BBC Rewriting Mid-East History

[Teddy Bear]

An extremely anti-Israel article on the BBC website today by Martin Asser, which is apparently going to be part of a series, who wants to rewrite the causes of the Mid-East conflict in relation to Israel and its neighbours. It asserts that the 6 day war was started by Israel because of its need for water.

Asser (aptly named) seems not to have been around during this war. Just to think that Israel would have gone against fantastic odds taking on the surrounding Arab nations, outnumbered in everything, with little hope of survival, to increase its water supply. But this is what he wants you to believe.

This particular sentence is the measure of it

"Israel says the 1967 war was forced upon it by the imminent threat of hostile Arab countries and there was no intention to occupy more land or resources.

But the war's outcome left Israel occupying an area not far short of the territory claimed by the founders of the Zionist movement at the beginning of the 20th Century."

"Israel says"? How exactly does a country speak? It's a matter of historical record that the surrounding Arab nations were massing on the borders, moving men and arms into position, with the aggressive rhetoric of their intention.

What total bullshit is this?

Obstacles to peace: Water
By Martin Asser
BBC News

The BBC News website is publishing a series of articles about the attempts to achieve peace in the Middle East and the main obstacles. Today, Martin Asser looks at the central issue of water.

The Arab-Israeli dispute is a conflict about land - and maybe just as crucially the water which flows through that land.

The Six-Day War in 1967 arguably had its origins in a water dispute - moves to divert the River Jordan, Israel's main source of drinking water.

Years of skirmishes and sabre rattling culminated in all-out war, with Israel quadrupling the territory it controlled and gaining complete control of double the resources of fresh water.

A country needs water to survive and develop.

In Israel's history, it has needed water to make feasible the influx of huge numbers of Jewish immigrants.

Therefore, on the margins of one of the most arid environments on earth, the available water system had to support not just the indigenous population, mainly Palestinian peasant farmers, but also hundreds of thousands of immigrants.

In addition to their sheer numbers, citizens of the new state were intent on conducting water-intensive commercial agricultural such as growing bananas and citrus fruits.

Shared water

Israel says the 1967 war was forced upon it by the imminent threat of hostile Arab countries and there was no intention to occupy more land or resources.

But the war's outcome left Israel occupying an area not far short of the territory claimed by the founders of the Zionist movement at the beginning of the 20th Century.

In 1919, the Zionist delegation at the Paris Peace Conference said the Golan Heights, Jordan valley, what is now the West Bank, as well as Lebanon's river Litani were "essential for the necessary economic foundation of the country. Palestine must have... the control of its rivers and their headwaters".

Photo journal: Water use
In the 1967 war Israel gained exclusive control of the waters of the West Bank and the Sea of Galilee, although not the Litani.

Those resources - the West Bank's mountain aquifer and the Sea of Galilee - give Israel about 60% of its fresh water, a million cubic metres (1 MCM) per year.

Heated arguments rage about the rights to the mountain aquifer. Israel, and Israeli settlements, take about 80% of the aquifer's flow, leaving the Palestinians with 20%.

Israel says the proportion of water it uses has not changed substantially since the 1950s. The rain which replenishes the aquifer may fall on the occupied territory, but the water does flow down into pre-1967 Israel.

But the Palestinians say they are prevented from using their own water resources by a belligerent military power, forcing hundreds of thousands of people to buy water from their occupiers at inflated prices.

Moreover, Israel allocates its citizens, including those living in settlements in the West Bank deemed illegal under international law, with between three and five times more water than the Palestinians.

This, Palestinians say, is crippling to their agricultural economy.

With water consumption outstripping supply in both Israel and the Palestinian territories, Palestinians say they are always the first community to be rationed as reserves run dry, with the health problems that entails.

Fruitless discussions

Not surprisingly, during the era of Arab-Israeli peacemaking in the 1990s, water rights became one of the trickiest areas of discussion.

They were set aside to be dealt with in the "final status" Israel-Palestinian talks, which were never concluded.

REPLENISHABLE RESOURCES
Sources in million cubic metres per year:
Sea of Galilee - 700
Mountain Aquifer - 370
Coastal Aquifer (Gaza) - 320
Other - 410
Israeli allocations:

56% agriculture
38% household
6% industry
(Source: Israeli government)

Meanwhile, Israeli settlement activity continued in some of most sensitive water areas in the West Bank, despite Israel's undertaking not to act in ways that prejudice final status talks.

Stalled negotiations on Syria's dispute with Israel over the Golan Heights - occupied by Israel in 1967 and annexed in 1980 - also foundered on water-related issues.

Syria wants an Israeli withdrawal to 5 June 1967 borders, allowing Syria access to the Jordan and Yarmouk rivers. Israel wants to use boundaries dating back to 1923 and the British Mandate, which give the areas to Israel.

