RUTHFULLY YOURS

Under relevant international law, a true state must always possess the following specific qualifications: (1) a permanent population; (2) a defined territory; (3) a government; and (4) the capacity to enter into relations with other states.
While this contingent condition of prior demilitarization of a Palestinian state may at first sound reassuring, it represents little more than a impotent legal expectation.
For one thing, no new state is ever under any obligation to remain “demilitarized,” whatever else it may have actually agreed to during its particular pre-state incarnation.
“The legality of the presence of Israel’s communities the area (Judea and Samaria) stems from the historic, indigenous, and legal rights of the Jewish people to settle in the area, granted pursuant to valid and binding international legal instruments, recognized and accepted by the international community. These rights cannot be denied or placed in question.” — Ambassador Alan Baker, Israeli legal expert.

International law has one overarching debility. No matter how complex the issues, virtually everyone able to read feels competent to offer an authoritative legal opinion. While, for example, no sane person would ever explain or perform cardio-thoracic surgery without first undergoing rigorous medical training, nearly everyone feels competent to interpret complex meanings of the law.

This debility needs to be countered, at least on a case by case basis. In the enduring controversy over Palestinian statehood, there are significant rules to be considered. For a start, on November 29, 2012, the General Assembly voted to upgrade the Palestinian Authority (PA) to the status of a “Nonmember Observer State.”

Although it is widely believed by many self-defined “experts” that this elevation by United Nations has already represented a formal bestowal of legal personality, that belief is incorrect. Under law, at least, “Palestine” – whatever else one might happen to think of “fairness” – remains outside the community of sovereign states.

This juridical exclusion of “Palestine,” whether welcome or not, on selective political grounds, is evident “beyond a reasonable doubt.” The authoritative criteria of statehood that express this particular exclusion are long-standing and without ambiguity. Under relevant international law, a true state must always possess the following specific qualifications: (1) a permanent population; (2) a defined territory; (3) a government; and (4) the capacity to enter into relations with other states.

Moreover, the formal existence of a state is always independent of recognition by other states. According to the 1934 Convention on the Rights and Duties of States (the Montevideo Convention):

“Even before recognition, the state has the right to defend its integrity and independence, to provide for its conservation and prosperity, and consequently to organize itself as it sees fit….”

It follows that even a Palestinian state that would fail to meet codified Montevideo expectations could simply declare otherwise, and then act accordingly, “to defend its integrity and independence….”

More than likely, any such “defending” would subsequently involve incessant war and terror against “Occupied Palestine,” also known as Israel. The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was formed in 1964, three years before there supposedly were any “Israeli Occupied Territories.” What, then, exactly, was the PLO trying to “liberate?”

On Yom Ha’atzmaut, Israeli Independence Day, lessons for our world from theirs
http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/202040/americans-the-almost-chosen-people

When we speak of culture in general, we typically think of fixed roots in the form of memory, custom, and habit. Yet the salient characteristic of the American character is restlessness, as Tocqueville observed. We are journeyers rather than settlers. We are risk-takers, entrepreneurs, and innovators. How then should we think about ourculture?

One approach is to steer clear of the problem and define America as a “propositional nation,” as John Courtney Murray contended. A proposition is something one assents to rationally. Culture, by contrast, is the context in which we perceive things, which we receive from our ancestors and pass down to our descendants. It is pre-rational, instinctive rather than intellectual, a manifestation of who we are rather than what we think. It is the way in which we cannot help but understand the world.

It is one thing to assert that a proposition is true and quite another thing to pledge one’s life, fortune, and sacred honor. The American Revolution is in some ways the strangest conflict in history: There is no other example of prosperous, property-owning people who were free to publish their thoughts and practice their religion taking up arms against the world’s most powerful empire. Four generations later, half a million Northerners died to end slavery.

If America is merely a propositional nation, moreover, then this proposition can be taught to any other nation, like a proof in logic. From Woodrow Wilson to George W. Bush, our attempts to instruct the rest of the world in the American proposition have had baleful consequences, and it behooves us to consider the side of being American that cannot be learned but rather must be lived—what we call culture.

