Are BS and Ds in BDS just manifestations of a malodorous whole?

If we leave analogies to bull and donkey excrement aside for the moment, is there any way to intellectually or morally justify the Arab- inspired BDS campaign?

Or is the BDS campaign, co-founded by Omar Barghouti, yet another example of how Muslim racist supremacism fails when interrogated by the standard trifecta of intellectual rigour, universal morality and international law?

In an article for the Los Angeles Times on May 26 2014, and placed prominently on the official bdsmovement.net website, Saree Makdisi, a professor of comparative literature, asks the question : “Does the term ‘apartheid’ fit Israel?”

And, in the time-honoured tradition of lazy journalism or arguably naïve enthusiasm, and just in case there was any chance of receiving an answer which would queer her pitch, Makdisi immediately answers herself in the affirmative: “Of course it does.”

But is that so? Is Israel an apartheid state as set out in Article II of the UNGA declaration introduced in 1973 and eventually ratified in 1976 by over 100 countries?

The UNGA declaration crafted 19 Articles which, in summary, concluded that "As such, apartheid was declared to be a crime against humanity, with a scope that went far beyond South Africa. While the crime of apartheid is most often associated with the racist policies of South Africa after 1948, the term more generally refers to racially based policies in any state."

Warming up to her task, Makdisi then states that the convention outcomes were “…ratified by most United Nations member states (Israel and the United States are exceptions, to their shame).”
In this she is mostly correct.

However, she omits to mention that in addition to Israel and the United States, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand, “to their shame”, also refused to sign on or ratify the ICSPCA. These democracies rejected the ICSPCA formulation that apartheid was declared to be a crime against humanity because crimes against humanity are considered so grave in nature that they must be meticulously elaborated and strictly construed under existing international law.

And so, in order to examine what Article II of the ICSPCA formulation said, I quote its entirety:

(a) Denial to a member or members of a racial group or groups of the right to life and liberty of person:
(i) By murder of members of a racial group or groups;
(ii) By the infliction upon the members of a racial group or groups of serious bodily or mental harm, by the infringement of their freedom or dignity, or by subjecting them to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment;
(iii) By arbitrary arrest and illegal imprisonment of the members of a racial group or groups;

(b) Deliberate imposition on a racial group or groups of living conditions calculated to cause its or their physical destruction in whole or in part;

(c) Any legislative measures and other measures calculated to prevent a racial group or groups from participation in the political, social, economic and cultural life of the country and the deliberate…denying to members of a racial group or groups basic human rights and freedoms, including the right to work, the right to form recognized trade unions, the right to education, the right to leave and to return to their country, the right to a nationality, the right to freedom of movement and residence, the right to freedom of opinion and expression, and the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association;

(d) Any measures including legislative measures, designed to divide the population along racial lines by the creation of separate reserves and ghettos for the members of a racial group or groups, the prohibition of mixed marriages among members of various racial groups, the expropriation of landed property belonging to a racial group or groups or to members thereof;

(e) Exploitation of the labour…of a racial group or groups, in particular by submitting them to forced labour;

(f) Persecution of organizations and persons, by depriving them of fundamental rights and freedoms, because they oppose apartheid.

For anybody who has lived in Israel, Article II, as it would be applied to the Jewish State by Israel’s detractors, is to draw a very, very long bow indeed.

Learned treatises have been written refuting every one of the apartheid allegations at every level that Israel’s detractors would bestow on her. I will not add to the painstaking and methodical work of my betters.

For those who haven’t lived in Israel, why would they believe somebody like Barghouti unless it suited them to subscribe to a prejudice and a libellous bigotry that meshed with their own personal world view? It is easy to show Barghouti for what he is.

By that I mean that labelling Israel as an apartheid state comparable with the old South Africa is the most potent weapon in the armoury of BDS promoters. It resonates well with those who live by popular media 'sound-bite analysis' of complex situations, and Barghouti has chosen his weapon well.

While well-intentioned, though not necessarily well-read, people believe the BDS movement is worthy of support because they mistakenly believe that BDS advocates a two state solution, the truth is quite different.

On the 6th January 2004, that same Omar Barghouti wrote in The Electronic Intifada: “The two-state solution for the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is really dead. Good riddance! But someone has to issue an official death certificate before the rotting corpse is given a proper burial… We are witnessing the rapid demise of Zionism…nothing can be done to save it…[and] I, for one, support euthanasia.”

Dem’s fighting words in anybody’s language. And the written record can never be erased.

Unfortunately, those sentiments from the horse’s mouth [apologies, Omar…] lay bare the real aim of the BDS campaign.