By contrast, the Jordan-Israel treaty of 1994 produced notable agreement on use of wells in the Wadi Araba area in the south and sharing the Yarmouk in the north.

In the 21st Century Israel has tried to solve the Palestinian problem unilaterally, pulling troops and settlers from Gaza and building a barrier around West Bank areas with the largest concentration of Palestinians.

Although Israel says this is a temporary security measure, the barrier encroaches deep onto occupied territory - especially areas of high water yield.

Better future?

Middle Eastern rhetoric often portrays the issue of water as an existential, zero-sum conflict - casting either Israel as a malevolent sponge sucking up Arab water resources, or the implacably hostile Arabs as threatening Israel's very existence by denying life-giving water.

Former UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali may not have been right when he said in the 1990s that the next war in the Middle East would be about water not politics, but a future war over water is not out of the question.

Demand for water already outstrips supply, requirements are rising and current supply is unsustainable.

Hydrologists say joint solutions need to be found, because water requirements are interdependent and water resources cross political boundaries.

That necessitates improved conservation and recycling by both sides.

Improving the political atmosphere would allow supplies to be piped from neighbouring countries. Also crucial, experts say, are investment in desalination and other technical advances.

Such solutions are desperately needed in the medium to long term. In other words, Israel and the Palestinians must work together, because they cannot survive as combatants.

[Teddy Bear]

Asshole Asser continues in the above manner with his latest offering 'Obstacles to peace: Refugees'

All the Arab propaganda is presented as 'the fact' while the Israeli view, backed up by historical evidence, is presented as 'denial' as though it it Israel who wants to rewrite history.

Without going into the facts and figures that dispute this article, simply ask yourselves this: - Is it credible that the small number of Jews in Israel present in 1948 would have purposefully taken on the might of the surrounding Arab nations with little more than ancient or homemade weaponry available to them if they had a choice? It is only the fact that their backs were against the wall, or in this case - the sea, with the Arabs intent on pushing them into it, that their spirit triumphed both then - and in later wars. I am sickened by the ignorance or total insidiousness of Asser displayed here.

Obstacles to peace: Refugees
The BBC News website is publishing a series of articles about the attempts to achieve peace in the Middle East and the main obstacles. Today, Martin Asser looks at the emotive issue of the Palestinian refugees.

Refugee camps of 1948 became permanent residences in exile

Forty years after the Middle East war of 1967 and nearly 60 since the establishment of Israel, there is no Arab-Israeli issue that remains as utterly divisive as the fate of Palestinian refugees.

In the course of Israel's creation in 1948 and its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, more than half the Arabs of pre-1948 Palestine are thought to have been displaced.

Today there are millions of Palestinians living in exile from homes and land their families had inhabited for generations.

Many still suffer the legacy of their dispossession: destitution, penury, insecurity.

Palestinian historians, and some Israelis, call 1948 one of the biggest, most comprehensive examples of ethnic cleansing in history - perpetrated by the Haganah (later the Israeli Defence Forces) and armed Jewish gangs.

Official Israeli history, by contrast, says most Palestinian refugees left to avoid battle or at the behest of Arab leaders, though it admits a "handful" of expulsions and unauthorised killings.

What is undisputed is that the refugees' fate is excluded from most Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts because, given a right of return, their numbers endanger the future of the world's only Jewish state.

The issue of the refugees is therefore seen by many Israelis as an existential one.

Massive displacement

Four million UN-registered Palestinian refugees trace origins to the 1948 exodus; 750,000 people belong to families displaced in 1967 - many for the second time.

REGISTERED REFUGEES

Jordan: 1,835,704
Syria: 434,896
West Bank/Gaza: 1,699,025
Lebanon: 405,425
Total: 4,375,050
Source: UN (31 March 2006)

Palestinian advocacy group Badil says another million and a half hail from pre-1948 Palestine but were not UN-registered, while an additional 274,000 were internally displaced inside Israel after 1948, and 150,000 were displaced in the occupied territories after 1967.

That makes more than six million people, one of the biggest displaced populations in the world.

Israel steadfastly argues that all refugees - and it disputes the numbers - should relinquish any aspirations to return to what is now its territory, and instead be absorbed by Arab host countries or by a future Palestinian state.

It disavows moral responsibility by arguing that 800,000 Mizrahi Jews were displaced from Arab countries between 1945 and 1956 (most of whom settled in Israel) and insists Palestinians left willingly.

But that view is at odds with UN General Assembly Resolution 194 and Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Resolution 194 asserts the refugees' unconditional right of return to live at peace in their old homes or to receive compensation for their losses.

