Read this legal opinion from Attorney Howard Grief about the legal status of Migron. It was requested by  the former Director General of the YESHA Council, Naftali Bennett.

Howard used good legal foundation for “reversing the charges” on the Arab accusation that Jewish settlements are illegal because Judea and Samaria are occupied territories.

So, if an occupying power  is limited on what it may do with occupied territory, what does this say about Jordan’s selling or allowing construction in Judea and Samarian the while it illegally occupied the territories?

If there is too much legaleze in the document, read on…

Moadim L’simcha,

Mark

Howard Grief

Attorney and Notary

Author of The Legal Foundation and Borders of Israel under International Law

Jerusalem תובב״א

29 Adar 5772   

March 30, 2012

To: Mr. Naftali Bennett

LEGAL OPINION ON THE LEGAL STATUS OF MIGRON

In a Petition filed before the Supreme Court by the foreign-funded organization “Peace Now” on behalf of alleged Arab owners of land where the hilltop settlement of Migron is located in the Binyamin region just outside Jerusalem, the Court ordered the dismantlement of this settlement and the land restored to its presumed Arab owners. In its 2006 judgment, the Supreme Court never questioned the principal fact in dispute, that the land truly belonged to the Arab Petitioners who live in the nearby village of Deir Dibwan, but merely accepted the admission by the Government of Israel that Migron was illegally built on private Arab property, apparently based on the findings of Talia Sasson to that effect, who, in preparing her 2005 report for the Government of Israel on unauthorized settlement construction in Judea and Samaria or what were called “illegal outposts”, accepted without any reservation on her part the Arab claim of land ownership. Since the Government’s policy is not to build new settlements on privately-owned land ever since the rendering of the 1979 Elon Moreh judgment where this question was first raised, the Court ruled that the Migron settlement was illegal principally for that reason and had to be evacuated. It appears, though, that both the Government and the Court acted too precipitously in the case of Migron, without examining the validity of the Arab claim of ownership.

In January of this year I was consulted by several concerned individuals, among whom were Attorney Orly Medina, Engineer Gedalia Glazer, Educator Yoel Lerner and Businessman Israel Ostreicher. I was informed that the land in question was parceled out in lots to a number of Arabs under a land grant made in 1960 or thereabouts by King Hussein of Jordan.

Now it is a well-known fact that Judea and Samaria were, during the 19-year period from 1948 to 1967, territories under illegal Jordanian occupation and that the Jordanian annexation of this entire territory in April 1950 was neither accepted by the international community nor even by the Arab League states, except by Great Britain (that did not recognize the Jordan annexation of eastern Jerusalem) and presumably Pakistan, which the research of Professor Sanford R. Silverburg of Catawba College, Salisbury, North Carolina has shown has never actually been corroborated by any official Pakistani document (See: Silverburg, S.R., “Pakistan and the West Bank: A Research Note”, Middle East Studies, Vol. 19, No. 2, April 1983, pp. 261-263). Under the prevailing rules of international law, as embodied in Articles 42, 52 and 55 of the 1907 Hague Regulations, Jordan, as the Occupying Power of Judea and Samaria, being lands that were earmarked for the Jewish National Home and State under the Balfour Declaration, San Remo Resolution, the Franco-British Boundary Convention of December 23, 1920 and the Mandate for Palestine, which Jordan had re-named the “West Bank”, had no legal authority to grant to its citizens or subjects parcels of land that did not legally belong to it under the established rules of international law. This prohibition is found in Article 55 of those Regulations, which states that

“the Occupying State shall be regarded only as administrator and usufructuary of public buildings, real estate, forests, and agricultural estates belonging to the hostile state, and situated in the occupied country. It must safeguard the capital of these properties, and administer them in accordance with the rules of usufruct”.