American culture is so singular that the general concept of culture we inherit from the Old World does not suffice to cover it. Critic Russell Kirk refers us to T.S. Eliot, who wrote:

[T]he term culture … includes all the characteristic activities and interests of a people: Derby Day, Henley Regatta, Cowes, the 12th of August, a cup final, the dog races, the pin table, the dart board, Wensleydale cheese, boiled cabbage cut into sections, beetroot in vinegar, 19th century Gothic churches, and the music of Elgar.

These are the sorts of quaint things American tourists used to look for in England, that is, when England still had them. If we Americans had things like that, we would put them in a theme park. I do not mean to deprecate Eliot. His is the common-sense way to think about culture, and to deviate from it takes us into deep water. Nonetheless, Eliot’s definition does not well suit the American example.

For Martin Heidegger, our Being-in-the-World, or Dasein, always occupies a particular space in a particular temporality. “Heritage” for Heidegger refers back to something like an autochthonous peasant archetype. In his later years Heidegger withdrew to a cabin in the Black Forest to write dithyrambs to the German Heimatendangered by the encroachment of technology. Americans do not stay in any one place long enough to accrete the Bodenständigkeit, or rootedness, that Heidegger sought at the core of our Being. No wonder Heidegger hated America.

Recently Alexander Gauland, the deputy chair of the ultra-right Allianz für Deutschland, called Americans “a people thrown together by chance without an authentic culture.” It is true that we do not have a high culture to compare to Europe’s, for all the good that did them. We cannot claim a national poet with the stature of a Dante, Shakespeare, or Goethe. Not until the 1920s did we discoverMoby-Dick when critics in search of an American classic rescued Melville’s work from 70 years of obscurity. We have Walt Whitman, the butt of innumerable parodies, and Hemingway, the subject of a famous imitation contest.

America nonetheless has a distinct national culture, with a national epic, a national poem, and a national place.

It is instructive to start in medias res, with the most original and influential work of American fiction, Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, whence “all modern American literature comes,” as Hemingway said. Its flaws shed light on our problem as much as do its virtues. Twain devised the most arresting image in American literature: the runaway boy Huck and the escaped slave Jim, fragile and free on the great river. The evocative opening of the novel, though, eventually fades into a disappointing sequel to Tom Sawyer. “The book ends so lamely,” Harold Bloom rightly observes. Nonetheless, we forgive Mark Twain his sin of literary construction and love the work. Our critics, I think, misunderstand why. Lionel Trilling thinks Huck is a “servant of the river-god,” while Bloom cannot decide whether Huck is a “wholly secular being” or an “American Orphic.” This seems far-fetched. What fascinates us in Huckleberry Finn is not the plot but the image of the journey itself. Twain gives us the most poignant picture of a journey ever imagined by an American: the vulnerability of the two fugitives against the backdrop of the great current that bisects the American heartland.

“What kind of talk is this, ‘punishing Israel?’ Are we a vassal state of yours? Are we a banana republic? Are we 14-year-olds who, if we misbehave, get our wrists slapped? Let me tell you whom this Cabinet comprises. It is composed of people whose lives were marked by resistance, fighting and suffering.”

These were the words of Prime Minister Menachem Begin delivered to the U.S. President Ronald Reagan in December 1981. Begin, one of the greatest leaders and fighters of our times, knew the meaning of true independence.

He knew that it was not about firecrackers, dancing in the streets or lighting flames. It was about standing up for yourself and submitting to no man. Declaring to the world, “this is where we stand.”

Israel’s independence was bought at a high price in Jewish blood, fighting first against the might of the British Empire and then against five powerful Arab armies which sought its destruction.

For 68 years Israelis have fought again and again to defend their independence against enemies who would subjugate their country. No other nation has struggled so long and so hard, surrounded by such unyielding hostility.

