Historically, viewed against the background of extensive and unapologetic terrorist perfidy in both Gaza and Lebanon, Israel has been innocent of any alleged disproportionality. All combatants, including all insurgents in Gaza and Lebanon, are bound to comply with the law of war of international law.

This firm requirement derives not only from what is known as the “Martens Clause,” a paragraph that makes its first appearance in the Preamble to the 1899 Hague Convention No. II on land warfare, but additionally from Article 3, common to the four Geneva Conventions of August 12,1949. It is also found in the two Protocols to these Conventions.

In world politics, reason is often trumped by passion. It has always been easy to condemn Israel with rhythmic chants of “disproportionality.” Yet, competent legal scholars, if honest about their jurisprudential obligations, will acknowledge the illegitimacy of such contrived charges.

Until now, any seemingly disproportionate uses of force by Israel have actually been the permissible outcome of antecedent and perfidious crimes committed by its enemies.

What about charges, over the years, that Israel had committed “aggression” in its Lebanon operations? At Lebanon’s insistence, not Israel’s, a formal state of war has existed between the two tiny countries since the Jewish state first came into existence in May 1948. Only an armistice agreement exists between Israel and Lebanon. Signed on March 23,1949, this was not a war-terminating agreement, but a codified pledge to “cease fire.”

Legally, it is not possible for Israel to commit aggression against Lebanon. This is because the latter already considers itself in a formal condition of belligerency with the Jewish state. Israel cannot commit aggression against another state with which it is already at war.

Faced with multiple and sometimes cooperating enemies on several fronts, who often make no secret of their explicitly genocidal intentions, Israel has adhered faithfully to the law of war. In starkly marked contrast to the conscious indiscriminacy of its terrorist foes in Gaza, Judea/Samaria (West Bank) and Lebanon, Jerusalem has struggled mightily to respect and honor this set of rules – significantly, a set with origins in the Hebrew Bible (Deuteronomy).

The core legal issue in recurrent Middle East conflict is not about Israeli “disproportionality,” or “aggression,” but rather a persistent Arab resort to terrorism and perfidy. Neither principal Palestinian faction has any effective reason to refrain from future terrorism against Israel. Already engaged in far-reaching diplomatic end-runs around Jerusalem, neither Fatah nor Hamas will ever require Prime Minister Netanyahu’s negotiated approval to proceed toward complete Palestinian sovereignty.

The UN could again take up the issue of membership for “Palestine.” Almost certainly, though any such consideration would likely not meet the more stringent requirements of statehood that were established at the 1934 Convention on the Rights and Duties of States (Montevideo Convention), a generally recognized and totally militarized Palestinian state would then become a reality. Should this UN conferral of sovereignty be implemented, Israel’s more limited future will be discoverable in Article 12 of the PA (Fatah) Charter, which calls for “the liberation of Palestine completely….” and in Article 19: “The struggle will not end until the elimination of the Zionist entity and the liberation of Palestine.”

As for the “less moderate” Hamas Covenant (Charter of the Islamic Resistance Movement), it begins with Israel’s annihilation: “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it….” Worth noting, especially in view of what is happening in Egypt, the Covenant refers to Hamas as “one of the wings of the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine.”

In the Middle East, wishful thinking is always perilous. Over time, Israel’s Arab enemies have generally not demonstrated any observable regard for compliance with the law of war. Once a new Arab state is carved out of Israel’s still-living body, “Palestine” would seize upon now vastly enlarged opportunities for inflicting war and terrorism. It follows that Jerusalem must do whatever it can to prevent Palestinian statehood. It can do this legally.

This morning, a friend sent me an article by Leonard Fein called “Occupation Corrupts Soul of Israel.”

Fein writes,

Hakibush mashchit — The occupation corrupts.

And so, plainly, it does. But so what? However inadvertent the origins, the poison fruit is today fully ripe. To understand that, it is not sufficient to call attention to the horrific attack in Zion Square the other night, the attack by a mob that threatened the life of Jamal Julani, or even to add to it the firebombing hours earlier of a taxi near Gush Etzion in which six Palestinians, two of them children, were wounded.

