[Part one of this article can be read at http://www.israelnationalnews.com/article.php3?id=4286.]
In view of the momentous, irreversible and unheard-of nature of the Ariel Sharon-Ehud Olmert uprooting proposition - that a government shall volitionally and unilaterally single out for transfer its own citizens from areas where it has the right to sovereignty, forcibly uproot them and replace them with the enemy - and in view of the total ignorance of the Israeli public of Jewish national rights according to current international law, it is clear that the periods of each of the activities designated (B) and (C) in Part I of this article should be many months. Rushing such momentous decision is evidently unlawful.
In this matter, too, we find that reality is the opposite of the lawful situation, even to the point of negating the need for a referendum altogether. No reason has been given by the Israeli authorities for the urgency in carrying out the expulsion plan. Such an urgency only follows a major military defeat or, as in this case, a total surrender to terror. (While such a surrender is guaranteed to encourage further terror, as indeed was recently admitted by Hamas, which explicitly said that the "disengagement" justifies a posteriori their terror tactics and suicide bombings.) A referendum was explicitly ruled out by the Prime Minister because of this unexplained and artificial urgency:
In a holiday interview with Maariv newspaper (14 September 2004), Sharon said, "A national referendum isn't on the agenda since it would cause a delay in the timetable of implementing the disengagement plan.
"I wanted to carry out a plebiscite at the time, but I was told it would be a very long process", the prime minister said. "The disengagement plan will be carried out without delay, according to dates I have outlined. If the plebiscite wouldn't have caused a delay, I would have considered it, but that is not the case."
Such an urgency is unacceptable.
The unprecedented nature of the uprooting proposal is further obvious if we recall that from the point of view of international law, Israel is entitled to urgently encourage and facilitate dense Jewish settlement in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and eastern Jerusalem to equal extent that it is entitled to encourage Jewish settlement within the 1949 armistice lines. See, for example, the former Assistant Secretary of State, the ex-dean of the best law faculty in the US (Yale), Prof. Eugene V. Rostow, in "The Legal Context of the Middle East Peace Talks", Policywatch, The Washington Institute, February 24, 1992.
Thus, the proposed evacuation is analogous to Tony Blair's government suddenly deciding to single out for evacuation all British people from Cambridge and Oxford and the area between them, and hurriedly transferring the land of Cambridge and Oxford to Osama Bin-Laden and his associates. And doing this without prior inclusion of such an intention in the manifesto of the Labor party before the election, nor after a referendum on the matter.
As for requirement (A) in Part I of this article - that the referendum on Judea, Samaria and Gaza shall be restricted to Israeli Jews only - the major reason for this restriction is that only Jews are the beneficiary of the League of Nations trust. This should be enough, but one can invoke many other reasons for this restriction.
Israel is the only country in the world that gives voting rights on the national level to its Arab citizens who are not required as a sector to perform otherwise compulsory military service. This military service involves three years for men (shorter period for women) and later long periods in the reserves for many years. Such a service is a very dangerous activity and it also sets back economically the Jewish citizens of Israel, as compared to the Arab citizens. The Arab citizens are not even required to do some kind of "National Service", they even refuse to voluntarily do national service in their own community, and there have been cases of intimidation and firing from jobs of those few Israeli Arabs that dared even raise the subject for discussion.
So what kind of democracy is it that gives all the rights to an ethnic sector (even though it belongs to the enemy's ethnicity) that does not bear all the duties. Without the readiness to endanger one's life for the state one lives in, one has no right to decide on questions of national survival, security, sovereignty, frontiers and the dominant culture of the state. The universal situation in the world is like that of the Jews in the First World War, who were killing each other in the service of opposing combatant armies.