Since Jordan was only the administrator or usufructuary of Judea and Samaria, it was never the legal owner or sovereign of this land. Hence, King Hussein’s land grant to various of his subjects has no legal validity or basis in international law, in the law of Palestine during the Mandate period, nor in Israeli law today, regardless of whether this land was registered in the names of those who benefited from the grant of land. The only exception to Article 55 of the Hague Regulations is set out earlier, in Article 52, which allowed the requisition or confiscation of land for military purposes only. Under these circumstances, it was incumbent on the Government and the Supreme Court to carry out a thorough inquiry to determine whether the deeds of ownership held by the Arab Petitioners, which they had received from Jordan, were indeed valid, a duty neither discharged or even considered. Moreover, it was wrong for the Government to rely only on the questionable and unproven findings of the Sasson Report for proof of ownership. The Petitioners themselves were obliged to prove their ownership to the satisfaction of the Government and the Court.

Prior to King Hussein’s land grant in Judea and Samaria, the land where Migron is located was not privately owned but was either land belonging to the Sultan called miri land or, much more likely, ownerless waste land known as mewat land under the Turkish legal system in force in Mandatory Palestine. All such land is today classified in Israel as state land. Jordan, which took control of this land through an illegal war of aggression it launched in 1948 against the nascent Jewish State of Israel was never the recognized sovereign of it, with a valid legal title. It could therefore not legally distribute the land to its own civilians. To repeat: Migron was therefore never “private Arab property”, a fact of immense importance in determining the legality of the settlement. Its establishment, it is true, may not have been approved by an advance Government decision, but the Government subsequently created its infrastructure, such as the paving of roads. However, the lack of government authorization at the outset of Migron’s establishment is not the chief reason for saying it was “illegal”. The chief reason was that it was built on privately-owned land, a claim which upon examination and analysis is found to be absolutely false and without merit.

It is true that ownership of land may eventually be acquired by prescription, unless interrupted by protest by the actual owner, through continuous possession of the land by squatters who originally had no right or title to the land. However, in the Migron case the alleged Arab owners never truly possessed the land in the sense required for prescription, since the land was never cultivated or farmed by them, but rather lay fallow or unploughed and was no more than unused vacant land until the Migron community was established in 1999. In light of the fact that the alleged Arab owners of the land constituting Migron never had a valid legal title to begin with, nor did they settle or vivify the land they claimed to have owned, their claim that the land was their “private property” is without any basis in law and should have been rejected outright by the Government and the Supreme Court. The intervention of Peace Now on behalf of the alleged Arab owners was a deceitful provocation that lacked any legal standing and would never have been permitted by a court in any other country except in Israel.

I understand that other legal arguments for rejecting the Arab claim of ownership were also made by the residents of Migron and their attorneys, but the principal argument as set out in this Opinion was unfortunately never made. To repair a bad situation, the Government ought to re-classify the land comprising Migron as “state land”, rather than “private land” and give the settlement retroactive authorization, which can be done by the simple issuance of an order.

It is ironic that Peace Now and the Court itself both cite the Rule of Law for dismantling an illegal settlement on private Arab land. Indeed, the application of the Rule of Law in this case requires the very opposite of what they say needs to be done, namely, that false claims should never be sanctioned by the Court and that the Government allow Migron to stand and flourish.  

(Part 2 of Attorney Howard Grief’s letters will be posted on the next Israelity!)

Have you ever heard of a country that has no capital city?

Have you ever heard of countries pretending a country does not have a capital?

Can a country’s closest “friend” deny your capital is your capital and still be considered a “friend?”

Does this Obama Administration policy violate U.S. law, or is this a political question rather than a legal question?

In the below video, State Department Spokesperson Victoria Nuland could not bring herself to say that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel. She was pressed repeatedly to name the capital of Israel. She refused. There are numerous Joint Congressional Resolutions and laws recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital (specifically “unified Jerusalem”). This also includes a ratified treaty recognizing Jerusalem  being within the legal boundaries of the Jewish National Home and prohibits partitioning or ceding any Jewish National territory.

Let’s state the facts:

The State of Israel has a capital.

The capital is Jerusalem.

Barack Obama, while he was a presidential candidate, even admitted that Jerusalem is Israel’s capital at AIPAC when he stated, “Jerusalem must remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided.”