The intellectuals [sic] behind the BDS campaign do not support a two-state solution as most European and some Australian BDSers believe.

They support a one-state solution where 7.7 million “Palestinians” worldwide would return to present-day Israel in an act of “euthanasia” [apologies, Omar] that would spell its demise.

The barely-concealed bigotry and prejudice that drives the international BDS campaign is slowly coming under greater examination across the western civilised world which values intellectual and moral honesty. Here again, Mr Barghouti does the movement no favours.

For example, Mr Barghouti maintains that BDS follows the heroic legacy of Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela and the anti-apartheid movement, where being anti-Israel aligns you with the romantic, heroic social justice movements of the past.

Fortunately, Dr King’s words still ring out as starkly today as they did in 1968 at a dinner he attended in Cambridge, MA : “When people criticize Zionists they mean Jews, you are talking anti-Semitism.”

And it says much about the racist bigotry of the BDS campaign particularly when King is recorded as saying on March 25, 1968, less than two weeks before his assassination:
“Peace for Israel means security, and we must stand with all our might to protect its right to exist, its territorial integrity. I see Israel as one of the great outposts of democracy in the world, and a marvellous example of what can be done, how desert land can be transformed into an oasis of brotherhood and democracy. Peace for Israel means security and that security must be a reality. I solemnly pledge to do my utmost to uphold the fair name of the Jews — because bigotry in any form is an affront to us all.”

As for that other icon, Nelson Mandela, and the narrative of C.R.A.P. that the BDSers would have you believe, we have only to turn to the 1990 series of interviews that Mandela gave on his invitation to the United States for a series of ticker-tape parades celebrating his achievement: With respect to Israel and the Palestinians, Mandela stressed that he unequivocally recognized Israel, not only as a de facto entity but its de jure right to exist as a state behind secure borders.

In his 1994 autobiography he states: “I have found Jews to be more broad-minded than most whites on issues of race and politics, perhaps because they themselves have historically been victims of prejudice.”

But this is not about whether Mandela gives Israel a character reference or not.

Rather, it is about his statement in Gaza with Arafat in October 1999, despite his ambivalence about Israel because of their support of the apartheid regime in South Africa that, “The Arab leaders must make an unequivocal statement that they recognize the existence of Israel with secure borders.”

Omar Barghouti and his BDS campaign are currently a popular go-to mainspring for those leisured but morally and intellectually suspect classes looking for a cause to espouse.

At his core, Barghouti is essentially dishonest; his campaign is based on a lie. Hence, BDS will go the way of other ill-conceived Arab plans since 1948 to rid the Middle East of the only Jewish state in the world.

In support of the above claim, I state that Mr. Barghouti claims that it is racist for Israelis not to condemn their army when it accidentally brings about the death of Palestinian civilians while in his view it is not racist for Palestinians publicly to applaud the purposeful murder of Jewish children or kidnapping of Jewish teenagers.

Further, Omar Barghouti does not deny the tacit assumption that while Palestinian nationalism is a legitimate expression of the national aspirations of the Palestinian people, Jewish nationalism must be racism.  For Mr Barghouti to appeal to a wider base of a readership not well versed in Middle east history, facts and figures, he must needs use the race card to justify his claim that Israel pursues a policy of apartheid.

If you have never been to Israel you would never know otherwise. Mr Barghouti banks on this.
If you had ever been to Israel or lived there, you would know that in Haifa or Tel Aviv or Jerusalem, Jews and Arabs live in the same neighborhoods, in the same blocks of flats sometimes, frequent each other's businesses, and cheer the home town football team together.

Israeli Arabs have the right to vote, serve in the Knesset, study in Israeli universities, share the same hospitals and public facilities and work alongside Israeli Jews. If you fell ill you would likely be looked after by Arab physicians and nurses in Israeli hospitals. Eleven serving members of the current Israeli Parliament in the State of Israel are Arabs, even though they don't (yet??) see the irony in their vociferous objection (Ahmed Tibi, MK, February, 2014) to living under the Palestinian Authority in any future two-state solution........

Casting Palestinians are passive 'victims', wholly innocent of any responsibility for their plight, Mr Barghouti essentially disrespects them by absolving them of any accountability for their own actions, and providing them with a framework to behave as if they can do no wrong.

"The only reason there is no Palestinian state thriving next to Israel (to which Palestinians the world over would have the right of return) is because the Palestinians do not want such a state: they would rather destroy Israel than build Palestine - and often well-meaning Europeans [and Americans] encourage them in that idee fixe" ( (Menachem Kellner, 2007).

Thus, even this brief survey highlights the questionable intellectual and moral honesty of this mainstay of rational Arab policy.