It is normal for a nation state to discriminate in favour of its own ethnic majority. For example, Israel is already discriminating in favour of Jews in its Law of Return. Similarly, Germany favours in its laws ethnic Germans, and facilitates their return and integration after absence from Germany of many generations, and nobody says that this discrimination is racist. On the other hand, millions of Turks live in Germany and neither they or their descendants have the German nationality and the right to vote on the national level. This, when, in contrast to Israel, Germany is not at war with Turkey. The situation is similar in Switzerland, where for many years, guest workers and their families find it very difficult to get Swiss citizenship, as the local authority has to permit such a citizenship.
The community of nations, as expressed in the Mandate (trust) for Palestine of the League of Nations has explicitly referred to Jews (only) being consulted in all matters national: "An appropriate Jewish agency shall be recognized as a public body for the purpose of advising and co-operating with the Administration of Palestine in such economic, social and other matters as may affect the establishment of the Jewish national home and the interests of the Jewish population in Palestine, and, subject always to the control of the Administration, to assist and take part in the development of the country.
"The Zionist organization... shall be recognized as such agency. It shall take steps in consultation with His Britannic Majesty's Government to secure the co-operation of all Jews who are willing to assist in the establishment of the Jewish national home." (Article 4 of the Mandate for Palestine)
It is the natural continuation of this that Jews only shall decide on national questions related to the Jewish national home in Palestine, or rather in the one-fifth that remains of it. The least appropriate is to involve members of the ethnic minority belonging to the ethnicity of the enemy and who do not even do military service as a whole sector of the population (recall that some ultra-Orthodox Jews are only given temporary postponement of their military service). The Sharon-Olmert uprooting plan is such a national question, as distinct from questions of local and municipal nature that involve all the population of Western Palestine.
Democracy is also an arbitrary notion and, in any case, just one consideration among others. For example, even when one applies the democratic principle, one person one vote, there is the prior arbitrary decisions - for example, which tribes in Africa to include in a certain national state, or whether to include Northern Ireland in the United Kingdom or in the Irish Republic - which might strongly affect the final result. Then there is the phenomenon of "one-time democracy". As when Adolph Hitler came to power democratically and then abolished democracy, or similarly, an extreme Muslim regime rising to power democratically and then persisting forever (see Algeria as an example).
[Part 2 of 3]
In view of the momentous, irreversible and unheard-of nature of the Ariel Sharon-Ehud Olmert uprooting proposition - that a government shall volitionally and unilaterally single out for transfer its own citizens from areas where it has the right to sovereignty, forcibly uproot them and replace them with the enemy - and in view of the total ignorance of the Israeli public of Jewish national rights according to current international law, it is clear that the periods of each of the activities designated (B) and (C) in Part I of this article should be many months. Rushing such momentous decision is evidently unlawful.
In this matter, too, we find that reality is the opposite of the lawful situation, even to the point of negating the need for a referendum altogether. No reason has been given by the Israeli authorities for the urgency in carrying out the expulsion plan. Such an urgency only follows a major military defeat or, as in this case, a total surrender to terror. (While such a surrender is guaranteed to encourage further terror, as indeed was recently admitted by Hamas, which explicitly said that the "disengagement" justifies a posteriori their terror tactics and suicide bombings.) A referendum was explicitly ruled out by the Prime Minister because of this unexplained and artificial urgency:
In a holiday interview with Maariv newspaper (14 September 2004), Sharon said, "A national referendum isn't on the agenda since it would cause a delay in the timetable of implementing the disengagement plan.
"I wanted to carry out a plebiscite at the time, but I was told it would be a very long process", the prime minister said. "The disengagement plan will be carried out without delay, according to dates I have outlined. If the plebiscite wouldn't have caused a delay, I would have considered it, but that is not the case."
Such an urgency is unacceptable.
The unprecedented nature of the uprooting proposal is further obvious if we recall that from the point of view of international law, Israel is entitled to urgently encourage and facilitate dense Jewish settlement in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and eastern Jerusalem to equal extent that it is entitled to encourage Jewish settlement within the 1949 armistice lines. See, for example, the former Assistant Secretary of State, the ex-dean of the best law faculty in the US (Yale), Prof. Eugene V. Rostow, in "The Legal Context of the Middle East Peace Talks", Policywatch, The Washington Institute, February 24, 1992.