Okay, so, Obama then hemmed-and-hawed to get out of the political quagmire caused by his statement which offended the poor Arabs, but even when trying to weasel his way out of the controversy, Obama still called Jerusalem the capital of Israel. Obama told ABC News, “The fact is, Jerusalem is the capital of Israel. So, I was simply stating a fact.”

Yes, it is simply a fact— Jerusalem is the capital of Israel.

It is not up for negotiation. Jerusalem is the capital of Israel.

Keep saying this over and over.

The United States is legally obligated to recognize Jerusalem as sovereign Israeli territory. Not just “West Jerusalem” or Jerusalem that was under Israel’s control prior to 1967, but all Jerusalem.

Jerusalem is the capital of Israel.

The United States and Britain signed the 1924 Anglo American Convention which is a ratified treaty. That means the two countries are legally obligated to honor the rights laid out in the Mandate for Palestine, of which the Jewish People are the sole beneficiary. The territory mapped for the Mandate includes all Jerusalem, all Judea and Samaria, all the Gaza Strip, and oh yeah, Trans-Jordan.

Yes, I agree with the claim that "Jordan is Palestine," but remember all Palestine is the legal territory of the Jewish National Home. There is no legally recognized Arab nation in Palestine. Arabs right of self-determianation was recognized in Arab countries, like Syria, Lebanon, Mesopotamia (Iraq), and what today is Saudo Arabia, but not in Palestine

The Arabs right of self determination in Palestine was not recognized at San Remo nor through the Mandate for Palestine. Any question about that? please read the minutes from the April 1920 San Remo Conference. I will be uploading this in the near future to the Office for Israeli Constitutional Law web site in the near future. 

All Palestine/Eretz Yisrael belongs to the Jewish People, as Winston Churchill stated, “by right and not by sufferance.” These rights are based on “The historical connection of the Jewish People with Palestine and the grounds for reconstituting their home in that country.”

For  those who think being Torah observant means, “The only rights we need are the ones G-d gave us,”  well, I can’t argue with you. G-d is the only one who grants rights, otherwise they are just priveleges. However, it was those “G-d given rights,” based on the Tanach (Bible), upon which the world body based their recognition of the Jewish National borders. British Prime Minister David Lloyd George defined the recognized borders that would be tied to the Mandate for Palestine as “from Dan to Beersheba,” using the Tanach’s repeated description of Israel’s borders. He explained the term to mean the greater area of land that had been under Jewish control from Joshua through the First and Second Temple periods.

The U.S. is obligated to recognize these borders and Article 5 of the Mandate for Palestine, which prohibits ceding any territory from the Jewish National Home, and article 6 which recognizes the rights for Jews to build anywhere in within the boundaries mapped for the Mandate for Palestine. Any statements made by the U.S. Administration that challenge or attempt to negate these rights, violate the legal doctrine of Estoppel. Estoppel is the prohibition against taking any action, or making any statements that violate a prior legal agreement or obligation.

Since the U.S. recognized Jerusalem as being part of the Mandated Jewish country via the 1924 treaty, the United States Government is legally barred from adopting any policy, taking any action, or making any statement that would appear to imply that the Jewish People no longer have sovereign rights to Jerusalem.

This is not a matter of challenging a President’s foreign policy. The recognition of Jewish legal rights to the Jewish National Home is U.S. law. Violating a treaty, which the constitution refers to as the “Supreme Law of the Land,” is illegal.  

The right for the Jewish People to name Jerusalem as our capital, which was done around three-thousand years ago, long before the United States existed, cannot be denied. There is no reason not to adamantly demand the world respect these rights.

My family recently got together with another family. My 9-year-old daughter said she did not want to play with their daughter because this girl is bossy and is always yelling at her. My wife told her, “Before you go to play with her, why don’t you tell her that you don't like it when she yells or bosses you around and that if she wants to play, she will have to treat you with respect.”

Guess what? The other girl responded by being on her best behavior, and they had a good time together.

Likewise, Prime Minister Netanyahu  must tell President Obama that if he wants to play, he will have to respect Israel. The Jewish People do not have to be subject to abuse by the U.S. Administration.