Disputed status

Whatever the rights and wrongs of their cause, the practicality of return and questions of moral justice, in Mid-East diplomacy the refugees' fate has been largely ignored.

This has been achieved by a dual process pegging all solutions to the Arab-Israeli conflict to the 1967 war, and discounting the events of 1948 as a element of the conflict.

Israel has effectively deployed a number of arguments to justify this, such as saying that it is the only Jewish state, the refuge of Jews from around the world, while there are 22 Arab countries where the refugees could go.

It also points out that UN General Assembly resolutions have no force under international law and says the unassimilated refugee population has been held hostage by frontline Arab states waiting for Israel's destruction.

The diplomatic focus on 1967 has been advantageous for Israel: territory occupied at that time is regarded as the entire problem, and solutions can therefore be limited to dividing up that land.

This is problematic for Palestinians, however, because it sidelines the Nakba, the "catastrophe" of 1948 - an issue that for them lies at the heart of the conflict.

Demographic prerogative

Palestinians accuse Israel of a kind of "Nakba-denial", absolving itself of liability, but thereby condemning itself to perpetual conflict with its Arab neighbours.

Israel vigorously denies such a characterisation. Official histories justify what happened in 1948 by saying the new Jewish state was threatened with annihilation by invading Arab armies.

But so-called revisionist Israeli historians say Israel's founding prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, exaggerated the Arab threat, so he could implement a covert plan to expel Palestinian civilians and grab as much of the former Palestine as possible.

Demography - the need to have a large majority of Jews to sustain a Jewish state - has certainly been a key concern for Israel since its foundation.

Under a 1947 UN-sanctioned plan to partition Palestine, Israel would have been established on 55% of the former territory, without a significant transfer of population, the Jews in the territory would have scarcely have exceeded the Arab population there.

The 1948 war ended with Israel in control of 78% of the former Palestine, with a Jewish-Arab ratio of 6:1.

The equation brought security for Jewish Israelis, but emptied hundreds of Palestinian villages and towns of 700,000 inhabitants - the kernel of the Palestinian refugee problem today.

With the justification of not wanting to jeopardise its Jewish majority, Israel has kept Palestinian refugees and their descendants out of negotiations on a settlement to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

But for most Palestinians, their fate remains an open wound, unless there is a Middle East peace deal that acknowledges what happened to the refugees.

[Teddy Bear]

Melanie Phillips writes an excellent article today which gives much of the real events surrounding that which is put forth above.

May 22, 2007
The war against Israel (14)
The past few days have witnessed two egregious additions on British television to the demonisation of Israel and the consequent furtherance of Jew-hatred. The first was a Channel Four ‘documentary’ about Jerusalem, presented by Paddy Ashdown. The second, also on Channel Four, was an attempt by Rod Liddle to look at whether the gulf between Israel and the Palestinians could ever be bridged.

I had a particular and personal interest in the Ashdown documentary. This is because I was originally approached to present it. The independent production company seemed very keen that I should do so. I told them that Channel Four would never permit me to front such a programme. This is because I support Israel’s right to exist, and since I am a Jew am therefore considered to be hopelessly biased; the only person Channel Four would consider objective, I suggested, would be someone who hated Israel and was either ignorant of or would misrepresent its history. Lo and behold, when the proposal with my name on it got to the Channel Four commissioning editor it suddenly turned into ‘Sorry, but it’s become a different kind of programme’. Well, waddya know.

So what viewers saw instead was Ashdown’s view of Jerusalem, and duly vicious it was. It was a melange of the usual ghastly libels. Israel was racist; the Palestinians were the innocent victims of Israeli perfidy. Carol Gould has written a passionate critique of the programme here which leaves little more to add.

I didn’t see the Liddle programme but I did read his preview article in the Sunday Times. Now I put Liddle, who describes himself as a supporter of Israel, in a different camp from Ashdown. His piece nevertheless gave a venomously false and unfair impression. I myself have little time for the attitudes of many American-born settlers, some of whom are a disgrace to the Jewish people. It is however tiresome when people focus on the settlers as a paradigm of the Israel/Palestinian impasse. They are not. Their attitudes are vastly different from the overwhelming majority of Israelis; and the impasse, which was not created by the settlements but by a century of Arab resistance to the Jews’ return to their ancient homeland, will not be solved by their removal. Focusing on the settlers deepens the gross failure of the west to understand that the Middle East tragedy is not a dispute over the division of a piece of land, but over the enduring aim of the usurper Arabs who violently colonised that land to obliterate from it, for the second time in history, the Jews for whom it was originally their own nation state.