But in making their stand, Israelis have never had to stand alone. From the beginning, Jews from the U.K., the U.S., Europe, Australia, South Africa and around the world rallied to the fight for independence under the glorious banner of the Mahal. Among them were non-Jews, including a Christian soldier from my own regiment.

In the years since, and even today, the courage of their young successors, the “lone soldiers”’ of the diaspora, travelling thousands of miles from the safety of their homes to stand and fight here to preserve Israel’s independence, inspires awe and humility. As Begin said: “This is the land of their forefathers, and they have a right and a duty to support it.”

Oxford University’s undergraduate law professors are providing “trigger warnings” before lessons about rape or violent crime so that students who might be made uncomfortable by such material can leave.

“Before the lectures on sexual offences — which included issues such as rape and sexual assault — we were warned that the content could be distressing, and were then given the opportunity to leave if we needed to,” one student said, according to an article in the Daily Mail.

This is, obviously, insane. Students are in law classes, presumably, because they have an interest in potentially pursuing a career in law. And the people in these fields — prosecutors, judges, attorneys, etc. — certainly cannot just up and leave the courtroom any time they feel uncomfortable.

After all, law jobs, by their very nature, in large part deal with things that are illegal — things which, by nature, are often uncomfortable or even downright disturbing. If you can’t handle talking about it in class, then you can’t handle those careers.

Now, this sounds like it should be obvious, but Oxford is far from the first place we’ve seen this idiotic logic at play. In fact, Harvard Law School professor Jeannie Suk wrote a piece in The New Yorker back in 2014 explaining that “student organizations representing women’s interests” have been so successful in pushing the idea that students “should not feel pressured to attend or participate in class sessions that focus on the law of sexual violence” that “even seasoned teachers of criminal law, at law schools across the country, have confided that they are seriously considering dropping rape law and other topics related to sex and gender violence . . . because they are afraid of injuring others or being injured themselves.”

This isn’t just annoying or stupid — it’s actually dangerous. After all, rape law’s being too “triggering” to teach will result in fewer people knowing how to prosecute rapists. It’s putting the misguided, abstract idea of achieving an emotional “safe space” above actual safety in a real, tangible way. Clearly, it’s time to wake up and take a look at our priorities — fast.

— Katherine Timpf is a reporter for National Review.

This past week, a group of young right-wing activists, including myself, met for a discussion with former MK Moshe Feiglin, in which he spoke about his goals when creating his new political party, Zehut.

Feiglin described the reality the way he saw it, as he often does, by describing the “horrible” state of affairs and claiming that the State of Israel was in very bad shape. He, of course, then promised that he was the only person who could change things.

“Is this the State of Israel that we dreamed of for 2,000 years?” he said.In the time leading up to Independence Day, I could not help but cringe when hearing such a description of reality.

I also could not help but answer with a resounding yes! This is indeed the state we dreamed of for 2,000 years, for in the past 68, Israel has grown into nothing less than a miracle.

ISRAEL’S POPULATION grew from a mere 800,000 in 1948 to an impressive eight million by 2013. This growth was caused by two things that were, by themselves, miraculous.

For a western country, Israel has a high birthrate, with 3.04 per woman in 2012, compared to 1.88 in America, 2.0 in France and 1.38 in Germany.

Since birthrates are usually a reflection of hope for the future, the fact that people living in war-torn Israel are still investing in birth is great testament that a nation whose national anthem is called “The Hope” is still living by this important principle.

The second factor leading to this population growth was Israel’s impressive ability to integrate hundreds of thousands of Jews who immigrated from all around the world.

From Australia to North America, through Brazil, Morocco, Europe, Ethiopia, Iran, Iraq, Yemen, Syria and Asia, Israel has successfully been fulfilling the biblical prophecy of the ingathering of the exiles: “The Lord, your God, will bring back your exiles, and He will have mercy upon you. He will once again gather you from all the nations, where the Lord, your God, had dispersed you.”

From its very beginning, this young and small nation with a fragile economy has been able to bring together people from very different backgrounds into one nation and an impressive, thriving democracy.