He goes on to talk about “settler violence,” the complicity of the authorities (if you ask the ‘settlers’, they will tell you that the authorities in fact protect the Arabs), price tag vandalism, etc.

Is this the “poison fruit” of ‘occupation’?

Or is it simply that some Jews have — after decades of murder, vandalism, no-go zones in Israel’s capital and other places, stonings, lynchings, etc. — learned to act like Arabs?

Did the poison come from Jews living in their historic homeland, or from the Arabs who hate them?

The Left’s solution is to end the ‘occupation’, to withdraw from Judea, Samaria, the Golan, and eastern Jerusalem. In short, give them what they want and everything will be fine. Of course “what they want” is not limited to the territories, and surrendering them will just send the message that we are too weak to resist, and they will redouble their efforts to obtain the rest.

I responded to my friend that if ‘occupation’ corrupts the soul, then withdrawal, with its concomitant rocket attacks and terrorism might well corrupt the body in a very physical way.

But in addition to the security issues, there is something still more important, which is well-understood by the Arabs, if not by the Leonard Feins. Here is a 2009 remark by PLO official Abbas Zaki, which explains it well:

With the two-state solution, in my opinion, Israel will collapse, because if they get out of Jerusalem, what will become of all the talk about the Promised Land and the Chosen People? What will become of all the sacrifices they made – just to be told to leave? They consider Jerusalem to have a spiritual status. The Jews consider Judea and Samaria to be their historic dream. If the Jews leave those places, the Zionist idea will begin to collapse. It will regress of its own accord. Then we will move forward.

Fein is wrong. The corruption of the Jewish soul did not begin in 1967. It began with the adoption of the idea that surrender is pro-Israel, with — as Fein mentions — the birth of Peace Now and the national self-flagellation that followed the Sabra and Shatilla massacres (in which Arabs behaved like Arabs), and culminated in the suicidal decision to allow Arafat and the PLO to return from exile in 1993. Today, it’s fed by a huge influx of money from the European antisemites who support the anti-state NGOs in Israel that are all that’s left of the Left.

It isn’t ‘occupation’ that corrupts — it’s surrender.

Visit FresnoZionism.org.

Sometimes the truth is more than just ‘inconvenient’. Sometimes it is downright unpleasant, even ugly. But nevertheless, it is what is and we need to deal with what is, not what we would like it to be.

Martin Sherman sees the unpleasant truth and, unlike so many others, draws the logical conclusions. He has written a series of articles in the Jerusalem Post in which he has exposed the sheer insanity of the Left’s two-state solution (TSS), as well as the failure of the Right to propose real alternatives.

Now Sherman has taken up the challenge to provide a practical alternative. In his most recent article — which I urge you to read in its entirety, since I can’t do justice to it with a few snippets — he writes,

To survive as the permanent nation-state of the Jewish people Israel must address two fundamental imperatives:

• The geographic imperative • The demographic imperative

It is self-evident that if either of these is inadequately addressed, Israel’s status as the nation-state of the Jewish people will be gravely jeopardized, eventually becoming unsustainable.

The mainstream discourse invariably – and deceptively – presents Israel’s only choice as being between accepting the TSS – which would make Israel untenable geographically, or the OSS (one-state solution) – which would make it untenable demographically.

Neither comprises an acceptable policy-paradigm for anyone whose point of departure is the continued existence of Israel as the permanent nation-state of the Jews.

This, as we will see, compels us to the inexorable conclusion that between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea there can – and eventually will – prevail either exclusive Jewish or exclusive Arab sovereignty…

While addressing the geographic imperative requires Israel to maintain control of all Judea and Samaria (or at least of sufficiently large segments to make the TSS unviable), addressing the demographic imperative means that the Arab population of these areas cannot be permanently incorporated into the population of Israel…

We are left to confront a brutally simple choice: Either forgo the Jewish nation-state or address the need to significantly diminish the scale of the Palestinian-Arab population.

Whether one relates to this stark dilemma with a sense of moral outrage or equanimity will not affect the inexorable logic that led to its deduction, or the necessity to acknowledge its inevitability. Trying to evade the bleak nature of this inescapable choice by reformulating it in less forbidding terms would be no more than an exercise in hypocrisy or self-delusion…

So, for those who find the prospect of forgoing the Jewish nation-state unacceptable, the grim decision is whether to address the problem of diminishing the Palestinian-Arab population by coercive or by non-coercive means.