And this gets to the real problem with Liddle’s piece, and it is surely at the very the heart of the problem of western hostility to Israel. For Liddle’s piece rested on a particular false assumption which I put down to an ignorance which is widespread. It is an ignorance about the history of Israel, and in particular the land known as the West Bank. People assume Israel itself was an artificial creation resulting from Holocaust guilt, when a load of European Jews were transplanted into a land owned for millennia by Palestinian Arabs. That itself is false. Israel was the nation state of the Jews centuries before the Arabs took it by force, and an unbroken Jewish presence remained in Jerusalem and other cities, some of which, indeed, had a Jewish majority.

And even if people don’t make this false assumption about Israel itself, they certainly believe – and Liddle’s article rested on this premise — that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank is illegal and illegitimate because Israel has no claim to that land which it has, in Liddle’s own incendiary word, ‘stolen’ from the Palestinians whose land it rightfully was. The animus against Israel’s occupation of this territory after the 1967 war is therefore not really about the behaviour or attitudes of the settlers or the Israeli military. It is based on the perception of gross injustice – of a land that has been stolen from its rightful owners. It is not surprising therefore that people with perfectly decent instincts are enraged by the continued ‘occupation’ of the West Bank. But they have been led to believe something that is not true.

For a start, Israel’s occupation of this territory is perfectly legal and legitimate as an act of self defence, after a war of aggression against it in 1967, against an enemy that refused to abandon its aggression. But at a deeper level still, the idea that Israel had no locus in this territory until 1967 is simply false. This West Bank land was never owned by the Palestinians. It was part of the post-Ottoman Empire Mandate administered by Britain until Israel’s creation in 1948. Following the war of extermination waged by the Arabs against the fledgling Israel at its creation, Judea and Samaria – as they then were – were illegally occupied by Jordan, and became ‘the West Bank’ as a result.

Furthermore, and even more significant, Judea and Samaria were part of Mandatory Palestine, within which Britain was enjoined to re-establish a Jewish national home. That’s right – the ‘West Bank’ was part of the territory to which the Jews had such a strong historical claim that Britain and the League of Nations decided they should be restored to it. It might astonish Rod Liddle to learn that Hebron, for example, is actually one of the four most sacred Jewish cities. Jews lived there continuously for some 38 centuries — Abraham settled there some 1800 years before Christ – until they were driven out by an Arab pogrom. In 1929, Palestinian Arabs committed a massacre in Hebron in which more than 60 Jews were murdered. Babies were beheaded, rabbis were castrated and there were incidents of rape, torture and mutilation with hands and fingers torn off apparently to rob the bodies of jewellery. The atrocity was so severe that the surviving Jews were evacuated, although some later returned and lived there until the Arab riots in 1936 finally ethnically cleansed this sacred place of its Jews.

To be told that Hebron is a place where Jews have no claim is therefore nauseating beyond belief. The fact is that Hebron and many other places to which the Jews could lay rightful claim were either renounced by the Zionist leadership, which was always prepared to compromise and give up territorial claims in order to get a small piece of the Jews’ inheritance restored to them, or were lost in battle. Before anyone gets the wrong idea (again), let me reiterate that I do not advocate Israel’s retention of the whole of Judea and Samaria. I have always thought it was not in Israel’s interests to retain it. But it is very important that the world should realise that Israel has a legitimate claim to it, and yet it has been and still is prepared to give up territory to which it has a right, if the outcome is that Israel can finally be allowed to exist in peace. It is very important that people come to understand that – whatever legitimate criticisms may be levelled at aspects of Israel’s behaviour – its core claim is one of justice, and the way this has been misrepresented is profoundly unjust. Indeed, it is monstrous.

I spoke a little about these myths of injustice in a talk that I gave recently. This is what I said:

The first core myth that Israel is the artificial creation of Holocaust guilt which displaced the rightful Arab owners of Palestine by European Jews. This is totally untrue. The Jewish nation ruled what later became known as Palestine for hundreds of years — almost two millennia before Islam was even invented in the seventh century and the Arabs invaded. And subsequently, during the long centuries of occupation, the Jews retained an unbroken presence in the land.

This recognition was fundamental to the Balfour Declaration in 1917 which committed the British to re-establishing the Jewish national home in Palestine. The British government’s 1922 White Paper on Palestine made the point that Jewish rights in Palestine were not a gift from anyone:

n order that [Palestine’s Jewish] community should have the best prospect of free development and provide a full opportunity for the Jewish people to display its capacities, it is essential that it should know that it is in Palestine as of right and not on sufferance. That is the reason why it is necessary that the existence of a Jewish National Home in Palestine should be internationally guaranteed, and that it should be formally recognised to rest upon ancient historic connection.

