On October 11, 2006 in a Keynote Address to the American Task Force on Palestine,¹ Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice claimed that Palestinian Arabs feel "daily humiliation of occupation." Palestinians say they feel humiliated and harassed when Israeli authorities search them and their belongings; when they are prevented from "travel[ing] more freely" because of checkpoints, roadblocks, closures, curfews and security concerns.

"Student of International History"

Dr. Rice, you maintain that you are "a student of international history." International law, the UN Charter and Article 80 of the UN Charter implicitly recognize the Mandate of the League of Nations [Mandate for Palestine]. This Mandate granted Jews the irrevocable right to settle in the area of Palestine - anywhere between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.²

You must be familiar with Professor Eugene V. Rostow, a world-renowned expert of international law who served as the Dean of Yale Law School (1955-66) and who later became the US Undersecretary of State. In 1967, he was a key draftee of UN Resolution 242. He explains:³

The Mandates of the League of Nations have a special status in international law. They are considered to be trusts, indeed "sacred trusts."

Under international law, neither Jordan nor the Palestinian Arab people of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip have a substantial claim to the sovereign possession of the occupied territories.

...

[The] mandate implicitly denies Arab claims to national political rights in the area in favor of the Jews; the mandated territory was in effect reserved to the Jewish people for their self-determination and political development, in acknowledgment of the historic connection of the Jewish people to the land. Lord Curzon, who was then the British Foreign Minister, made this reading of the mandate explicit. There remains simply the theory that the Arab inhabitants of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip have an inherent "natural law" claim to the area. Neither customary international law nor the United Nations Charter acknowledges that every group of people claiming to be a nation has the right to a state of its own.

"Humiliation"

In Israel, every Israeli is searched numerous times during the course of a day. Israelis are asked to open their bags and purses for inspection. In most cases, they are subjected to body searches with a metal detector every time they enter a bank or a post office, pick up a bottle of milk at the supermarket, enter a mall or train station, or visit a hospital or medical clinic. Young Israeli men and women are physically frisked in search of suicide belts before they enter crowded nightclubs.

These ordinary daily humiliations now extend to similar searches when Israelis go to weddings or bar mitzvahs. No one abroad talks about the humiliation Jews in Israel are subjected to having to write at the bottom of wedding invitations and other life cycle events, "The site will be secured [by armed guards]" - to ensure relatives and friends will attend and share their joyous occasion.

To date, no one protests the fact that, since the 1970s, Jewish schoolchildren in Israel are surrounded by perimeter fences, with armed guards at the schoolyard gates. Not one Arab village in the Judea, Samaria or Gaza territories has a perimeter fence around it.

Israelis are told to disguise themselves when traveling abroad - not to speak Hebrew in public and not to wear garments that reveal their Jewish Israeli origins. On the other hand, Arabs who frequent Jewish cities and towns in Israel wear their traditional Arab headgear without fear of being attacked or harassed.

In fact, Secretary Rice, the average Israeli is "humiliated and harassed" far more times a day than the average Palestinian.

Contribution to Civilized Society?

You believe Palestinian Arabs "have so much to give to the international community and to all of us." In fact, culturally, Palestinians are not distinct from other Arabs. The sole contributions Palestinians can take credit for are the invention of skyjacking for political purposes in the 1960s, and lately, a special brand of suicidal terrorism that uses their own children as delivery systems for bombing pizza parlors, discos and public commuter buses.

Michael B. Oren, writing in the Wall Street Journal, wonders:

How can there be peace with a people that celebrates mass murder?

There is, of course, nothing new about Palestinians applauding terror. During the Gulf War in 1991, they danced on rooftops in praise of Iraqi scud missiles raining on Israeli neighborhoods. Again, in the mid-1990s, after bus bombs in Israel killed dozens - one of them was my sister-in-law - an estimated 70,000 Palestinians filled a Gaza stadium to cheer a re-enactment of the massacre. The deaths of over 3,000 Americans on Sept. 11 was another cause for dancing in Palestinian streets, though Arafat's men suppressed foreign coverage of the fete.⁴

For Jews, Building a Future Was Never Easy

From a report by the Palestine Royal Commission after touring Palestine in 1937:⁵

With every year that passes, the contrast between this intensely democratic and highly organized modern [Jewish] community and the old-fashioned Arab world around it grows sharper, and in nothing, perhaps, more markedly than on its cultural side. The literary output of the National Home is out of all proportion to its size.

It is the same with science. The Daniel Sieff Research Institute [today, the Weizmann Institute] at Rehovot is equipped with the most delicate modern instruments; the experiments conducted there are watched by chemists all over the world: yet from its windows can be seen the hills inhabited by a backward peasantry who regard it only as the demonstration of a power they hate and fear and who would like, no doubt, when their blood is up, to destroy it.

Speaking generally, whether it be the Jew who has been driven from a comfortable life in a cultured milieu and is now digging all day in the fields and sleeping in a bare cottage, or whether it be the Jew who has emerged from a Polish ghetto and is now working in a factory at Tel Aviv, the dominant feeling of both is an overwhelming sense of escape. The champions of Zionism have always held - and on the whole they are now proved right - that a Jew released from an anti-Jewish environment and "restored" to Palestine would not only feel free as he had never felt before, but would also acquire a new self-confidence, a new zest in living from his consciousness that he was engaged in a great constructive task.

Did US Policy Change?

On June 30, 1922, a joint resolution of both Houses of Congress of the United States unanimously endorsed the Mandate for Palestine - the irrevocable right of Jews to settle in the area of Palestine - anywhere between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.⁶

On September 21, 1922, President Warren G. Harding, (the twenty-ninth president, 1921-1923) signed the joint resolution of approval to establish a Jewish Homeland in Palestine.

The facts speak for themselves. The truth does not always win, but it is always right.

Footnotes

1) For the full text see http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2006/73895.htm.

2) For the document see http://middleeastfacts.org/content/UN-Documents/Mandate-for-Palestine.htm For commentary see http://www.mythsandfacts.com/Conflict/mandate_for_palestine/mandate_for_palestine.htm#B1.

3)Eugene V. Rostow, "The Future of Palestine" from the paper delivered at the American Leadership Conference on Israel and the Middle East in Arlington, Virginia. October 10 1993. See http://middleeastfacts.org/content/book/The%20Future%20of%20Palestine.htm. Eugene V. Rostow's biography is at http://www.law.yale.edu/YLR/pdf/ylr50-2/Rostow.pdf.

4) For one description of the "culture of glorifying death," that drives immature adolescents to blow themselves to smithereens fueled by the "promise" of seventy virgins when they get to Paradise, see Michael B. Oren, "Palestinians Whoop It Up: How can there be peace with a people that celebrates mass murder?" in The Wall Street Journal's "Opinion Journal" at http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110002113. (11593)

5) Palestine Royal Commission report of July 1937, chap. V, 110/556

6) "Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled. That the United States of America favors the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of Christian and all other non-Jewish communities in Palestine, and that the Holy places and religious buildings and sites in Palestine shall be adequately protected."