Israel Matzav

Appeasement sixty years on

Caroline Glick highlights the direct connection between the rape of Israel taking place today in Annapolis and the 'partition resolution' - UN General Assembly Resolution 181 - that was passed sixty years ago on Thursday:

Both the 1947 UN resolution and the Annapolis conference are dedicated to the task of forcing the Jewish people to compromise their rights in a bid to appease Israel's neighbors who still 60 years on maintain their refusal to accept the right of the Jewish people to sovereignty over their land. And both are presented as diplomatic achievements by the Israeli government.

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ON NOVEMBER 29, 1947, the UN General Assembly passed resolution 181. As a General Assembly resolution, 181 had no force of international law. The international legal basis for the Jewish state was the 1922 League of Nations Mandate for Palestine which charged the British government with administering the area earmarked as the future Jewish state.

Indeed, if anything, resolution 181 sought to legitimize illegal moves taken by Britain throughout the term of its mandate. As the League of Nations mandate made clear, Britain was supposed to preside over the territory of the Mandatory Palestine and to foster the establishment of a Jewish state which would eventually replace the British mandatory government. Yet almost from the get-go the British did just the opposite. They established the Hashemite Kingdom of Transjordan on the majority of the land slated for the Jewish state. Moreover, they took all possible steps to prevent the Jews from establishing a state on the remainder of the land. They blocked Jewish immigration and limited the right of Jews to purchase and settle the land to a tiny portion of the territory - which they believed would be too small to sustain a sovereign state.

It was due to the British failure to destroy Zionism and block the Jewish people from establishing their state that the UN partition plan was brought into being. That is, far from establishing a Jewish state, 181 simply accepted an already existing national entity. Despite the best efforts of Britain, the Jews had already established their state in 1947. It would have existed even if the resolution had not passed.

Unfortunately, rather than recognize the actual legal foundation of Israel and though it, its own rights to Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem, Israel acts as though its legitimate boundaries were determined by the UN Security Council. Its misplaced gratitude to the UN has caused successive Israeli government's to ignore and downplay the UN's mistreatment of Israel.

For the past 40 years, far from living up to Israel's high opinion of it, the UN has been the primary engine behind the campaign to deny Israel's right to exist. The UN has relegated Israel to the status of second class citizen that suffers from systematic discrimination throughout the UN system. The UN's unfair treatment of Israel places the UN in violation of its own charter's assertion that all states must be treated equally. And indeed, it has corrupted the organization beyond repair.

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Far from giving the UN a wide berth, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni have embraced the hostile body and empowered it to determine international policy on the three largest threats to Israel's national security: Iran's nuclear weapons program; Hizbullah's power in Lebanon; and Palestinian terror and political warfare against the Jewish state.

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After Hamas won the Palestinian elections in January 2006, Israel called for the international community to expand its financial support for UNRWA. UNRWA, which runs the Palestinian refugee camps has allowed those camps to be used as terror bases. The sole purpose of UNRWA is to perpetuate the plight of the so-called Palestinian refugees and their descendents by preventing them from being permanently resettled in the countries where they have lived for four generations. And yet, the Olmert government has become one of the agencies most fervent advocates.

The Olmert government denigrates its critics who point out that the Annapolis conference is harmful to Israel's national security interests as anti-peace. By the same token, it attacks Israel's supporters who criticize the UN for its anti-Israel policies. On November 18, experts on international law, US lawmakers and retired Israeli diplomats convened in New York at a conference entitled: "Hijacking Human Rights: The Demonization of Israel by the United Nations" sponsored by Touro College, The Hudson Institute and the American Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists. The UN's sole defender at the conclave was Deputy UN Ambassador Daniel Carmon.

Carmon trivialized the effect of the UN's discriminatory treatment of Israel as a merely unpleasant and upheld the UN as useful on Iran, the Palestinians and Lebanon. He chided Israel's defenders for attacking the UN and generally did everything in his power to demoralize his audience.

As Esther Kandel, a Jewish activist who has been lobbying the US Congress to cut off funding for UNRWA due to its support for terrorism told the Jewish Week, "It doesn't help when we are working on educating members of Congress about the fraud and evil-doing in UNRWA to have a representative of Israel say that UNRWA is a good thing. I feel undercut and undermined by the government of Israel on this issue."

The problem that Israel's supporters face in contending with the Olmert government is the same as that experienced by Israelis who understand just how dangerous and self-defeating the government's foreign policy is. In both cases, the same blind officials who think they have accomplished something when Arab and Islamic states agree to sit at the same table as Israelis and condemn the Jewish state to their faces, and who view a legally insignificant failed UN resolution as a great diplomatic achievement, are calling the shots.

Read the whole thing.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 11:30 AM