If Israeli leaders and Jews around the world would uniformly declare the Jewish State will not have its sovereign rights challenged, perhaps the U.S. would suddenly be able to find Israel’s capital on the map.

Don’t be afraid to stand up for your rights.

Enough is enough ! 

I’m posting this letter (with permission), written by attorney Howard Grief to the British Ambassador to Israel for having given the typical British claim that Israel is “occupying” Arab land, without having any valid law to back up their claim.

Needless to say, the Ambassador allegedly gave the same broken record response, which has no connection to proving Israel is occupying any land other than being the sovereign rulers of the land belonging to the Jewish National Home.

Howard founded our organization, the Office for Israeli Constitutional Law and is probably the world’s greatest expert on Jewish rights to the Land of Israel under International Law.

Mr. Grief  has researched the subject for more than a quarter of a century and is the Author of The Legal Foundations and Borders of Israel Under International Law (Jerusalem: Mazo Publishers, 2008).

Part I is Howard’s letter to the Ambassador and a separate letter to a representative of the British Foreign Office. I know it is a bit long, but the information is important. The  second part weill be posted next time:

H.M. Ambassador Matthew Gould

British Embassy,

192 Hayarkon Street,

63405 Tel-Aviv.

Dear Ambassador Gould,

You may recall that, at a meeting that took place this year on March 8, 2011 at the Jewish Agency Building in Jerusalem, sponsored by the group “Europeans for Israel” and chaired by Leah Zinder, I asked you the following question:

Upon what document of international law does Foreign Secretary William Hague rely when he asserts that Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria are illegal under international law?

The stock answer you gave me, which I was fully expecting, was that Jewish settlements were a violation of Article 49, paragraph 6 of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, which states that “the Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies”. The only problem with your answer is that Judea and Samaria are not, nor were they ever – in a legal sense – Israel “occupied territories”, but rather are and have always been integral parts of the Jewish National Home that was internationally recognized explicitly in 1920, 1922 and in 1924, and therefore Article 49 is inapplicable to the situation.

In the moderator’s desire to move on to other questioners, I was not given the chance to rebut your incorrect explanation and moreover, I was surprised that no one in the audience you addressed saw fit to challenge you on your answer.

After your address, I spoke to you briefly and gave you a copy of my book, The Legal Foundation and Borders of Israel under International Law, with the hope that you might take the time to read it and perhaps disabuse yourself of the false notion that Israel is an “Occupying Power” of the various regions of the Jewish National Home.

I have written extensively on the question of what constitutes “occupied territories” under international law, and you are free to consult these writings if you care to download my articles from the internet.

Recently, I have dealt with this same question again in a letter I wrote to Mr. David Lee of London (Kingston-upon-Thames), Surrey, England to rebut the oft-stated remarks by Foreign Secretary William Hague that Israel illegally occupies Arab lands. A copy of this letter, dated November 1, 2011, is herewith enclosed so that you may better appreciate the legal and historical truth that Judea and Samaria are not Arab territories that are under occupation in violation of international law.

I also enclose my article on the meaning of Article 80 of the United Nations Charter which impacts directly on the question of the legality of Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria, and renders them perfectly legal under international law.

Finally, I enclose a letter I wrote on the subject of Israel’s legal rights to Judea and Samaria (and Gaza), which I sent to Mr. Ilkka Uusitalo of the European External Action Service whose jurisdiction includes the Middle East.

Mr. Ambassador, just as I advised Mr. Barry Griffiths who is on the staff of the British Foreign Office, I recommend that you look deeper into the subject before stating that Judea and Samaria are “occupied territories”. You owe it to yourself as a Jewish representative of Her Majesty’s Government in Israel to be aware of the true historical and legal facts. Of course, the Foreign Secretary is authorized to determine policy, but one would expect it to be in concert with valid international law, and not based on prevarication and falsification that echoes Arab pretensions.

