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A PUBLIC DEBATE. RESOLVED: THERE BE CREATED A SECOND JEWISH STATE

by Dr. Yoram Shifftan

I suggest a public debate on the fate of those lands of the former British Mandate that lie to the west of the Jordan river.

Classic debate structure would call for three affirmative positions; each of which, of course, would be contested by corresponding negative presentations. The following is a possible triplet of assertions for debate:

In view of Olmert's so-called "convergence plan", in this paper we discuss #2: the advisability of a second Jewish state in Yesha (Samaria, Judea and Gaza) as a legal means to allow Jews to remain and further develop and settle the many empty areas in Western Palestine beyond the Green Line.

The essay that follows are our preliminary notes: some points on which we would base our argument. We also discuss the advantages of a public debate for driving home some home truths that are usually ignored -- to Israel's detriment.

ONE SUCH truth is that, if Olmert persists with his intention to further uproot Jews who are living in their ancestral homeland, such a second Jewish state is the only way to comply with the dictate of international law which is antithetical to the intended uprootings.[1] This international law only allows for the active and urgent Jewish settlement in all of Western Palestine. The proposed debate would allow and provide in particular a receptive and attractive background to inform the public and our ignorant judicial system about the information available[2] about which much of the public knows nothing. The more the public becomes informed, the more the LAWYER Olmert and the opportunists surrounding him -- many of whom are also LAWYERS -- will be shamed in public, because lawyers are supposed to maintain the law. The more the public understands the facts, the more will both the home and international public reject the outrageously unfair demonization of the settlers. Without such demonization, and with a larger proportion of the public knowing the true facts (and time is of essence), it would be very hard for the Olmert's government to transgress the law again and proceed with further uprooting.

The singling out of Jews for ethnic cleansing in their ancestral homeland by a "Jewish" government is a very serious violation of the irrevocable decision by the League of Nations, a decision also enshrined in the charter of the UN and in the decision of the International Court of Justice, in the Feisal-Weizmann 1919 Agreement, in the most fundamental human rights, and also in other laws of the state of Israel itself, such as the law of return. These violations are discussed in the articles of lawyer Howard Grief.[3]

As a bonus of such a DRAMATIC debate that the Jewish people consider a second Jewish state after 2000 years of being stateless, the pro-Israel information that was hitherto deliberately concealed by the 'Jewish' government itself[4] will be made available to inform the world, and so may possibly demolish the assumptions that motivate academic, commercial and cultural boycotts. (Admittedly, a realistic assessment might be that it takes very little for hate-Israel hate-Jews groups to coalesce.) It is also possible, though much less likely, that it will decrease the motivation of terrorists to kill. The terrorist agenda appears based firmly on a triumphant Caliphate ambition, not facts, so it is resistent to logical argument.[5]

Another 'bonus' of such a DRAMATIC and therefore attention-attracting debate is that many more Jews and Israelis will learn about the justice of the Jewish cause. When Peres, an Israeli PM and Minister of Foreign Affairs (MFA), himself propagates Arafat's multiply false statement that "even if Israel gave the 'Palestinians' all of Yesha, the 'Palestinian nation' will have only 22% of 'Palestine'",[6] how can we expect Jews and Israelis to believe in the justice of their cause and not to become demoralized and self-hating? His deliberate falsification is amplified and given unwarrented credence because it is carried without question or comment in Jewish media such as Maariv and Kol Israel.

We would examine the impending threat, or prospect, of a second Jewish state with its own army, whose soldiers will not be available to the army of the first Jewish state (although the two Jewish states will cooperate in all fields). It is likely that the very existence of such a state, even if it is only temporary, will deter thoughts about uprooting Jews in Yesha. The proposed uprooting is more, not less outrageous, because it is to be perpetrated by Jews against Jews.

