This article is written for a specific person, who got very indignant that Israel doesn’t let all the poor Palestinians return to their land.
Jack Cohen – Right of Return and BDS
Right of Return
This article is written for a specific person, who got very indignant that Israel doesn’t let all the poor Palestinians return to their land. Although she agreed that the Israeli Arabs are free to live their lives in Israel, she was concerned that they are upset that their fellow Palestinians are unable to join them. But, she fails to make a clear distinction between Israeli Arabs, who have been citizens of the State of Israel for 67 years, giving them equal rights under the law to Jewish Israelis, and Palestinian Arabs, who are not Israeli citizens and therefore have no such rights. It would be like saying that because there are Syrian immigrants living as citizens in the UK, so all Syrian migrants should be allowed to join them. In fact there is no right to enter any particular country, just as there is no “right of return” to any particular country.
International law is largely not based on abstract concepts such as rights or morality, it is rather much more pragmatic than civil or criminal law. Countries are considered sovereign, and if they don’t want to admit a person or a group of people it is their concern, and there is no court that can theoretically force them. For example, during WWII the Soviet Union expelled the Tatars from the Crimea because they sided with the Nazis. It was only after the fall of Communism that Russia allowed some of them to return from Siberia where they had lived for generations, but all of them were not allowed to return as a group. Once an expulsion or exile has occurred it cannot simply be reversed.
Can the North American native “Indians” return to their lands taken over by the United States? For example, the three nations, the Cherokee, Choctaw and Cree, were expelled from Alabama/Georgia in 1837 by the Indian Removal Act on what was called the “Trail of tears.” They were sent to what is now Oklahoma. Do they have any right of return? Of course not. For example, the Celtic peoples who inhabited the British Isles were expelled from what became England by the invading Germanic tribes the Angles and Saxons, and forced into the periphery of what is now Scotland, Ireland and Wales. Would anyone in England give up their land and their houses to allow the Celts to return?
There is of course one major exception to this issue of return, and that is the use of force, military force. This is how the Jews managed to return to their ancient and original homeland. It is true that the Jews had an excellent case, everyone knows the Bible, everyone should know that the Arabs, who come from Arabia, conquered the Holy Land and Jerusalem in 637 ce, and held it until the Crusaders and then the Turks took it away from them. But, even though Israel had an excellent case in international law, including the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and the British Mandate that was given by the League of Nations in 1923 for the express purpose of establishing a Jewish State in Palestine, this would not have been accomplished if the Jews were not able to defend their rights. The Palestinian Arabs (a group with no history before 1967) were not able to defeat Israel, kill the Jews and take the land by force. Therefore, they came up with the PR gambit to try to persuade naive and “useful idiots” that they have some fictitious “right of return” to the land they lost in the war. Sorry, it doesn’t work that way, the results of wars cannot be reversed by international law and sovereign nations can decide who they want or do not want to let in.
Jack Cohen – Right of Return and BDS
Stand With Us vs BDS
The anti-Israel bias that is so prevalent in the West has spawned the so-called BDS movement, Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, which in turn has led to the formation of several anti-BDS organizations. Foremost among them may be Stand With Us, an American-based organization that was established to oppose BDS on campuses and that has now spread around the world.
We went to a presentation of Stand With Us at the Beth Israel Conservative Congregation in Netanya by Michelle Rojas-Tal a very articulate speaker. She started by giving her own background, a half Puerto-Rican, half-Jewish kid growing up in New York City who only learnt of the suffering of her maternal grandmother during the Holocaust in Europe when she was a teenager and began to be interested in her Jewish roots. When she was in school and then university she began to read a lot about Jewish history and Israel, but she found found herself defending Israel against many lies and propaganda, including from her teachers. This led her to become an activist and eventually joining Stand With US, and she is now their Diaspora Education Director, located in Jerusalem and married to an Israeli.
She described many examples of anti-Israel activities of professional student provocateurs on US campuses. How they claim to be supporting the rights of the down-trodden Palestinians, but actually engage in violent anti-Semitic acts and will stop at nothing to demonize and destroy Israel. This includes shouting down pro-Israeli speakers, tearing down pro-Israel posters, attacking pro-Israel information tables and intimidating individual Jews who wear a Magen David or any other identification. So that now it is dangerous for Jewish students to attend many campuses in the US and Canada safely, as well as in the UK, France, S. Africa and Australia. This is now a world-wide phenomenon and the level of anti-Semitism has reached heights not seen since WWII.
She also described actions of Stand With Us to counteract the BDS movement and its outrageous acts of violence and lies. There have been many positive outcomes, from preventing the passage of divestment from Israel on many campuses to training and dispatching spokesmen to campuses in countries all around the world, including China (to read more about the activities of Stand With Us see http://www.standwithus.com). They also produce very useful pamphlets and information to help people understand the issues and counter anti-Israel propaganda. In doing so it is very important that they be absolutely truthful and totally nonviolent.
However, I have two issues with Stand With Us, first their activities are largely defensive in nature. They need to be more proactive and to not just counter the enemy (for that’s what they are) but to point out their many weaknesses. For example, the Arab countries are in melt-down and have produced almost no stable civil societies. For example, the Palestinians are violently split between Hamas and Fatah and the PA “government” of Pres. Abbas is actually illegal since his term expired in 2006. For example, the Palestinians have no pressure to resolve their problems with Israel because they are looked after from cradle to grave by the UNRWA, which is mainly supported by the USA. I know its difficult to go from defense to offense when you are under constant attack, but we must do it.
The second issue is that their pamphlets, their main contact with the world, are too wordy and not graphic and hard-hitting enough. We Jews know that we are right, so we think if we explain everything in detail people will be persuaded. But, that is nonsense, in this age of short attention span and social media we must hit them with the facts between their eyes. That’s the only way to win the propaganda war.
Jack Cohen – Right of Return and BDS
Born in London, UK, lived in suburban Washington DC area for 30 years, moved to Israel in 1996. He has a web site: Jack’s Blog