Israel is also the only nation in history that has been able to revive a dead language. It is hard to believe that at the beginning of the previous century, Hebrew was used as a language only for prayer and religious study. Today, it is thriving. People speak in Hebrew, sing in Hebrew, joke in Hebrew and even curse in Hebrew. Hebrew is once again a living language.

From 1950 to 2007, the per-capita GDP in Israel grew six-fold. The country’s now-thriving economy is at the center of international innovation, which abounds in Israel not only in hitech, the heart of the so-called start-up nation, but also in academia and defense industries.

As for international relations, things have never been better. Just recently, Israel opened an office at NATO’s headquarters in Brussels. It joined the OECD a few years ago. While relations with the European Union are at times tense, bilateral relations between Israel and European states remain strong: Germany, France, England and the Czech Republic are all led by people who proudly call themselves friends of Israel. Australia and Canada have constantly deepened their ties with Israel, and even a very hostile Obama administration has not been able to hurt the strong bond between the Israeli people and the American people.

ISRAEL IS far from perfect. Its shortcomings span all its sectors. However, one must realize that this is true of every single nation in this world.

There are no nations that are perfect, no states without shortcomings. It is easy for a politician like Feiglin to distort reality by focusing only there and ignoring the incredible advancements of our society. It is also easy for politicians who have never been in a position of power – where they need to compromise on their principles, the way every leader rightfully needs to do in a democracy – to criticize ruling politicians for “not going the whole way.”

One can easily list the problems with our lack of sovereignty in Judea and Samaria, ignoring the silent steps undertaken in order to protect the rights of the Jews living in these areas. One can easily list the problems we have on the Temple Mount, where Jews are robbed of their right to the free practice of religion when they are not allowed to pray.

Yes, there are still many shortcomings.

However, when we come to understand that perfection exists only in utopian fantasies, we quickly realize that when looking at the accomplishments of a government or state, we must judge not the way things are, but the trends that are present. Anyone claiming that Israel’s history has been anything but blessed with positive trends is living in a parallel reality.

There is still a long way to go, but Israel is on the right path.

A person can start working with the system to try and influence change, incremental as it might be, instead of having a “my way or the highway” approach like Feiglin has had ever since entering politics, where he announced he was running for prime minister before he even entered the Knesset as a regular parliamentarian.

Yes, compromise is less appealing, but it is the way things get done. This is how we see slow change happening. A lack of compromise means no change will happen.

Feiglin’s discourse is not very different from the discourse of the Left. People there are also imbued with utopian dreams instead of realistic policies. They like to blame Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for everything bad in this world, as if he were responsible even for the weather. Yet a worse aspect of this discourse is that it shows a great deal of ungratefulness for what we have accomplished as a nation in such a short time.

ONE WEEK ago, we celebrated Holocaust Remembrance Day. This week, we marked Remembrance Day, in which we remembered and thanked the soldiers who sacrificed their lives for us to achieve these great accomplishments, and celebrated Independence Day. The contrast between the two days shows how far our nation has moved forward in only a few decades.

By ignoring our accomplishments, by always asking for more without recognizing what we already have, people are showing a great deal of ungratefulness to all those who sacrificed so much to bring us to where we are today.

Asking for us to keep moving forward is a great thing. Ignoring our accomplishments turns us into incredibly ungrateful beings. ■

The writer is an attorney and a former legislative adviser to the Knesset’s coalition chairman. He previously served in a legal capacity at the Foreign Ministry. He is a graduate of McGill University Law School and Hebrew University’s master’s program in public policy.
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In a week or two, Israel will again be the focus of a well-dressed international lynch mob. According to news reports, US President Barack Obama intends to use the so-called Middle East Quartet, comprised of the US, the UN, Russia and the EU, as a tool to ratchet up Western condemnations of the Jewish state.

The report is expected to include even more expansive assaults on Israel for refusing to deny Jews our civil rights in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria.