It might even concentrate the mind of the Jewish and Israeli intelligentsia to the point that they will finally start internalizing the home truth that Western Palestine was given by international law to the Jews in perpetuity,[7] hence it is fundamentally illegal for one Jewish generation to deprive future Jewish generations of their eternal right of "close settlement by Jews on the lands, including State lands and waste lands not required for public purposes"[8]

This debate would allow us to point up other facts usually obscured by the world media. When Britain conquered land owned by the Ottoman empire, the initial proposition was a single Jewish state and a single Arab state. The area was not to be equally divided -- the Arab state was to be the Middle East minus the land set aside for the Jewish state (today's Israel, Samaria, Judea, and Jordan); i.e., the Arab state was to be 99% of the Ottoman lands; the Jewish state 1%.[9] But the one nation-one state rule was soon violated.[10] The Arabs continue to write in all their official documents that they are only one nation and that the imperialist nations divided them into many states. But they are not slow in voting their 22 states en bloc in the U.N. -- indeed, they have wasted so much of the world's time on harassing Israel instead of solving some of the world's real problems that more and more people have begun to regard the U.N. as an expensive joke.

The Arabs have essentially all the natural resources of the Middle East, while the Jews, who lived all over the Middle East usually before the Arabs came to these areas, are deprived of these natural resources. And even their national existence in one or two Jewish states on miniscule areas is challenged. All the world, including most Israelis and Jews, have been taught to believe that the essence of the problem is 'self-determination' for a separate Palestinian nation that existed for thousands of years. This falsehood, which is strongly refuted in the book of Julius Stone,[11] is the source of the guilt feeling of the Jews who believe that the creation of Israel has deprived the Palestinian nation of self determination, and it feeds anti-Israel feelings world-wide.

The proposed debate would be a good venue in which to remind the public that until the middle sixties, self-determination for a separate Palestinian nation was not an issue according to the Palestinian Arabs themselves, whose leaders have often frankly stated that this "peoplehood" was created in the mid-sixties as an artificial ploy to continue the war for the final destruction of Israel.[12] Even if we were to grant the legitimacy of this Palestinian nation that came into being in the middle sixties out of nowhere, there is already a Palestinian Arab state called Jordan in four fifths of Palestine.[13] Recall that the totality of Palestine was designated by international law for the Jewish state.

I urge all of you to read the Feisal-Weizmann 1919 agreement,[14] in which the Jewish and Arab parties agree in good spirit to the divide this area of the Ottoman empire into one Arab state and one Jewish state. The Jewish state is called Palestine there (as it is in the League of Nations' documents). It is against the background of the artificial creation of 22 Arab states, indeed often by imperialist nations, that the debate about two Jewish states in the fifth that remains of Palestine, is in particular justified and appropriate.

When the possibility of a second Jewish state in order to bar further uprooting is impending, it would be particularly fruitful to remind the public that when Churchill decided,[15] to "withhold", to "postpone", the application of the League's mandate for a Jewish state in four-fifths of the designated Jewish state in Eastern Palestine -- the area later called Trans-Jordan or Jordan -- even the reputable dove Haim Weizmann desperately appealed to Churchill to revoke his decision, explaining why a Jewish state that was only in Western Palestine was too small to be viable. It needed to be on both sides of the Jordan river.[16]

Perhaps nothing demonstrates better than this anecdote how we have lost the sense of what is normal. It was once normal to accept dividing the Ottoman area into a huge Arab state and a small Jewish state. The idea of taking more land from the tiny Jewish state to add to the enormous holdings of the Arab state was patently absurd, particularly after the size of the eventual Jewish state was reduced to a fifth of Mandated Palestine so that the British could pay off a political debt. So how did the Arabs succeed in making their continued attempts to grab Jewish land seem reasonable? They did it by inventing the "Palestinian people" in 1964. It pretends to be a separate entity from the larger Arab mass. And by constant reiteration of a false argument, the world has been conditioned to ignore the vastness of Arabland and to believe that giving Jewish land to this "Palestinian people" will bring peace to the region.

From the beginning of the 20th century there has been a one-direction process of Jewish-only concessions, of giving the Arabs what precisely they do not even need -- more land and more states -- in the vain attempt to buy peace. This process has accelerated so much since Oslo erupted that a Jewish leader wanted to dry the sea to create more land for the Jews,[17] and these days Arab Knesset members are emboldened to the point of demanding an immediate application of the alleged Arab 'right of return'.[18] The Arabs would then demand the possession of the Galil and the Negev. And that would be the end of the one Jewish state after 2000 years.

