long as it takes until the Jewish Problem is solved again.

President-elect Donald Trump’s promise to move the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem provides a timely opportunity for the new president to make a sharp break with President Barack Obama’s unwise, unjustified and ultimately ineffective hostility toward America’s closest ally in the turbulent Middle East.

Especially after Obama’s recent decision to abstain from, rather than veto, U.N. Security Council Resolution 2334, which condemned Israeli settlements in absurdly one-sided terms, moving the embassy would send a strong signal to Israel, the region and the world that the United States will once again stand by its allies.

Predictably, critics worry that such a provocative move could have catastrophic effects that include inciting more Palestinian violence, dooming Israeli-Palestinian peace, inflaming the “Arab street” and threatening Israel’s growing private ties to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and other Arab nations.

A Palestinian terrorist rammed a flatbed truck into a group of Israeli soldiers who had just disembarked from a bus adjacent to a popular promenade in southern Jerusalem on Sunday. They were on a sightseeing tour at the time. The massacre, a copy of the vehicular terrorist attacks in Nice and Berlin last year, resulted in the deaths of four Israelis, including three women, and the wounding of at least fifteen others. The terrorist driver was shot dead before he could inflict even more mayhem. Even so, his attack was one of the deadliest in Israel over the last year.

The terrorist, identified as Fadi al-Qanbar, was believed to have lived in an Arab area of east Jerusalem. He had previously served time in an Israeli jail, but nevertheless reportedly managed to buy the truck he used as a killing machine, which even carried Israeli license plates.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, “We know the identity of the attacker, and according to all the signs, he is a supporter of Islamic State. We will overcome this terror, just as we overcame other attacks.” Linking this attack to the ones in Nice and Berlin, he added, “We know there is a succession of attacks, and it could well be that there is a connection between those in France and Berlin — and now in Jerusalem.”

As of the writing of this article, ISIS has not claimed responsibility for the attack. Regardless, the Palestinian terrorist could well have been inspired by an Islamic State magazine, which instructed jihadists how to use large trucks to target “large numbers of kuffar” congregating on streets and at public markets. “The target should be on a road that offers the ability to accelerate to a high speed, which allows for inflicting maximum damage on those in the vehicle’s path,” the magazine advised. “It is imperative that one does not exit his vehicle during the attack. Rather he should remain inside, driving over the already harvested kuffar, and continue crushing their remains until it becomes physically impossible to continue by vehicle.” That is precisely what the terrorist driving the truck into the group of Israeli soldiers did. After running some of them over, he put his truck in reverse to crush them even further.

According to a report on Debkafile, some Palestinians standing nearby “clapped and shouted encouragement to the truck driver.”

Hamas spokesman Abdul-Latif Qanou described the latest terrorist slaughter as a “heroic” act which other Palestinians should emulate, although Hamas did not immediately claim responsibility. Palestinian social media were full of congratulations to the terrorist driver for the “feat” he had accomplished. The following is from an official Fatah Twitter account: “perpetrator of the ramming operation in occupied Jerusalem is the martyr Fadi Qunbar.”