Right now the screaming about racism, transfer, ethnic cleansing, etc. begins. I won’t discuss why this automatically follows any discussion of Arabs moving but not Jews, nor the numerous Palestinian expressions of their intention to have a Jew-free state if the TSS is implemented. I’ll only emphasize that the alternative is no Jewish state at all.

If your idea of morality is such that yet another Jewish diaspora — undoubtedly accompanied by a bloody war — is preferable to some Arabs living between the river and the sea moving to one of the 22 Arab Muslim states in the region, then you have chosen sides and I don’t have anything to say to you.

Sherman believes, and promises details in a forthcoming article, that a non-coercive population transfer — yes, I am using that word because that is what it is — is the morally preferred option and that it can be made practical.

I have my doubts about the practicality of such a solution. But I am convinced that Sherman is right and that survival of a Jewish state requires both geographical and demographic domination of the area between the river and the sea. I remain to be convinced that this can be accomplished peacefully.

Originally published at FresnoZionism.org.

Both the extreme left and the extreme right are now calling for a one-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Of course, the one-state solution each seeks is completely different: the left wants yet another Arab state in place of Israel; the right wants a Jewish state that encompasses what is now the West Bank, in place of any Palestinian state. Both are prescriptions for undemocratic disasters and for the ultimate delegitimation of Israel as the democratic nation-state of the Jewish people.

I have advocated a two-state solution, based on secure borders for Israel, since the early 1970s, when I debated Noam Chomsky, who was then an advocate of a secular bi-national state. I advocated a version of what was then known as “the Alon Plan,” which, in effect, would have annexed portions of the captured territories that were necessary for Israel’s security but would have precluded Israeli civilian settlements in other captured areas. This plan was consistent with Security Council Resolution 242, which allowed for some territorial annexation by Israel to achieve secure borders. I did not, and do not now, advocate a return to the indefensible 1967 lines, which reflected nothing more than temporary truce lines following the attack on Israel by the surrounding Arab states in 1948.

Now the hard left wants to eliminate these borders and create one state which would soon become another Arab Muslim state in which Jews would be a minority, while the soft left wants Israel to return all the territory captured in the defensive war of 1967, with mutually agreed acre-for-acre land swaps (to which the Palestinians now seem unwilling to agree).

The hard right, on the other hand, wants Israel to annex and settle the entire West Bank, make it part of Israel, but deny its Arab residents the right to vote and become citizens (If the hard right position were to grant voting and citizenship to the Arab residents of the West Bank, they would be agreeing with the hard left’s position on a “democratic” one-state solution that would quickly turn into an undemocratic Muslim state based on Sharia law, as specified in the Palestinian Constitution).

Both one-state solutions would end in Israel’s delegitimation as the democratic nation-state of the Jewish people. That’s why the vast majority of Israelis, as well as every centrist Israeli leader, rejects both the left and right wing versions of the one-state solution.

An Israel that would permanently deny millions of Arab residents the rights of citizenship would become illegitimate not only in the eyes of the international community, but even more important, in the eyes of most Israelis and Israeli supporters around the world. Israel would cease to be a democracy if nearly half of its residents could not vote. Some on the hard right would “solve” this problem by expelling the Arab residents of the West Bank. That too is not a solution that is consistent with democratic values.

In a recent article entitled “Disputing Dershowitz,” Martin Sherman tries to make the hard right case against the two state solution. In doing so, he never even addresses the issue of democracy. This is perhaps because he doesn’t care whether his “one state” is or is not democratic. But the vast majority of Israelis, and their leaders and supporters, do. But because Sherman doesn’t value democracy, he seems willing to impose his undemocratic solution in an undemocratic manner on unwilling Israelis and Palestinians.