As for Ms Makdisi who lives and works at UCLA, well, I bear her no ill will.

When all is said and done, Ms Makdisi, who has never been to Israel, is a professor of literature, and the tools of her trade are, after all, mostly fiction.

The aboriginal rights of Jews to the State of Israel

-or why the “Palestinians” are hard to sell legally

- shamelessly plagiarized and adapted from the work of Allen Z. Hertz

It is indeed fortunate that increasing international attention is being paid to the concept of aboriginal rights as an important legal topic in Australia, New Zealand, and the U.S..

The implications of such research and thinking have far-reaching consequences for the current Arab Muslim narrative of a state for the “Palestinian” people.

Because it so clearly undermines the Muslim Arab narrative of the concept of a “Palestinian” people or “nation”, it also helps to explain why the Arab states are so supportive of an economic, academic and cultural boycott of the Jewish state in their efforts to de-legitimise the Jewish state.

In other words, the ongoing Arab-Israeli conflict via the subterfuge of the creation of a "Palestinian" state, has no legal, historical, political or moral basis as this article will show. Thus,  getting others to de-legitimise Israel through sanctions after both the legal and the military imperatives have failed, remains the only avenue remaining to the Arabs to remove completely, an indigenous people from an Arab-colonised and occupied Middle East.

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The Basic Premise
The notion of aboriginal rights is an important legal and moral adjunct to the claim of an indigenous people to a homeland where they have demonstrated demographic and cultural ties to a land for more than twenty seven centuries.

This recognition of the documented aboriginal land rights of an indigenous community backed by the highest sources of international law are what are so problematic for all those supporters of the de-legitimisation of Israel.

The notion of “peoplehood” is about much more than genetics. It is also a complex sociological phenomenon— a central pillar of the notion of nation states. It is important because the political and legal doctrines of aboriginal rights and the self-determination of peoples cannot apply retroactively.

This means that a people, without a continuous identity stretching back to the relevant historical time, cannot today make an aboriginal or other claim with respect to that earlier period before it decides to proclaim itself a “people”. The implications for the slick modern-day narrative of the “Palestinian” people are fraught with legal, moral and historical minefields.

You cannot become a "people" just because you don't like Jews.

Historical antecedents
For 2.18 billion Christians, the Bible says that the Twelve Tribes straddled the Jordan River, as did the realm of Kings David and Solomon and their successors. Since antiquity, this homeland was known to Jews as “the land of Israel”, and as the “Holy Land” to Christians. Muslims and Islam never figured in these ancient texts.

Together with the Jewish Bible, the Christians Gospels and, later, the Muslim Koran, all refer to the Jewish people and its connection to the Holy Land. With at least 2,700 years of continuous history, the Jewish people kept a subjective-objective identity that always included demographic and cultural links to its native land.

Thus, the Jewish people, as both an abstraction and a physical entity are the aboriginal tribe and “the Arab people” is the interloping settler population, including newer waves of Arab immigration in the 19th and 20th centuries.

And before the Arab and Muslim armies invaded and colonised the Land of Israel, the “Holy Land” was home, inter alia, to the immediate ancestors of the Jewish people, including personalities like Kings David and Solomon. Of course, the “Holy Land” of the Christians (there is still no mention of Islam ….) was also home to other peoples like the Phoenicians, Ammonites, Moabites, Edomites, and Philistines which have long since vanished from the world with nobody today entitled to make new claims on their behalf.

Judaism, the Hebrew language, and the Jewish people were already established in the Holy Land for about a thousand years before the 7th-century-CE ethnogenesis in Arabia of the Arab people, the birth of which was approximately concurrent with the emergence of Islam and classical Arabic.

In this regard, the Jewish people’s claim to its ancestral homeland reaches back to antiquity and thus antedates the post-classical birth of both Europe and the Islamic civilization. Conceptually, the Jewish people is aboriginal to its ancestral homeland in the same way that the First Nations are aboriginal to their ancestral lands in the Americas and the Aboriginal people are indigenous to Australia.

So if we apply the doctrine of the self-determination of peoples, which normally allocates territory by the national character of the current local population, then the self-determination of the Arab people is expressed via twenty-one Arab countries, while the State of Israel is the sole expression of the self-determination of the Jewish people.

Furthermore, if the break-up of the Ottoman Empire legitimised nation-states such as Japan, Italy, Greece, and the countries of the Arab League, then Israel and two dozen other modern countries are successor-states of the Ottoman caliphate.

This poses a huge problem of legitimacy for the current “Palestinian” narrative.

Yeah, but what of Modern history?
In 1919, there was no “Palestinian” people.