In the last few weeks Olmert and Kadima have focused on a single argument to justify the continuation of the ethnically cleansing of Jews in their homeland. They argue that the uprooting is required because of the demographics -- that the Arab population will continue to grow rapidly and overwhelm the Israeli Jewish population. They continue to ignore that the data for this conclusion came from Palestinian Arab sources and have been shown by competent statisticians to be false and/or exaggerated.[19] Nevertheless, Kadima continues to use the demographic argument, because Olmert can not say that it would be good for security to uproot Jews, as they did before uprooting the Jews of Gush Katif in Gaza and in North Shomron. This would be too easily negated by the reality of what has followed the last uprooting -- the terrorists have created training facilities, enlarged their weapons manufactory and brought massive amounts of war material into Gaza.

As a historic note, the disingenuous nature of enlisting the demographic argument to continue the ethnic cleansing of Jews by Jews to supposedly separate the Jews and Arabs recalls that the same leftist circles (such as MAPAM), which now push for further ethnically cleansing of Jews, were against Ben Gurion in 1948 in his wish to declare a Jewish state. But then they used the OPPOSITE argument: they wanted a bi-national state of Jews and Arabs living harmoniously together, despite the fact that in 1948 they already had half a century of experience of many massacres of Jews by Arabs, but they still wanted a bi-national state. Furthermore, the 'Oslo Process' that these leftist circles initiated in the early ninties was based on the idea of close living and cooperation between Jews and Arabs. This is why many resources were transferred to the Arabs, and common industrial areas and transit points were erected. Now, instead of having the humility to admit that they have been wrong on all fronts, they've gone from insisting that Jews and Arabs live together in a single state to insisting Jews and Arabs live segregated in separate states. But miraculously from these two contradicting arguments they still manage to derive the same invariant conclusion: 'Jews should give up their land'. Is it a case of flawed logic or working for foreign interests?

A collateral debate would examine the practical issue that there are both Jews and Arabs living in the territories. What do you do about the large Arab population? The proposed debate would provide an opportunity to argue that you do not need territorial continuity for national cohesion and national existence according to international law, as exemplified by Northern Ireland, or Hawai and Honlulu, separated from their mainland and still part of the national state in the mainland. Hence the Arabs could reside in the territories but be politically part of Jordan. It would demolish once and for all Olmert's repeated argument that it is necessary to uproot Jews in Palestine in order to preserve Israel's simultaneous Jewish and democratic character.

Singling out Jews for uprooting in Biblical Israel for demographic reasons is shown to be absurd when we point out that already a fifth of the population of pre-1967 Israel is Arab. Is Olmert prepared to continue to shrink the Jewish state as the Arab population expands? The Arabs have a decided advantage, in Darwinian terms, because they avoid the hazards of doing compulsory military service or even national service (yet they have full voting rights in the national level), and they receive excellent medical benefits, including state support for generating large families. It is only in the comparative and historical context that we can see the extent of the accelerating Jewish self-denial.

The economic cost and the fracture of social cohesion and morale would be debated. The violation of the pioneering settlement ethos that caused Jews to come in the middle of the night and build a roof so that they could legally settle under Ottoman rule will be discussed. The fact that even the British, cognizant of the League's decision, did not dare uproot settlements 'beyond the green line' will be noted.[20] For example, the 'foreign' British did not uproot Kefar Darom before 1948 even though it was beyond the green line. The 'Jewish' Arik Sharon and Ehud Olmert did uproot the very same place to their eternal historical shame in Jewish history. The Kefar Darom arid land was bought, settled and made to bloom by Jews already in the 19th century. It was periodically evacuated, given Arab bellicosity and Jewish military weakness. If you were an Arab, how could you not smell Jewish blood in the water in the face of this summer's uprooting of Kefar Darom, given its symbolic value and its history? You can only conclude that the Jews are on the run and that terrorism works, so more of it should be applied.

The reward for terror that such ongoing uprooting constitutes would be usefully debated when the spectre of a second Jewish state is on the horizon.

Valid security arguments are that it is obligatory to be in the territories as the only way to deprive the enemy of its logistic possibilities to organize and inflict terror[21] and that it is the very presence in the territories of civil Jewish settlements that makes the situation not-colonial as compared to an army-only presence ("occupation"). One should add that it is stupid to separate the Jews from the neighboring Arab villages and concentrate them in Jewish areas, where they will constitute a more attractive target for the use of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD)! The opposite of "convergence" is urgently called for.