Yours sincerely,

Howard Grief

______________________________________________________________________________________________________

Jerusalem תובב״א

4 Marheshvan 5772

November 1, 2011

Mr. David Lee

Dear David,

Thanks for forwarding me the letter you received from Mr. Barry Griffiths of the “Near East Group”, who responded to your earlier letter to the British Foreign Secretary William Hague about the latter’s idiotic remark that Israel is “illegally occupying Arab lands”, upon which false assumption Mr. Griffiths bases his entire letter to you. The Griffiths letter is replete with misleading statements and nonsensical interpretations of the actual meaning of UN resolutions on the Question of Palestine and the Land of Israel. I can only deal here with some of the points he raised in his letter that, however, unfortunately represents official long-standing British thinking.

Griffiths asserts that the Mandate for Palestine, which he incorrectly terms the “Palestinian Mandate”, was awarded by the League of Nations to Britain. This statement reveals that Griffiths never read the minutes of the San Remo Peace Conference for April 24 and April 25, 1920, nor the final text of the San Remo Resolution of April 25, 1920, that resulted from that Conference, otherwise he would know that the League of Nations did not do what he says it did. It was the Supreme Council of the Principal Allied Powers that conferred or entrusted the Mandate for Palestine to Great Britain in order to create the political, administrative and economic conditions in the country to secure the establishment of the Jewish National Home and future independent Jewish State, as set out in Article 2 of the Mandate. The League, which had just come into existence only three months earlier upon the ratification of the Treaty of Versailles on January 10, 1920 and had barely begun to operate, had no role whatsoever in either conferring the Mandate upon Britain or in selecting Britain as the Mandatory Power. Before he attributes unfounded powers to that body, Mr. Griffiths can verify this important point by simply reading the Preamble to the Mandate for Palestine, particularly Recitals One and Four. He would also do well to read Lord Balfour’s statement on the subject of Mandates and the exact role played by the League in regard to them:

The Mandates are neither made by the League nor can they in substance be altered by the League… a Mandate… is imposed by the Allied and Associated Powers themselves in the interests of what they conceived to be the general welfare of mankind; and they have asked the League of Nations to assist them in seeing that this policy should be carried into effect. But the League of Nations is not the author of the policy but its instrument… (Charles H. Levermore, Third Book of the League of Nations, p. 137; cited on p. 47 of the book British Rule in Palestine by Bernard Joseph, published by Public Affairs Press, Washington DC, 1948).

Griffiths makes the astounding statement that “…the Balfour Declaration ceased to have legal effect when the UK discharged its Mandate”. Britain never executed the Mandate for Palestine in accordance with the original purpose noted above. In truth, the Balfour Declaration, as a British policy statement in 1917 that Prime Minister David Lloyd George described as a “bargain” or contract between World Jewry and Britain, was converted into a document of binding and irreversible international law by the adoption of the San Remo Resolution by the Supreme Council of the Principal Allied Powers on April 25, 1920, that subsequently became Articles 94 to 97 inclusively plus Article 132 of the Treaty of Sèvres. This Resolution, insofar as Palestine was concerned, was then incorporated into the first three recitals of the Preamble of the Mandate for Palestine, subsequently approved by all 52 members of the League in 1922 and separately by the United States. The San Remo Resolution is the founding document not only for the State of Israel under international law, but also for that of Iraq and Syria. As stated in my previous letter to you, it continues in legal force today, mutatis mutandis, contrary to what Griffiths asserts, and no action taken by the United Nations today or by Britain itself can nullify this binding act of international law upon which the State of Israel draws its legal existence. If it were otherwise, the states of Israel, Syria and Iraq would have no legal right to exist under international law, and the Ottoman Empire would not have been disbanded. For Mr. Griffiths’ information, the San Remo Resolution means that all of Palestine is Jewish land, not Arab land, and that any partition of this land is perforce illegal and null and void. For his further edification, I would advise him to read Chapter One of my book, The Legal Foundation and Borders of Israel under International Law, that discusses in detail the juridical significance and import of the San Remo Peace Conference and the San Remo Resolution on Palestine, as well as Chapter Four on the Meaning of the Balfour Declaration. He may then learn to his dismay about the existence of Jewish legal rights to all of Palestine and furthermore that such information and knowledge is stored and found in the British diplomatic archives to which he presumably has access. As a Foreign Office staffer, he certainly has a duty to be cognizant of what the British archives reveal on the Question of Palestine as it emerged in the early period before Britain adopted a different direction beginning with the ascension of Winston Churchill to the Colonial Office on February 14, 1921 and the convening of the Cairo Conference in mid-March 1921.