Indeed, until that point in time (the break-up of the Ottoman Empire into Syria, Jordan Lebanon and Iraq…), no Muslim history had ever known or acknowledged a state or province called “Palestine.” No Muslim holy book had ever mentioned the sanctity of Jerusalem as a holy Muslim icon. And no Muslim Arab ruler had ever designated the Ottoman province of Damascus as the centre of the Islamic faith.

The Ottomans themselves, who ruled over the Arabs for over 400 hundred years, never had a province or sub-provincial unit called “Palestine”.

It is true that the Ottomans did, for a time, after the 7th-century-CE Arab conquest and colonisation of the modern Middle East, keep the old Roman and Byzantine Christian toponym Palaestina, arabicized as Filastin (فلسطين).
 
But the Paris decision-makers who presided over the break-up of the Ottoman caliphate and who created Syria, Jordan, Iraq and Lebanon were specific in their aim to establish the Holy Land to be the national home for the Jewish people estimated to be 14 million Jews worldwide, including the one million then living in the Near and Middle East.

Failure to create a national home for the Jewish people would also have meant that the Arab people would have received almost the whole of the Ottoman inheritance.

That result would have been unacceptable to Britain and America and to the principal Arab leader at the Paris Peace Conference, Prince Feisal because they significantly understood that the claim to self-determination of the Jewish people was as compelling as that of the Arab people.

In actual fact, as sole representative of the Arab nations at the 1919 Peace Conference, Feisal had specifically accepted the plan to create “a national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine while his father, the Hashemite King of the Hedjaz (later part of Saudi Arabia) was party to the 1920 Sevres Treaty that explicitly stipulated that there would be “a national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine.

The historical record will always remain unchanged.………….

So who are the “Palestinians”?
The international decision to create a national home for the Jewish people, from the sea to the Jordan River, did not result in the displacement of local Arabs.

On the contrary, from 1922 until 1948, the Arab population of the national home for the Jewish people almost tripled, while the Jewish population there multiplied eight times.

The later problem of Arab refugees (about 726,000) from the national home for the Jewish people, and Jewish refugees (about 850,000) from Arab countries only emerged from May 1948, when local Arabs allied with several neighbouring Arab states to launch a war to destroy the newly independent Israel. Their declared intention was to exterminate the Jews living between the sea and the Jordan River, just as the Turks in 1922 had spectacularly succeeded in liquidating the aboriginal Greek communities of the Anatolian littoral.

Among local Muslim Arabs, the formation of a distinct, subjective-objective “Palestinian” identity did not generally occur before the second half of the 20th century, roughly around 1964, in the heyday of Egyptian pan-Arabism.

In 1950, two years after the establishment of the State of Israel, King Abdullah of Jordan unilaterally annexed the West Bank and East Jerusalem with his Arab Legion which illegally entered, conquered and occupied the land in the 1948-1949 War of Independence. Only Britain and Pakistan alone in the world recognised this occupation.

And so, in May 1948, when the name “Palestine” was dropped in favor of “Israel” as the name for the newly independent Jewish state it was begun to be used by the Muslim Arabs to denote their resistance to the creation of a jewish state.

Before 1948, the adjective “Palestinian” had too often been used as synonym for “Jewish.”
In other words, the name “Palestine” and many other specific features of the 1922 Palestine Mandate were too closely associated with Jews and Zionism to have offered much of a focus for Muslim Arabs. Therefore, they generally did not identify as “Palestinian” until the “Palestine” trademark had been definitely abandoned by the Jews.

That, ten, is the history of “Palestinian” “nationalism. The vast majority of "Palestinians" turn out to be Arabs who have migrated to modern day Israel through the 1920s as economic migrants from surrounding Arab lands who were lured by the bright success of the Zionist enterprise in what was marsh and/or stony desert.

For centuries prior to the break-up of the Ottoman Caliphate, there had never been a Muslim state or province by the name of “Palestine”.

After the breakup of the empire, between 1922 and 1948, the term “Palestine” was used by the British, the Americans and the the Arab representatives to designate the homeland of the Jews.
Between 1948-1967, no Palestinian state was created when Egypt held the Gaza Strip and Jordan had East Jerusalem and the West Bank.

Thus, the continuing present-day Arab insistence on a “Palestinian” state is arguably one facet of a multi-faceted strategy to remove an indigenous people who are not Muslim, from a colonised and occupied Arab Muslim Middle East.

In 2014, we have only to look at the fate of the fast-dwindling Christian communities in countries of the “Arab Spring” and in Bethlehem itself today to extrapolate the end-game of a resurgent, oft-violent Islam in the twenty-first century.