The importance of a SHARP, DRAMATIC and no-nonsense debate is brought home if we realize that the SLOW return to the 1967 borders makes all of us lose sight of what is going on. It is rather like what happened when the Nazis closed the noose on Europe's Jews in a deliberately gradual and slow process, and thus succeeded in blunting the awareness of the Jews to the final goal. Then too they were helped by some 'Jewish leaders' who concealed information even when they knew it.[22] This slow one-directional strangulation should be contrasted with the sudden relief in the wake of the 1967 war, when borders were widened. Invoking this reverse process that engendered sudden relief will help us realize what is going on. Younger Israelis can not imagine what it means to live with the 1967 borders. Not for nothing did even Abba Eban, the famous dove, call them Auschwitz borders. Life in pre-1967 Israel meant constant fear and terrible tension that the country would be cut in two, communication and reserve mobilization disrupted, with an ensuing destruction of the state.[23] This eventuality was nearly realized when in the Six Days War a Jordanian tank brigade was very close to entering the Tulkarem-Netanya axis, with no significant force on the ground to stop them. It was pure chance that at the last minute the airforce managed to divert a few airplanes from Egypt and deal with these long columns of Jordanian tanks just before they entered this axis.[24]

Israel cannot lose even once. And remember, that at that time, we dealt with a relatively disciplined, British-trained Jordanian army, with its relatively smaller potential for atrocities, and without WMDs.

The public has to realize that had Netanya been taken in the Six Days War, the massacre of the civilian population of Netanya would surely follow as the first massacre in a series. This is what always happened in the past even if the Jewish defenders officially surrendered; see e.g. what happened to the defenders of Gush Etzion in 1948 -- they were mutilated and massacred even though they surrendered." [25]

Olmert's policy makes massacres such as the massacres of the Jewish civilian population of Hevron[26] more probable. The Israeli public may have forgotten that when Arabs conquer a Jewish town it is not like the Israeli or British army conquering a town. The Israelis and the Brits do not molest the civilian population. The Arabs do. It is so ingrained in their culture that barbaric behavior to civilians figured large in the Arab falsification of what happened in Jenin.[27]

Such a debate would help to reconstruct the dread and fear that imbued the Israeli public (and Jewish public world-wide) in the waiting weeks leading to the Six Days War when the country was mobilized and living in fear of the final massacre, when 40000 graves were dug in advance in Tel Aviv alone.

It is a measure of the traumatic siege feelings in the weeks leading to the six Days War that this war affected the life-course of people all over the world. For example, Dr Jonathan Sacks, the leading intellectual and Chief Rabbi of the UK, would probably have remained a student of Philosophy in Cambridge, had it not been for the Six Days War. Nathan Sharansky too has testified that it was the Six Days War that transformed him and other Russian Jews from hardly being aware that they were Jewish, into human rights and Jewish rights activists.[28]

We have to find ways to make it vivid to Israelis and others how impossible it was before the Six Days War. And we didn't have WMD to worry about. A public debate would be a platform that would allow us to bring home that this Olmert's convergence plan would recreate all the horror, the tension, the fear, the feeling of doom and helplessness. It amounts to national and physical suicide.

It is abnormal of us to initiate willingly -- let alone accept -- the old situation of extreme vulnerability. We had no strategic depth; the waist of the state was 17 Km (which is the distance from Natanya to Tulkarem) when Jerusalem was encircled in the 1948 war. Jerusalem could once again be under siege and Ben Gurion International airport paralyzed. This would be emphasized in such a debate.

In pre-1967 Israel life was a security nightmare because the whole population had to live in a permanent state of readiness and the reserves had to be mobilized in essentially zero-time. Warehouses of military equipment needed always to be in perfect condition at all times. All this created an enormous strain on the resources of the State.

In pre-1967 Israel the intelligence of the Central Command had to maintain very tiresome permanent air and land patrols along the complicated green line, eternally trying to pick up any change in the deployment of the enemy. This could not be done effectively from a distance. If we now revert to this situation by imposing borders close to the green line beyond which we will not be allowed to go, imagine the uproar in the world if we step beyond the self-imposed borders even for the purpose of reconnaissance, let alone in order to affect the situation on ground. To initiate such a situation ourselves is the height of folly.