It will likely ratchet up the false claims that have already been made to the effect that Jewish cities, towns, neighborhoods and homes beyond the 1949 armistice lines are illegal and a threat to world peace.

The Quartet statement will also brutalize Israel for lawfully destroying illegal construction projects undertaken by the EU in Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem. The EU engages in illegal building in order to subvert Israel’s rule of law and enfeeble the IDF.

Around the same time that Obama has scheduled his newest assault on Israel, France is expected to convene a so-called peace conference. The stated purpose of the conference is to restart the fraudulent peace process which the Palestinians killed nearly 16 years ago and have never agreed to resuscitate.

The novel aspect of the French conference, which neither Israeli nor Palestinian diplomats will attend, is that other than the misleading headlines referring to their powwow as a peace conference, the French are making no effort to hide that the sole purpose of their initiative is to condemn Israel.

The purpose of the conference is to provide diplomatic cover for the French government to recognize a state called Palestine. When then French foreign minister Laurent Fabius announced the conference in January, he said that whether or not the conference leads to peace, France will recognize “Palestine.” And just to be clear, the “Palestine” France intends to recognize will be located in land controlled by Israel and to which Israel has a valid claim of sovereignty.

In the face of the approaching international onslaught, thought leaders and politicians on the Left insist that Israel must act. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, they argue, must participate in the Paris conference, and he must announce an initiative now to vacate Judea and Samaria, or to stop allowing Jews to exercise their legal right to build homes in these areas and in Jerusalem.

As every Tom, Dick, and Harrietta tries to talk about climate change and the massive wildfire that destroyed a good portion of the northern Alberta city of Fort McMurray — in the heart of the oil sands region, there is unscientific nonsense being spewed all over the place.

Take Elizabeth Kolbert’s article at The New Yorker. Apparently Kolbert won the “2015 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction.”

Kolbert claims the following: “April was exceptionally mild.”

Wrong. Wrong. And even more wrong.

Here are the mean daily maximum and mean daily temperatures for the month of April at Fort McMurray since records began in 1916, with the 2016 data highlighted in red.

Not only was April 2016 not “exceptionally mild,” it was colder than April 2015 and quite a bit colder than many other Aprils in the past several decades.

What is happening instead is that Fort Mac’s annual average temperature is changing rapidly over time.

Jan Poller, my trusted friend and e-pal brought this to my attention….rsk
The Ecology and Justice Forum In Global Studies And Languages Presents: Is Islamophobia accelerating Global Warming?
Sponsored by Global Studies and Laguages, Global Borders Research Collaboration, MIT Anthropology

Ghassan Hage Ghassan Hage is Future Generation Professor in the School of Philosophy, Anthropology and Social Inquiry, University of Melbourne Introduced By Bettina Stoetzer, Global Studies And Languages

Mon. May 9

This talk examines the relation between Islamophobia as the dominant form of racism today and the ecological crisis. It looks at the three common ways in which the two phenomena are seen to be linked: as an entanglement of two crises, metaphorically related with one being a source of imagery for the other and both originating in colonial forms of capitalist accumulation. The talk proposes a fourth way of linking the two: an argument that they are both emanating from a similar mode of being, or enmeshment, in the world, what is referred to as ‘generalised domestication.’ Ghassan Hage has held many visting positions across the world including in Harvard, University of Copenhagen, Ecoles des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and American University of Beirut. He works in the comparative anthropology of nationalism, multiculturalism, diaspora and racism and on the relation between anthropology, philosophy and social and political theory. His most well-known work is White Nation: Fantasies of white supremacy in a multicultural society (Routledge 2000). His is also the author of Alter-Politics: Critical Anthropology and the Radical Imaginary (Melbourne University Press 2015). He is currently working on a book titled Is Islamophobia Accelerating Global Warming? and has most recently published a piece in American Ethnologist, titled: “Etat de Siege. A Dying Domesticating Colonialism?” (2016) that engages with the contemporary “refugee crisis” in Europe and beyond.