He makes the absurd argument that the Palestinians are not a people based on the fact that they don’t have a unique language, script, religion, heritage or history. By that standard, the United States should still be part of Great Britain, because the American Colonists, who were being denied full citizenship, also lacked those characteristics. The Palestinians are a people because they regard themselves as such and seek to govern themselves. They will secure self-government, however, only if they come to the bargaining table, with no preconditions, and with the realization that they must accept borders and other conditions that assure Israel’s security. They must also realize that they are not coming to the negotiating table in the same bargaining position as the Israelis. The Israelis secured the West Bank after winning a defensive war started by Jordan, in whose place the Palestinians now stand. By demanding preconditions from the Israelis to receive what they claim is their land, the Palestinians remind us what Abba Eban said in 1967 when the Arabs rejected Security Council Resolution 242:

“This was the first war in history which has ended with the victors suing for peace and the vanquished calling for unconditional surrender.”

The major reason there is still no two-state solution is the Palestinian unwillingness to accept Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people, to acknowledge the need for border adjustments necessary for Israel’s security, and to renounce the phony “Right of Return,” which is simply another ploy to secure a one-state solution.

Queen Rania Al-Abdullah of Jordan has commissioned a jeweler in Calcutta, India to make shoes for her out of gold.

The 22-carat gold shoes will each weigh 750 grams, and will be encrusted with diamonds and topaz, according to Irish news site breakingnews.ie, citing Bengali daily newspaper Anandabazar Patrika.

The sites reported that while the queen is accustomed to wearing shoes utilizing gold threads on leather, this time the shoes will be made of solid gold. Rania has already paid an advance of almost $54,000 for the shoes, according to breakingnews.ie, with the custom footwear expected to come to a significantly higher total price.

The news comes as Jordan’s King Abdullah II began a new push for a Palestinian state on land within the State of Israel. On January 17, US President Barack Obama met with the Jordanian leader in the White House to strategize their next steps in bringing Israel and the Palestinian Authority to direct negotiations. The get-together came just a week after the first Jordanian-brokered meeting between Israeli and Palestinian Authority envoys in months.

Aside from relations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, the King and the President discussed the effects of the Arab Spring on Jordan.

At a press conference following the meeting, King Abdullah thanked the President for “the economic support that you’re showing Jordan in this very difficult time,” and noted that as Arab revolution sweeps the Middle East, “the economy and the situation that challenges the livelihood of Jordanians is very, very important”.

            What is already clear is that Israel’s leaders must now ask forthrightly: What are the true sense and form of chaos in the world system, and exactly how should this discoverable geometry of chaos affect the Jewish state’s comprehensive national survival strategy?

              LOUIS RENÉ BERES (Ph.D., Princeton, 1971) lectures and publishes widely on international relations and international law. In Israel, he has been involved with national security, military and intelligence matters for almost forty years. Professor Beres was born in Zürich, Switzerland, on August 31, 1945. He is Strategic and Military Affairs columnist for The Jewish Press.

Author’s Note: The following article was originally in these pages in February 2000. It is being reprinted now because President Obama has recently advanced a “Two-State Solution” that utterly ignores the irremediable core impediment to real peace in the Middle East. This impediment was, and still remains, the far-reaching and fundamentally doctrinal Islamic hatred of Jews. Israel will never be accepted in the Islamic Middle East because it is a Jewish state. Period! As with the Oslo process discussed in this 2000 article, no Road Map, or any other favored form of twisted cartography, can ever hold any plausible promise for Israel. Today, as in the earlier case of Oslo, the “Two-State Solution” would require Israel to exchange land for nothing. For Israel, therefore, any Two-State Solution must still remain a distinctly Final Solution.

O our beautiful land imprisoned in a cage and surrounded by wolves, My shaded garden, the tormentors have destroyed you, and the dogs have settled in you, O Jerusalem, O my city, With my notebook and pencil and the fire of my rifle I will shatter the cage, I will kill the wolves and plant the flag. The dogs will not bark in the heroic cities.

Poem read on the Voice of Palestine, official radio station of the Palestinian Authority (Yasir Arafat), on May 22, 1999.

In the strict Islamic view, Israel is always the individual Jew in macrocosm. The Jewish state must be despised because of this relationship, because of the allegedly innate evil of each individual Jew. This is a very far cry from the view (accepted by misguided supporters of the Oslo Process) that Israel is despised only because it is an occupier. The Israeli is despised in the Islamic world because he is a Jew.