The fact is that there never was an independent state of Palestine. Judea was renamed Palestine when the Romans conquered it to erase its Jewish history. And the period of Arab rule was actually very short, lasting less than one century. During the following centuries Palestine was under protracted periods of Islamic rule, largely through the Turkish or Byzantine empire which was brought to an end when the Turks were defeated in the First World War. But from the time the Jews of Judea were conquered and exiled, apart from the Jews who remained in Palestine the non-Jews who lived there — who we are told were the ancestors of the Palestinian Arabs who were displaced in 1948 after 1000 years of rule — were actually descended from Latins, Balkans, Greeks, Syrians, Egyptians, Turks, Armenians, Italians, Persians, Kurds, Germans, Afghans Circassians, Bosnians, Sudanese, Algerians, Tartars, Danes, Russians, Nubians. Oh, and Arabs. The only nation for which Palestine was the historic national home was actually the Jews.

Even under the Mandate, the Arabs in Palestine did not regard themselves as a people seeking nationhood at all. Very few were there before the Jews arrived. The Palestine Royal Commission reported in 1913 that on the road from Gaza to the north, ‘no orange groves orchards or vineyards were to be seen until one reached Yabna … the western part towards the sea was almost a desert… The villages in this area were few and thinly populated’. Sherif Hussein, the guardian of holy places in Arabia, wrote: ‘The resources if the country are still virgin soil and will be developed by the Jewish immigrants’.

Many Arabs moved to Palestine on the back of the prosperity brought by the returning Jews during the first half of the 20th century. Between 1922 and 1947, the Arab population in Palestine rose by 120 per cent. And they regarded themselves as mainly Syrian. In 1937, the Peel Commission found that the Palestinian Arabs and their kinsmen in Syria ‘clung to the principle that Palestine was part of Syria and should never have been cut off from it’.

The idea that the Jews kicked out the indigenous Arabs was also a myth. The Jews bought most of the land from the Arabs —mainly absentee Arab landlords — as many Arab sources have testified, such as King Abdullah of Transjordan, who wrote that the Arabs were ‘as prodigal in selling their land as they are in useless wailing and weeping’.

The second great myth of injustice is that the Jews drove out the Arabs when Israel was created in 1948. But the evidence is that most of them fled because they were told to do so by the Arab world. Various Arab newspapers excoriated those who were abandoning their houses and businesses. Syria’s Prime Minister after 1948, Khaled al Azm, wrote in his memoirs: ‘Since 1948 it is we who demanded the return of the refugees. while it was we who made them leave…We brought disaster upon the refugees, by inviting them and bringing pressure to bear upon them to leave…We have rendered them dispossessed…’ The Economist, never a friend of Israel, reported that the most potent factors for the Arabs’ flight were ‘the announcements made over the air by the Higher Arab Executive urging the Arabs to quit…It was clearly intimated that those Arabs who remained in Haifa and accepted Jewish protection would be regarded as renegades’.

Only very recently a columnist in the Palestinian Authority’s official paper, Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, acknowledged the same thing. The columnist, Mahmud Al-Habbash, wrote that in 1948, Palestinian Arabs left their homes willingly under the instruction of their own Arab leaders and their false promises of a prompt return. And if we’re talking refugees, there were more Jewish refugees from Arab lands than Arabs who fled Israel. Far from being a European imposition, half of Israel’s population came from the Arab world where an estimated 800,000 were forced out during that period alone, almost double the number of 472,000 Arabs who fled Palestine, according to figures from the UN Mediator on Palestine.

In 1946 the British politician Richard Crossman, who served on the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry Regarding the Problems of European Jewry and Palestine, wrote in his book Palestine Mission: ‘Looking at the position of the Palestinian Arab, I have to admit that no western colonist in any other country had done so little harm, or disturbed so little the life of the indigenous people’.

The next great myth of injustice is that Israel has stopped the Palestinians from having their own state. We are about to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Six Day War, from which come all the allegations of the illegal occupation of the disputed territories. We will celebrate the triumph, and indeed the miracle, of that war. But many of us don’t even fully appreciate that the Jewish presence in these territories is entirely legal and indeed just. That doesn’t mean it is desirable — but that’s a quite different matter.

The first thing to note about this myth is that the Jews have always accepted two states in Palestine. A Palestinian Arab state was on offer in 1937, 1948 and 2000, but the Arabs always refused it and chose to try to destroy Israel instead. It’s also important to realise that two states were indeed established. In1920, Britain was given a mandate by the League of Nations to establish a Jewish national home within Palestine. At that time, Palestine included what is now Jordan. One year later Winston Churchill gave almost 80 per cent of Palestine away to King Abdullah to form what is now Jordan. Jordan is, in fact, east Palestine. So when the Palestinian Arabs say they are being expected to accept a tiny fraction of what is rightfully theirs, this is a deep distortion of history. It was the Jews who were forced to accept a tiny fraction of what was rightfully theirs. The Palestinians were given their state. The problem is that they never wanted the Jews to have theirs.