The talk is free and open to the public.

Last year, Israeli President Rivlin denounced Israel as a “sick society” and accused Jews of having “forgotten how to be decent human beings.” Now Major General Yair Golan, the military’s deputy chief of staff, accused Israel of resembling Nazi Germany in a speech delivered on the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Israel is a sick society only to the extent that, like a fish, it rots from the heads of men like Rivlin and Golan. It is a sickness comes from members of the political elite whose views are fundamentally at odds with those of the people. The hatred that Rivlin and Golan, the beneficiaries of privilege and protektsia, feel for ordinary Israelis is unrelenting in its ugliness.

The Jewish State is fundamentally divided between two groups, its people and its leaders. Israel’s population is defined by a diverse mix of Middle Eastern and Russian Jewish refugees along with large numbers of Orthodox Jews. These groups tend to have more conservative views and their influence makes it very difficult for the left to win elections the way that it once used to.

Rather than adapting to Israel’s changing demographics, its elites have poured on the hate. From Dudu Topaz to Yair Garbuz, a Labor rally can’t seem to pass by without slurs aimed at Middle Eastern Jews. At last year’s election, Garbuz ranted, “How did this handful quietly become a majority?”

There was nothing quiet about it. But inside a leftist bubble of power and privilege the revelation that the majority of Israelis have very different views than they do has been deeply traumatic and shocking. Prime Minister Netanyahu is on his third straight term, but the Deep State of the elites is unwilling to be dislodged by mere democratic elections. And the Deep State controls leadership roles across the government from the military through the judiciary, not to mention academia, non-profits and culture.

It’s been a long time since this elite has been optimistic. Instead its rhetoric is divisive and nasty; it’s marked by paranoid suspicions about the ordinary Israelis who have left them behind. Hostile remarks, like those by Rivlin and Golan, express an undemocratic distaste toward the average Israeli.

The majority of Israel’s Jewish population now consists of refugees from the Middle East. This is a population with fundamentally different views when it comes to fighting back against the Islamic supremacism which they and their ancestors had lived under and eventually fled. It feels no guilt over the death of terrorists. It does not mourn the Jihadists of the Nakba who headed for the border in the expectation that the Jews in Israel would meet with a final Holocaust at the hands of the five invading Muslim armies, not to mention the forces of the Muslim Brotherhood. Instead it feels a moral pride.

The World Happiness Report 2016 Update ranks Israel (Jews and Arabs) 11th of 158 countries evaluated for the United Nations. Israel also shines as No. 5 of the 36 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries on the OECD’s Life Satisfaction Index—ahead of the U.S., the U.K. and France.

How can this be so? Israelis live in a hostile and volatile neighborhood, engaged in an endless conflict with the Palestinians and under the threat of nuclear annihilation by Iran. If you crunch the different components of these indexes, Israel falls much further down the lists. It ranks only 24th in GDP per capita, and comes in at No. 30 of the 36 OECD countries on security and personal safety. Israel has only the 17th-highest per capita income in the world.

But Israelis do not rank as stupid on any index. Israel was the fifth-most innovative country in the 2015 Bloomberg Innovation Index, and a 2014 OECD study ranked it fourth in the percentage of adults with a higher education.

So what explains the Israeli paradox? Do Israelis only become stupid when thinking about their own happiness?

The explanation probably lies in indicators not considered in standard surveys. For instance, a new study by my organization, the Jewish People Policy Institute, looked at pluralism in Israel and found that 83% of Israel’s Jewish citizens consider their nationality “significant” to their identity. Eighty percent mention that Jewish culture is also “significant.” More than two-thirds (69%) mention Jewish tradition as important. Strong families and long friendships stretching back to army service as young adults, or even to childhood, also foster a sense of well-being. All of these factors bolster the Jewish state’s raison d’être.

This year, May 12 will mark the 68th anniversary of Israel’s founding, when a nation was created against all odds. The enormous challenges never eroded Israelis’ energy, or hope. CONTINUE AT SITE