We know that historically it was always the side that dominated the gav hahar (the ridge of the Judean mountains that Olmert wants to rid of its jewish population) that dominated militarily. With the expected rain of missiles and modern warfare, the possession of the ridge of the mountain and in fact all of Western Palestine is even more important. Indeed it is absolutely essential according to all the military experts, including the Chief of Staff of the American Army in his report in 1968 to President Johnson.[29]

What is called for is the opposite of Olmert's retreat strategy. What is needed is an intensive Jewish settlement in all of the empty areas of Yesha. Israeli Jews has good reason to be retrospectively grateful to the settlers. They absorbed the thousands of missiles in Gush Katif. Now that the Jews have been evacuated from Gush Katif, these missiles are now directed on Ashkelon and the Western Negev. This pattern will be amplified if Olmert is allowed to carry out his plan.

To the security considerations one should add in the proposed debate the ecological aspect and related considerations such as pollution and the preservation of water resources. Suppose the Arabs were suddenly to paint over their spots and announce they were signing a peace treaty on condition that they unconditionally take over Samaria and Judea. This would give the Jews as much cause for rejoicing as when Saudi Arabia announced a peace proposal that included an initial return of any and all alleged "Palestinians" to their ancestral homes in Israel. If the Arabs take over Yesha, they will control much of Israel's water supply.[30] And while man can live (primitively) without oil, he can not live at all without water.

Israel is green and produces wonderful fruits and flowers. And it has all the civilities. It is easy to forget that when the Jews began to return in large numbers to their homeland in the late 1800s, the land was desolate and with few inhabitants -- the early settlers found rock and sand and very little shrubbery. Beginning in the 1970s, Gush Katif also blossomed under Jewish care. (In the few months since the Arabs took control, sad to tell, it has begun to return to being a desolate place.) But there are limits to what even the Jews can accomplish on the land -- the arid Negev is mostly desert and will remain so. So how is a shrunken Israel to provide space for an expanding population? This too has to be pointed out in the proposed debate.

There are very few challenges to the second law of thermodynamics as effective as heroic Israel's agriculture-driven settlement and science. Ben Gurion said that in Israel the only realist is the dreamer. His declaration of independence, on the eve of an invasion by far superior armies, was against all the odds for survival. Similarly, Israel achievements in agriculture, medicine and science[31] is against the odds, and is truly "order out of chaos", precisely because they are done by a nation under siege. Nothing symbolizes more this struggle against the law of increase in entropy than the construction of Gush Katif. The marsh land of Gush Katif was called by the Arabs "the place of death" and they did not want to settle it, yet it was made to blossom by Jewish farmers, in a miraculous local lowering of entropy against all the odds; but alas that place has now returned to its high-entropy chaotic state. The engulfment of Gush Katif by entropy is the micro-cosmos that should serve to warn us what awaits Israel and the free world on a more global scale if appeasement and retreat continues. Human progress is achieved by the coupling of the degradation of the energy with local lowering of entropy. In initiating the destruction of Gush Katif, the Jewish government of Israel has done the opposite of human progress. It has begun its own contribution to the march of entropy -- a very un-Jewish deed indeed.

There are also the political consequences. If Jews are uprooted from biblical places like Shilo and Tekoa, even by a 'Jewish' government, the world will not understand by what right they can live in Sheich Munis (Ramat Aviv) or Jaffo. Voices debating their right to live anywheres in Israel are already raised. Israelis may think they are being reasonable by being willing to give up some of what rightfully belongs to them in the interests of gaining peace with their neighbors. They forget that the world suspects that if you are willing to give up your land, then it isn't really your land to begin with.

In conclusion, we have done the experiment of uprooting the Gaza strip and North Shomron. We are experiencing the resulting worsened security situation and the IDF's impotence to react to the new situation. We have observed that shooting ourselves in the foot contributed to Hamas' coming to power. Indeed, Hamas has declared that even on paper they are not obliged to earlier-signed agreements. Why then would we want to continue and compound the folly with more of the same retreats? To continue to operate under our self-imposed inhibitions is not just self-defeating; it amounts to wishing a national and PHYSICAL suicide. An alien would conclude that Israel's leaders are extremely stupid, or have been bought by foreign interests, or both. Their ideas are certainly alien to Judaism.