Thus, the proposed evacuation is analogous to Tony Blair's government suddenly deciding to single out for evacuation all British people from Cambridge and Oxford and the area between them, and hurriedly transferring the land of Cambridge and Oxford to Osama Bin-Laden and his associates. And doing this without prior inclusion of such an intention in the manifesto of the Labor party before the election, nor after a referendum on the matter.
As for requirement (A) in Part I of this article - that the referendum on Judea, Samaria and Gaza shall be restricted to Israeli Jews only - the major reason for this restriction is that only Jews are the beneficiary of the League of Nations trust. This should be enough, but one can invoke many other reasons for this restriction.
Israel is the only country in the world that gives voting rights on the national level to its Arab citizens who are not required as a sector to perform otherwise compulsory military service. This military service involves three years for men (shorter period for women) and later long periods in the reserves for many years. Such a service is a very dangerous activity and it also sets back economically the Jewish citizens of Israel, as compared to the Arab citizens. The Arab citizens are not even required to do some kind of "National Service", they even refuse to voluntarily do national service in their own community, and there have been cases of intimidation and firing from jobs of those few Israeli Arabs that dared even raise the subject for discussion.
So what kind of democracy is it that gives all the rights to an ethnic sector (even though it belongs to the enemy's ethnicity) that does not bear all the duties. Without the readiness to endanger one's life for the state one lives in, one has no right to decide on questions of national survival, security, sovereignty, frontiers and the dominant culture of the state. The universal situation in the world is like that of the Jews in the First World War, who were killing each other in the service of opposing combatant armies.
It is normal for a nation state to discriminate in favour of its own ethnic majority. For example, Israel is already discriminating in favour of Jews in its Law of Return. Similarly, Germany favours in its laws ethnic Germans, and facilitates their return and integration after absence from Germany of many generations, and nobody says that this discrimination is racist. On the other hand, millions of Turks live in Germany and neither they or their descendants have the German nationality and the right to vote on the national level. This, when, in contrast to Israel, Germany is not at war with Turkey. The situation is similar in Switzerland, where for many years, guest workers and their families find it very difficult to get Swiss citizenship, as the local authority has to permit such a citizenship.
The community of nations, as expressed in the Mandate (trust) for Palestine of the League of Nations has explicitly referred to Jews (only) being consulted in all matters national: "An appropriate Jewish agency shall be recognized as a public body for the purpose of advising and co-operating with the Administration of Palestine in such economic, social and other matters as may affect the establishment of the Jewish national home and the interests of the Jewish population in Palestine, and, subject always to the control of the Administration, to assist and take part in the development of the country.
"The Zionist organization... shall be recognized as such agency. It shall take steps in consultation with His Britannic Majesty's Government to secure the co-operation of all Jews who are willing to assist in the establishment of the Jewish national home." (Article 4 of the Mandate for Palestine)
It is the natural continuation of this that Jews only shall decide on national questions related to the Jewish national home in Palestine, or rather in the one-fifth that remains of it. The least appropriate is to involve members of the ethnic minority belonging to the ethnicity of the enemy and who do not even do military service as a whole sector of the population (recall that some ultra-Orthodox Jews are only given temporary postponement of their military service). The Sharon-Olmert uprooting plan is such a national question, as distinct from questions of local and municipal nature that involve all the population of Western Palestine.
Democracy is also an arbitrary notion and, in any case, just one consideration among others. For example, even when one applies the democratic principle, one person one vote, there is the prior arbitrary decisions - for example, which tribes in Africa to include in a certain national state, or whether to include Northern Ireland in the United Kingdom or in the Irish Republic - which might strongly affect the final result. Then there is the phenomenon of "one-time democracy". As when Adolph Hitler came to power democratically and then abolished democracy, or similarly, an extreme Muslim regime rising to power democratically and then persisting forever (see Algeria as an example).
[Part 2 of 3]