The Issue Is Not Security; The Issue IsThat Israel's Rights To The Land Supersede The Palestinian's

Caroline Glick calls it.

Israel has fallen into the habit of defensively phrasing its rights--and requirements--in the context of security and defense in the face of the ongoing Palestinian terrorist attacks.

That may be seen by some as a way to avoid the hard issues in negotiating with the Arabs, but as history has clearly shown: the Palestinian Arabs have consistently avoided any real negotiations--the kind that require give as well as take, concession as well as demand--instead resorting to demands, threats, unilateral moves and terrorism.

Keep in mind that resorting to terrorism applies equally to Abbas and Fatah as it does to Hamas. The ongoing incitement of hatred against Israel by Abbas borders on, and may very well legally constitute, genocide.

In any case, as Glick points out, in constantly pursuing peace and accommodation with the Arabs, Israel has neglected that its claims to the land are superior to that of the Palestinian Arabs.

The government's behavior is probably due to force of habit. Since the initiation of the phony peace process with the PLO 18 years ago, at their best, Israel's governments have justified the Jewish state's control over territories it won control over in the 1967 Six Day War on the basis of our security needs. Without the Jordan Valley, Israel is vulnerable to foreign invasion from the east. Without Gush Etzion to Jerusalem's south and Gush Adumim to its north, the capital is vulnerable to attack. Without overall Israeli security control over Judea and Samaria, Israel's population centers are vulnerable to terrorist attacks. And so on and so forth.

All of these statements are accurate. But they are also defensive. While Israel has been defending its right to security, the Palestinians have been on the offensive, arguing that all the land that Israel took control over from Jordan in 1967 belongs to them by ancestral right. And so for the past 18 years, the conflict has been framed as a dispute between the Palestinians' rights and Israel's security requirements.

Like its willingness to place itself at the UN's mercy, Israel's willingness to accept this characterization of the Palestinian conflict with Israel has doomed its cause to repeated and ever-escalating failure. For if the land belongs to the Palestinians, then whether or not their control of the land endangers Israel is irrelevant.

This is the reason the US's support for Israel's right to defensible borders has been reduced from support for perpetual Israeli control over unified Jerusalem and some 50 percent of Judea and Samaria in 1993, to US support for a full Israeli withdrawal to the 1949 armistice lines - including the partition of Jerusalem - in 2011. You can define "defensive needs" down. Defining rights down is a more difficult undertaking.

The irony here is that Israel's sovereign rights to Judea and Samaria are ironclad while the Palestinians' are flimsy. As the legal heir to the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, Israel is the legal sovereign of Judea and Samaria.

Moreover, Israel's historic rights to the cradle of Jewish civilization are incontrovertible.

And yet, because Israel has not wanted to impede on the possibility of peaceful coexistence with the Palestinians, for the past 18 years it has avoided mentioning its rights and instead focused solely on its security requirements. Consequently, outside of Bible-literate Christian communities, today most people are comfortable parroting the totally false Palestinian claim that Jews have no rights to Judea, Samaria or Jerusalem. They further insist that rights to these areas belong exclusively to the Palestinians who did not even exist as a distinct national community in 1967.

Read the whole thing.

Of course, this also let's Obama off the hook, allowing him to call himself a true friend of Israel merely by throwing money and weapons Israel's way instead of having to really stand up for Israel's rights. Similarly, Obama originally referred to Israel as nothing more than a place to escape from the Holocaust--it wasn't till September of last year that Obama finally referred to Israel as "the historic homeland of the Jewish people".

While Obama is happy to provide cash and weapons to Israel, he has turned down the opportunity to make a real statement by following Congress's lead in withholding money from the UN and the Palestinian Arabs.

Israel has strong legal claims to the land based on international law.
That is what it needs to focus on now.

Technorati Tag: Israel and Palestine.