This critical Islamic position was clarified by a recent article in AL-AHRAM. Here, Dr. Lufti Abd al-Azim wrote unambiguously:

The first thing that we have to make clear is that no distinction must be made between the Jew and the Israeli…. The Jew is a Jew, through the millennia…. in spurning all moral values, devouring the living and drinking his blood for the sake of a few coins. The Jew, the Merchant of Venice, does not differ from the killer of Deir Yasin or the killer of the camps. They are equal examples of human degradation. Let us therefore put aside such distinctions and talk about Jews.
In a current Egyptian textbook of “Arab Islamic History” used widely in teacher training colleges (in a country “at peace” with Israel), similar sentiments are expressed:

The Jews are always the same, every time and everywhere. They will not live save in darkness. They contrive their evils clandestinely. They fight only when they are hidden, because they are cowards…. The Prophet enlightened us about the right way to treat them, and succeeded finally in crushing the plots that they had planned. We today must follow this way and purify Palestine from their filth.

Ayatollah Khomeini, in the foreword to his book on Islamic Government, remarked: “The Islamic Movement was afflicted by the Jews from its very beginnings, when they began their hostile activity by distorting the reputation of Islam, and by defaming and maligning it. This has continued to the present day.”

And again, on the “Zionist Problem” as a mere manifestation of the underlying and all-important “Jewish Problem,” Dr. Yaha al-Rakhawi remarked in AL-AHRAM: “…we are all – once again – face to face with the Jewish Problem, not just the Zionist Problem; and we must reassess all those studies which make a distinction between ‘The Jew’ and ‘The Israeli’…. and we must redefine the meaning of the word `Jew’ so that we do not imagine that we are speaking of a divinely revealed religion, or a minority persecuted by mankind….we cannot help but see before us the figure of the great man Hitler, may God have mercy on him, who was the wisest of those who confronted this problem….and who out of compassion for humanity tried to exterminate every Jew, but despaired of curing this cancerous growth on the body of mankind.”

Jewish supporters of Oslo may even acknowledge this far-reaching Islamic demonization of Israelis as Jews, but, they are apt to argue, Arafat and the PLO are different. They are interested in land. They are pragmatic. Their views are of an entirely different sort. Yet, here is what Arafat said on January 30, 1996, addressing 40 Arab diplomats at the Grand Hotel in Stockholm. Speaking under the title, “The Impending Total Collapse of Israel,” Arafat remarked:

We Palestinians will take over everything, including all of Jerusalem…. All the rich Jews who will get compensation will travel to America…. We of the PLO will now concentrate all our efforts on splitting Israel psychologically into two camps. Within five years we will have six to seven million Arabs living in the West Bank and in Jerusalem…. You understand that we plan to eliminate the State of Israel and establish a purely Palestinian State… I have no use for Jews; they are and remain Jews.

Is anyone listening?

LOUIS RENÉ BERES was educated at Princeton (Ph.D., 1971). Strategic and Military Affairs columnist for The Jewish Press, he lectures and publishes widely on Israeli security matters.

U.S. President Barack Obama will not back away from his so-called “Road Map to Peace in the Middle East.” Even now, a plainly self-defeating “Two-State Solution” remains the cornerstone of this twisted cartography. Understanding all this, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seemingly continues to harbor hopes that, somehow, any Palestinian state would be suitably demilitarized. Such hopes, of course, would necessarily rest upon a problematic antecedent assumption that demilitarization could actually work.

Mr. Netanyahu, of course, is mistaken. There exists no basis for any such assumption. Neither major Palestinian faction (Hamas or Fatah) would ever negotiate for anything less than full sovereignty. Why should they?

Regrettably, Palestinian statehood is widely favored throughout the world. Jurisprudentially, any rejection of demilitarization could find fully authoritative support in pertinent international treaties. For example, experienced international lawyers, seeking to “discover” helpful sources of legal confirmation, could readily cherry-pick assorted provisions of (1) Convention on the Rights and Duties of States (the 1933 treaty on statehood, sometimes called the Montevideo Convention), and (2) 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties.