Griffiths then cites UN Security Council Resolution 242 regarding “the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war”, a sound principle of law which, however, does not apply at all to Israel’s liberation or repossession in June, 1967 of territory that constitutes the Jewish National Home. What Griffiths fails to understand is that Israel never acquired title to Judea, Samaria and Gaza by war, and it is therefore under no obligation to withdraw from those regions that the Allied Powers accorded to or recognized as belonging to the Jewish People. As the devolee or assignee of the Jewish People, the State of Israel has inherited all the legal rights derived from the San Remo Resolution and the Mandate for Palestine that were vested in the Jewish People by the unanimous decision of the Supreme Council of the Principal Allied Powers. As a direct result of this decision, Palestine, to use Griffiths’ term, was “awarded” to World Jewry represented by the Zionist Organization to establish their National Home there with the full agreement of Britain, while the great bulk of former Ottoman territory in the Middle East (over 90%) was set aside for the Arabs for their own national self-determination. In the Six-Day War of June 1967, Israel was only recovering territories that were originally designated or intended for the Jewish State by the Principal Allied Powers. The same situation obtained when France recovered Alsace-Lorraine in 1918 from Germany that had annexed the French territory in 1871 as a result of the Franco-Prussian War in which France was soundly defeated. Would Griffiths have called Alsace-Lorraine “French-occupied Germany”, as he does for Israel’s recovery of Jewish land in the Six-Day War, and would he say that it was “inadmissible” for France to re-acquire its former territory by war?

Griffiths stands on very shaky ground when he claims that Judea and Samaria (misspelled by him as “Sumaria”) are held by Israel in “belligerent occupation”, to which the Fourth Geneva Convention applies. It is only because Griffiths and the British Foreign Office he represents are so completely ignorant of the significance of the San Remo Resolution and the provisions of the Mandate for Palestine that he can with a straight face say that the territories liberated or repossessed by Israel in 1967 are under belligerent occupation. If Griffiths were right, that would mean that such territories, i.e., Judea, Samaria and Gaza, had never been part of Mandated Palestine and the Jewish National Home.

He is also misleading regarding the position of the Israeli Supreme Court in this matter, which is more complex than what he thinks. The Court has never decided on the merits or accepted as a proven argument that Judea and Samaria are “occupied territories” under international law, but merely adopted the position of the Government of Israel, that it adjudicate all cases before it as if Judea and Samaria were governed by the laws of war embodied in the Hague Regulations and Fourth Geneva Convention, without ruling on the actual legal status of these territories. In adopting this egregious policy based on the erroneous legal advice of then Military Advocate-General Meir Shamgar, the Government of Israel violated its own constitutional law and caused foreign states to believe that this indeed was the legal status of those regions, even though, ironically enough, Shamgar himself, later President of the Supreme Court, issued a disclaimer stating that he did not consider these military administered territories to be necessarily “occupied territories”. Despite his disclaimer, he did refer to them in that incorrect sense in an article he wrote and then published in a book he himself edited (see Military Government in the Territories Administered by Israel 1967-1980: The Legal Aspects, Hemed Press [Jerusalem], Reprint Edition, 1988, pp. 13; 28; 31).