Moreover, Article 25 of the Mandate emphasised that it extended both west and east of the Jordan River: ‘in the territories lying between the Jordan and the eastern boundary of Palestine.’ In other words, the ‘occupied territories’ actually form part of the original land of Palestine within which the British were enjoined to establish the Jewish national home. And rightly so — after all places like Hebron are part of our ancient and sacred history. These territories of Judea, Samaria and Gaza were indeed illegally occupied — but by Jordan and Egypt, between 1948 and 1967. To repeat: I am not suggesting that Israel should retain Judea and Samaria. Indeed, I think it should not. But it is very important to point out that the Jews are entitled to them, according to both law and history, and that the great injustice was done to us.

It is claimed that the Israeli ‘occupation’ is illegal. But it is not. It is legal, not least because Jewish rights there do not derive from Israel’s capture of the territories in 1967. They derive from the Mandate.

This secured Jewish rights to a homeland and to ‘close settlement’ in Palestine. In doing so, it did not distinguish between Judea and Samaria and the rest of western Palestine. Nothing since that time has abrogated those terms for territories that have not yet come under the sovereignty of any state.

Those rights did not expire upon the demise of the League of Nations or the creation of the United Nations. Article 80 of the UN Charter expressly preserves such ‘rights of peoples’ as existed under League mandates.

Eugene V Rostow, who as undersecretary of state during the Johnson administration helped draft the famous UN Security Council Resolution 242 after the 1967 war, has written that Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip constitute portions of the Palestine Mandate trust territory that have not yet been allocated to a sovereign. Rostow, a former dean of Yale Law School, concludes that the Mandate remains in force for those regions. Similarly, contrary to the refrain of various United Nations resolutions, the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention does not render Jewish settlement in these territories unlawful because these territories have never been lawfully part of a sovereign state.

Resolution 242 itself, which states the general principles on which ‘a just and lasting peace in the Middle East’ should be established, leaves the issue of territorial rights open for resolution by agreement among the parties. By stressing the importance of security, highlighting the right of all states to live ‘within secure and recognized boundaries’ and refraining from calling for withdrawal from all the newly acquired territories, Resolution 242 envisions that peace talks will produce borders different from the 1949 armistice lines. If the Security Council had intended that Israel withdraw its forces to a definite line, it could have said so.

We are told repeatedly that Israel is behaving illegally and that it must observe international law. So we should insist that the legal demarcations of the Mandate which have never been rescinded should be recognised and upheld. It is not enough for us to say that Israel was attacked in 1967 and won a famous victory, because it is its behaviour since then that has been called into question. So to defend Israel, we must remind people of this history and this law. We have allowed the running to be made by people who misrepresent both.

There are those who believe that making such facts better known is a waste of time because the vilification of Israel is a prejudice which is not susceptible to reason. Call me an incorrigible optimist (!) but I beg to differ. Much of this madness is based on profound ignorance, which in turn has been fed by an equally profound evil. It is perfectly possible for decent people to be misled into believing indecent things. Only when people are taught the truth will the big lie finally be nailed.

[steevo]

Quite an article by Melanie.

Don't know if you've read this by Carol Gould : www.currentviewpoint.com/cgibin/news.cgi?id=11&command=shownews&newsid=935. I thought it particularly interesting having a little more info why the Zionist movement came about.

Had I known nothing or even very little about Jewish, Zionist and Israeli history I would have come away from former MP Paddy Ashdown's two-hour documentary on British Channel Four's primetime Saturday slot thinking the Jews are just about the most disagreeable race on this planet. Were I an Arab or Muslim I would believe the Jews of the Holy City are the scum of the earth.

In this film he managed to label the Jewish authorities of Jerusalem 'racism masquerading as bureaucracy,' 'discriminatory and inhumane' and 'waging a forty-year war over the Haram al Sharif.'

Once again a British television programme has taken the complex and tragic story of Israel and turned it into a polemic about the endlessly victimised Palestinians and those brutal, hate-filled, despicable Jews....

In the documentary he asserted that after 1967 and the rise of Zionism things went from bad to worse for the Arabs of Jerusalem. Mr Ashdown needs reminding that the birth of the Zionist movement took place in the 1890s after centuries of brutal and relentless European and British anti-Semitism, culminating in the trial of Alfred Dreyfus and the publication of 'J'Accuse' by Emile Zola. Why are these facts never offered in British programming or articles? The original Zionist movement was a noble enterprise led by Jewish Socialists hoping to establish co-operative farms alongside their Arab neighbours. Furthermore Jews have lived in the Holy Land for thousands of years and are not new, irritating arrivals, as is so widely promulgated by the mass media and the anti-Zionist New Left.