A Palestinian state, any Palestinian state, would present an intolerable threat to Israel’s physical continuance. It should, therefore, be strenuously opposed by Mr. Netanyahu, whatever its proposed form. Any Israeli arguments for Palestinian autonomy or restricted sovereignty would be promptly defeated, and quickly become geopolitically and jurisprudentially moot.

Assuming, in principle, that the Palestinian side would agree to some form of demilitarization, could such a relatively satisfactory arrangement be judged acceptable to Israel? Or would even a demilitarized Palestinian state in Judea/Samaria (West Bank) and Gaza still represent an intolerable existential peril to Israel?

From the start, Mr. Netanyahu would have to understand that negotiated demilitarization could turn out to be a trick. There are hidden and very significant dangers to demilitarization. This is because the grave threat to Israel of any Palestinian state would lie not only in the presence or absence of a particular national armed force, but also in the many other enemy armies and insurgents that would inevitably compete for power in the new and fragile Arab country.

There is another less obvious reason why a demilitarized Palestine would present Israel with a substantial security threat: International law would not necessarily expect Palestinian compliance with pre-state agreements concerning armed force. As a new state, Palestine might not be bound by any pre-independence contracts, even if these agreements had included certain U.S.guarantees to Israel. Also, because authentic treaties can be binding only upon states, a non-treaty agreement between the Palestinians and Israel could be of no real authority and have little real effectiveness.

What if the government of a new Palestinian state were willing to consider itself bound by the pre-state, non-treaty agreement? Even in these relatively favorable circumstances, the new Arab government would have ample pretext to identify various strong grounds for lawful treaty termination. It could, for example, withdraw from the “treaty” because of what it regarded as a “material breach” (a violation by Israel that had allegedly undermined the object or purpose of the agreement). Or it could point toward what international law calls a “fundamental change of circumstances” (rebus sicstantibus). In this connection, should Palestine declare itself vulnerable to previously unforeseen dangers – perhaps even from the forces of other Arab armies – it could lawfully end its codified commitment to remain demilitarized.

There is another factor that explains why a treaty-like arrangement obligating Palestine to accept demilitarization could quickly and legally be invalidated after independence. The usual grounds that may be invoked under domestic law to invalidate contracts also apply under international law to treaties and treaty-like agreements. This means that a Palestinian state could point to errors of fact or to duress as perfectly appropriate grounds for termination.

Any treaty is void if, at the time it was entered into, it was in conflict with a “peremptory” rule of general international law (jus cogens) – a rule accepted and recognized by the international community of states as one from which “no derogation is permitted.” Because the right of sovereign states to maintain military forces essential to self-defense is certainly such a rule, Palestine could be entirely within its lawful right to abrogate any agreement that had previously compelled its demilitarization.

Mr. Netanyahu should take little comfort from the legal promise of Palestinian demilitarization. Should the government of any future Palestinian state choose to invite foreign armies or terrorists in to its territory (possibly after the original national government had been displaced or overthrown by more militantly Islamic anti-Israel forces), it could do so not only without practical difficulties, but also without necessarily violating international law.

The overriding danger to Israel of Palestinian demilitarization is more practical than legal. In the final analysis, this road map-driven pattern of intermittent territorial surrender stems from a deep misunderstanding of Palestinian goals. While Israeli supporters of the road map continue to believe in a “Two-State Solution,” the Palestinian Authority has other ideas.

For the PA, as for most of the rest of the Arab/Iranian world, Palestine includes the entire State of Israel. For them, there can only be a “One State Solution.” This exterminatory definition is effectively the same as a Final Solution.

Palestinian demilitarization couldn’t possibly make a Palestinian state any less dangerous. If Prime Minister Netanyahu were to oppose Palestinian statehood, as indeed he should, Palestine should be rejected in any and all of its potential forms. On this point, it must also be recalled that a nuclear Iran is now almost inevitable, and that the expected synergy between Iranian nuclearization and Palestinian statehood would render the latter far more dangerous. Further exacerbating this especially perilous synergy would be any attempt by Mr. Obama to compel Israel’s participation in a 2012 conference designed to establish a “nuclear-free Middle East.”

LOUIS RENÉ BERES (Ph.D. Princeton, 1971) is the author of many books and articles dealing with Israel and international law. He is Strategic and Military Affairs columnist for The Jewish Press.