To call Judea, Samaria and Gaza the “Occupied Palestinian Territories” is not only an oxymoron but also an abuse of the English language in the service of the imperialistic Arab cause, as well as an outright denial or attempted erasure of the legal, political and diplomatic history of the Palestine Question. For Griffiths, this history only begins in 1967, which is why he and Foreign Secretary William Hague can duplicitously proclaim that Judea, Samaria and Gaza are or have been under belligerent occupation ever since that year. There is no doubt that all of the State of Israel constitutes “Palestinian territory” and that no part of former Mandated Palestine including Judea, Samaria and Gaza, whether included or not in the borders of the State of Israel can be considered Israeli “occupied territories”. If that were truly the case, such an appellation would make a mockery of the San Remo Resolution and Mandate for Palestine since, as already noted, all of Palestine was meant to be included in the Jewish State. The claim made by the British Foreign Office, especially in the wake of the illegal and now-lapsed “Oslo Accords”, that Judea, Samaria and Gaza belong to a fictitious “Palestinian Nation” that was invented circa 1969 by the Arab League with the assistance of the United Nations – is a complete falsification of international law. If Mr. Griffiths and his superiors were more honest or did more of their “homework”, both he and they would come to the same conclusion I have reached – that Judea, Samaria and Gaza are not and have never been Israeli “occupied territories”.

Britain, as the country most responsible for the adoption of the San Remo Resolution as a result of which it received the Mandate for Palestine to create the Jewish State has slipped into amnesia in regard to what it was committed to do but never did. Any facetious argument that an independent Jewish State was not the intended goal of these basic documents is belied by the evidence in the British archives and the statements made by the British and French leaders at the time of their formulation. When Foreign Secretary George Nathaniel Curzon called the San Remo Resolution the Magna Carta of the Zionists in a letter addressed to Prime Minister Lloyd George dated October 29, 1920, he spoke the absolute truth. In that letter, Curzon was certainly referring to all of the land of Palestine, including undoubtedly Judea, Samaria and Gaza.

The British Foreign Office has a duty to review its own diplomatic archives and records during the Balfour-Curzon period, to learn how Palestine came into being as the Jewish National Home before it acts on the pro-Arab, anti-Zionist conception that Judea, Samaria and Gaza should become the 22^nd Arab state in the world. Moreover, it should bow its head in contrition for assenting to the artificial claims of the so-called “Palestinians” to appropriate internationally recognized Jewish land for that nefarious purpose and for turning its back on the noble cause of Zionism that it once so eagerly supported when doing so suited the goals of the British Empire. No less a great British statesman as David Lloyd George accused his own country, upon hearing of the 1939 White Paper, of committing “an act of national perfidy” vis-a-vis the Jewish People for not keeping its “plighted word” to the Jews, who, he said, had honourably kept their part of the bargain to help the Allied cause in World War I (see my book, The Legal Foundation and Borders of Israel under International Law, pp. 406-408). Mr. Griffiths should reflect on Lloyd George’s condemnation of this British perfidy which continues unabated even today.

David, you have my permission to send a copy of this letter to Mr. Griffiths and to Foreign Secretary Hague, as well as the letter I wrote on the San Remo Resolution to the Prime Minister of Canada, Mr. Stephen Harper, and my letter to Ilkka Uusitalo, as you see fit. Let us hope that they will not only read these letters, but appreciate their significance.

Best regards,

Howard

When is the victim the aggressor and the aggressor the victim?

What is worse than getting on a school bus with a load of explosives?

How can you fire 200 rockets at civilians and still be the innocent party?

How can you have a ceasefire when there is still active fire?

What is reality?

I'm back from a Flu/Purim break...

For some reason I was unable to upload  the video, so I  had to lower the video quality and it uploaded. I apologize for the lower video quality.

It’s no surprise the Obama Administration is critical of Israel’s decision to approve 500 new units in historical Biblical Shiloh.

President Obama makes no qualms about his denying the Jewish People’s legal rights to a large area of the Jewish National Home. However, at this point, Obama does not want to be too vocal about his Middle East goals. After all, it is an election year.

Once again, Obama is heading for AIPAC in hopes of wooing the Jewish American voters. Perhaps Obama will say, “The security of Israel is sacrosanct. With me as president, you can be certain the United States will stand by Israel to fight the threat posed by a nuclear Iran.”

Will anyone believe Obama. Let’s remember his quick backtrack on, “Jerusalem must remain the capital of Israel, and it must be undivided…”

If Obama wins the election in November, I guarantee you we will be able to say, “Meet the new boss; He’s the same as the old boss…”