[Teddy Bear]

Actually Melanie links to Carol's article in her own above, I just neglected to include it. Glad you found it.

Carol's been on Doughty Street a few times as well in a friday evening programme they were running.

[Teddy Bear]

Jeremy Bowen has also been rewriting history to fit the BBC spin. Since this event is in living memory for so many people he is actually highlighting BBC bias in this sphere. Here is his 'take' on things followed by an article from Honest Reporting about it. Notice in Bowen's article he shows a map with the land that Israel took following the 6 day war. no mention of how much was returned following peace negotiations with Egypt and Jordan.

How 1967 defined the Middle East
By Jeremy Bowen
BBC Middle East editor


To understand what is happening between Israel and the Palestinians now, you have to understand what happened in the Middle East war of 1967.

It took only six days for Israel to smash the armed forces of Egypt, Jordan and Syria but over the last 40 years, the legacy of the war has shaped the conflict into what it is today.

The war made 250,000 more Palestinians - and more than 100,000 Syrians - into refugees. No peace is possible in the Middle East without solving their problems.

Israel became an occupier.

See a map of land taken by Israel during the 1967 war
It captured the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip from Egypt, the Golan Heights from Syria, and the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan.

Israel had another, very serious, war with Syria and Egypt in 1973, but increasingly the main Arab thrust against Israel came from Palestinian groups, led by Yasser Arafat's PLO.

For Palestinians, the lesson of the humiliating defeat suffered by the Arab frontline states in 1967 was that no-one else was going to do their fighting for them.

The failure of Arab nationalism in 1967 was also a major factor in the early development of political Islam. The mosques began providing the answers to questions that the secular strongmen could not convincingly answer.

Spoiling for a fight

The myth of the 1967 Middle East war was that the Israeli David slew the Arab Goliath. It is more accurate to say that there were two Goliaths in the Middle East in 1967. The Arabs, taken together, had big armed forces, but they were not ready for combat.

The Jewish Goliath had never been in better shape, and knew it, or rather its leaders did. In 1967 Israel was a fortress society in a way that it is no longer. There was no television, and generals and politicians did not leak their business to their favourite journalists as they do today.

Israeli civilians, especially in the crisis that led to war, were left to their own fears, which for many people were considerable.

The Jewish state was only 19 years old and the youngest survivors of the Holocaust were barely in their 20s. Egyptian leader Gamal Abdul Nasser's radio station Voice of the Arabs fed their anxieties by broadcasting bloodcurdling threats.

Its chief announcer, Ahmed Said, had the best known voice in the Arab world in the 1960s after Nasser himself and the legendary diva, Umm Kulthum.

Said was famous for lines like this: "We have nothing for Israel except war - comprehensive war... marching against its gangs, destroying and putting an end to the whole Zionist existence... every one of the 100 million Arabs has been living for the past 19 years on one hope - to live to die on the day that Israel is liquidated."

No wonder many Israelis and their friends and relations abroad were scared stiff.

Reports of what Said was saying, and even the broken Hebrew of broadcasts beamed directly into Israel from Cairo, convinced many Israeli civilians that if they were facing enemies that were prepared to annihilate them, then they needed to fight, and fight hard.

The problem for the Arabs was they believed Ahmed Said and his colleagues too, and convinced themselves that an easy victory was coming.

Israel's generals were not taken in. They all knew that the only way that Israel would lose the war would be if the IDF did not turn up.


The Israeli generals... had been training to finish the unfinished business of Israel's independence war of 1948 for most of their careers


So did King Hussein of Jordan, and most of the Egyptian generals - with the exception of the inept and corrupt commander-in-chief, Field Marshal Abd al Hakim Amer.

The Israeli Air Force destroyed the Egyptian air force on the ground on the morning of 5 June 1967 in a surprise attack.

In the next five days Israel confirmed the intelligence estimates of the British and the Americans.

Six weeks earlier, the British cabinet's Joint Intelligence Committee had concluded that an Arab victory was "inconceivable."

Around the same time, the US Joint Chiefs of Staff said Israel would be "militarily unchallengeable by any combination of Arab states at least during the next five years".

The Israeli generals, hugely self-confident, mainly sabras (native-born Israeli Jews) in their late 30s and early 40s, had been training to finish the unfinished business of Israel's independence war of 1948 for most of their careers.

When their political leaders, most of whom were cautious immigrants at least 20 years older, tried to use diplomacy to end the crisis that led to war, the top brass were beside themselves with frustration.

They believed that delay meant more casualties, and the unnecessary postponement of the inevitable war and inevitable victory for which they had been preparing.

Victors

Nasser's motives for risking war in 1967 are still debated.