I RECOGNIZE that most of these arguments do not entail as severe a political upheaval as separating the Jewish state into two polities. What the debate says is: Hey, Israeli Government. You have demonized us Jews of Yesha. You do not respect us. The Judiary sides with the Arabs against the Jews in civil matters. The police cater to Arabs and brutally club Jewish children who are peacefully and democratically demonstrating against a Government edict. On T.V. and talk shows, Peres' flunkies in the Israeli embassies gush over the wonderful idea of giving our land to create a Palestinian state. We believe the reason you treat us as second-class citizens is in part because we have let you. We have respected judicial decisions that have been stacked against us. We do not riot the way the Arabs do at anything and everything. We grumble. We hold meetings. We march. But that doesn't bother you. You don't want us? You don't like us? We are an expense? The IDF should not have to protect us? O.K. we will create our own governmental entity. We will protect ourselves. Let us part as friends. We don't want more Amonas.[32]

1. See in particular the chapter entitled "Continuing Obligations of the Mandate, in Julius Stone's Israel and Palestine, Johns Hopkins Press, 1981, pp. 121-123.

3. Howard Grief's articles appeared in Hebrew and English in www.acpr.org.il. You can also read two of them by clicking here and here.

4. Yoram Shifftan, "Israeli Hasbara: A Nation Working Against Itself," (www.think-israel.org/shifftan.html).

5. Efraim Karsch, "Islam's Imperial Dreams: Muslim political ambitions aren't a reaction to Western encroachments,"
(www.think-israel.org/karsch.imperialism.html).

6. Yoram Shifftan, "Israeli Hasbara: A Nation Working Against Itself," (www.think-israel.org/shifftan.html) and Yoram Shifftan and Bernice Lipkin, Nativ, (nativ.cc/june_05/shiftan_lipkin.htm in Hebrew).

7. Yoram Shifftan, "A Legal Challenge To Sharon's Uprooting Policy,"
(www.think-israel.org/shifftan.uprooting.html).

8. From Article 6 of the League's mandate for Palestine, and originally referring to all of Palestine, i.e., including Jordan of today. Also see Julius Stone, Israel and Palestine, p 150.

11. Julius Stone, ibid. See also Yashiko Sagamori, "Who are the Palestinians,"
(www.think-israel.org/sagamori.html) and also Joseph Farah, "Palestinian people do not exist," World Net Daily, July 11, 2002,
(www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=28222).

12. On March 3, 1977, for example, the head of the P.L.O. Military Operations Department, Zuhair Muhsin, told the Netherlands paper Trouw that "there are no differences between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese....We are one people. Only for political reasons do we carefully underline our Palestinian identity. For it is of national interest for the Arabs to encourage the existence of the Palestinians against Zionism. Yes, the existence of a separate Palestinian identity is there only for tactical reasons. The establishment of a Palestinian state is a new expedient to continue the fight against Zionism and for Arab unity". It is to be found in p.11 of Julius Stone's book (see Ref.#1).

As another example, in the early twenties, representatives of the leading Arab families of Palestine (as they would do many times later on) sent Churchill a memorandum and rejected the notion that the Arabs of Palestine are a nationality different from that of the Arab people in general. See Douglas J. Feith, "A Mandate for Israel,"
(www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2751/is_n33/ai_14538698/print).

13. Yasser Arafat said repeatedly "What you call Jordan is actually Palestine." Cited in Ramon Bennett, Chapter 7, The Great Deception, (Third Printing, April 1997, Shekinah Books),
(http://home.iprimus.com.au/square/POLITICS/Philistine.htm).

15. England could not legally take the land away from the Jews. So she used a postponement strategy, and assigned the administration of the area temporarily to the family of Hussein, the Emir of Mecca.

"Churchill's inclination to put Eastern Palestine under Arab administration--to lop off around 80 percent of the territory originally available for the Jewish national home--caused consternation among the Jews. It moved Chaim Weizmann to write Churchill that a Jewish national home confined to Western Palestine was altogether inadequate:

17. Israeli media reported in 1998 that minister Refael Eitan intended to create land by drying an area in the Mediterranean sea.

18. As reported in the Israel media, e.g., "Arab Israelis Demand Right of Return," Arutz-Sheva, December 18, 2005,
(peacepalestine.blogspot.com/2005/12/ arab-israelis-demand-right-of-return.html)

19. Aaron Klein, "Trouble In The Holy Land: Palestinian 'population bomb' a lie. New study debunks PA claims of demographic threat to Israel," World Net Daily, January 18, 2005,
(www.pademographics.com/trouble_in_the_holy_land.txt).