Another explanation is that Nasser was prepared to take Israel to the brink to reinforce his position as an Arab hero


Two Israeli historians have recently suggested that he was egged on by the Soviet Union, which wanted Egypt to destroy Israel's nuclear weapons programme at Dimona.

Another explanation is that Nasser was prepared to take Israel to the brink to reinforce his position as an Arab hero.

If it went over the brink, he assumed the superpowers would rescue him and deliver a political victory, as they had in the Suez war of 1956.

When victory came, Israeli civilians, who had never been told how strong Israel was, believed that they had escaped a terrible fate.

David Rubinger, the Israeli photographer who took the most iconic pictures of the war, was with IDF paratroopers when they captured the Western Wall, and was swept up in the mood:

"We were all crying. It wasn't religious weeping. It was relief. We had felt doomed, sentenced to death. Then someone took off the noose and said you're not just free, you're king. It seemed like a miracle."

The conviction that it was a miracle, that God saved the Jewish people and reunited them with their historic homeland in Judea and Samaria, is still the driving force behind Israeli religious nationalism.

When the messianic moment of victory combined with Zionism's innate instinct to push out the frontier, the result was the settlement movement.

Occupiers

Israel's reward, apart from victory itself, was a new strategic relationship with the United States.


Nearly half a million Jews have settled in the West Bank since 1967

Yet even before the fighting ended, as Israel completed its capture of Jerusalem and the West Bank, President Lyndon Baines Johnson, one of the staunchest friends Israel has ever had in the White House, warned that by the time the Americans had finished with all the "festering problems", they were going to "wish the war had never happened".

Four days after the war ended, US Secretary of State Dean Rusk warned that if Israel held on to the West Bank, Palestinians would spend the rest of the century trying to get it back.

Forty years on, Israel has settled around 450,000 people on land occupied in 1967, in defiance of everyone's interpretation of international law except its own.

The settlers are protected by all the resources of the state, including the IDF, from a rebellious subject people, many of whom believe that ruthless violence targeted at civilians as well as soldiers is a legitimate response to occupation.

For Palestinians, the settlements are a catastrophe, made worse every day by the fact that they are expanding fast.

After 40 years as an occupier, Israel can no longer count on the international support it had in 1967.

The settlers see their presence as a national asset, necessity and obligation, but many other Israelis, to varying degrees, believe the settlements, and all the other legacies of 1967 that have deepened the conflict with the Palestinians, are a national disaster.

"The tail started wagging the dog," David Rubinger complains bitterly. "Now the tail is so strong the dog can't move."




Clickable guide to how the war unfolded

And the Honest Reporting response, as well as links to get the real facts.

Perhaps it is unfair of us to single out Jeremy Bowen amidst the wealth of media coverage of the 40th anniversary of the Six Day War. It's just that Bowen has cropped up as the BBC's Mideast "expert" on Newsnight, Radio 4, BBC Online and just about anywhere else that the BBC can use him.

Bowen is also illustrative of some of the deficiencies in reporting of the Six Day War anniversary. Renowned historian Michael Oren notes: "The biggest myth going is that somehow there was not a real and immediate Arab threat, that somehow Israel could have negotiated itself outside the crisis of 1967, and that it wasn't facing an existential threat, or facing any threat at all."

What's behind the myth, Oren argues, is "a more pervasive, ongoing effort to show that Israel bears the bulk, if not the sole responsibility, for decades of conflict in the Arab world, and that the Arabs are the aggrieved party."

This is precisely what Bowen implies on 4 June in his own skewed analysis on BBC Online :

The myth of the 1967 Middle East war was that the Israeli David slew the Arab Goliath. It is more accurate to say that there were two Goliaths in the Middle East in 1967. The Arabs, taken together, had big armed forces, but they were not ready for combat. The Jewish Goliath had never been in better shape, and knew it, or rather its leaders did.

Ignoring the rhetoric from Arab leaders themselves promising to destroy Israel and the very real sense of fear and desperation of the Israeli public and its political leadership, Bowen attributes the threats as empty posturing from an Egyptian radio station. This, despite Michael Oren's research of documents in Arab countries that revealed clearly that the Arabs had planned to destroy Israel.

Comments to the BBC - www.bbc.co.uk/complaints - about this and any other BBC programmes that you may take issue with over the coming days.

Jeremy Bowen is but one source of biased reporting of the Six Day War anniversary and the issue above is not the only flaw in his analysis. There have already been other articles in the media and undoubtedly there will be more to come, each bringing up a variety of issues. For more resources to address this media coverage, see Honest Reporting's Special Report: The Six Day War: Forty Years On as well as the following:

www.sixdaywar.co.uk
BICOM
The Jewish Virtual Library
Palestine Facts
Camera's Six Day War Website