The new demographic statistics also have consequences for America. The American Congress has been alerted that the PA has inflated the size of the Arab population in the territories in order to claim additional billions of dollars in relief and humanitarian aid. See Debbie Berman, "Inflated PA Demographics," Arutz-Sheva, March 10, 2006,
(www.israelnationalnews.com/news.php3?id=100008).

20. Professor Eugene Rostow, who was dean of the Yale law school, repeatedly emphasized in his articles that from the point of view of international law there is no difference between Jewish settlement on both sides of the Green line. The mandate of the League of nations obliges all nations of the world to urgently encourage dense Jewish settlement in all of western Palestine (and merely postponing this duty in Eastern Palestine). There is no extra international legitimacy to Jewish settlements west of the green line as compared to those east of this line.

Furthermore, the present sanctification of the Green line by the Israeli left and hostile international community ignores the fact that Jordan itself insisted in the armistice agreement that the Green line will not bias any future arrangement. It also ignores the fact that Jewish settlements that existed before 1948 "beyond the Green line", such as Atarot, Neve Yaakov, Beit Haarava, Kalya, Kefar Darom, Jewish Quarters in the old city of Jerusalem and Hebron, or Kefar Darom, the four Kibbutzim of Gush Etzion, all disappeared from the map before and during 1948 because of Jewish military weakness coupled with Arab aggression. Sanctification of the green line violates international law not only because it violates the dictate of the League's Palestine mandate, but also of the rule ex iniuria non oritur ius -- the aggressor shall not benefit from the fruits of its aggression. see e.g. Stone's pp. 7, 51.

21. Caroline Glick, "Ehud Olmert's 'convergence' plan for the West Bank and US Middle East Policy," Center for Security Policy,
(www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org/Olmerts_Convergence_Plan.pdf). Also, Caroline Glick, "Our World: Olmert's mythological settlements," May 15, 2006,
(www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1145961349445&pagename= JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull).

22. There is for example the famous story of Dr. Rudolph Kastner, who, with Eichman and the Jewish Agency, secretly organized a train of some selected 1200 Jews to be saved but did not inform the rest of the Hungarian Jews (400,000 perished) on what awaits them in the east. There were similar stories in various Ghettos in Poland where the head of the Jews had to fill a quota for deportation.

23. Dinur, Ben Zion, Sefer Toldot ha-Hagana (History of the Hagana), Tel Aviv 1995. History of the pre-state Jewish Army.

24. "The Six Days War" on the official website of the Israel Defense Forces is a good place to start to read about the 6-Day War.
(www1.idf.il/.../mainpage.asp?sl=EN&id=5&from=history&docid=18924 &Pos=18&bScope=false).

25. "Kfar Etzion Remembered: A history of Gush Etzion and the Massacre of Kfar Etzion,"
(www.zionism-israel.com/Gush_Etzion_Massacre.htm). Also, "Kfar Etzion massacre,"
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kfar_Etzion_massacre).

26. Elyakim HaEtzni, "The Hebron Market," Think-Israel, November-December 2004,
(www.Think-Israel.org/haetzni.hebron.html).

27. David Frankfurter, "Peter Hansen of UNRWA",
Think-Israel.org/may04bloged.html#may04.254

28. Natan Sharensky, in a BBC world service interview some 3 weeks ago (March 2006).

29. The report of the American Chief of Staff (General Earle G. Wheeler) in 1968 to President Johnson -- (see
www.acpr.org.il/hatikvah/index.htm and
www.acpr.org.il/hatikvah/05-English-Ad.htm.)
Also, Yoram Ettinger, "Gaza Security Wise and Historically Part of Israel," August 14, 2005, cited in Women in Green, (www.womeningreen.org/sayaug04.htm).

30. See Aubrey Wulfson, "What Retreat from the Territories means for Israel's Water Supply,"
(www.think-israel.org/wulfsohn.water.html) and Martin Sherman, "Water in Israel: the dry facts,"
(www.think-israel.org/sherman.water.html)

32. Hillel Fendel, "Cracks between Religious-Zionist Public and Army," February 2, 2006,
(www.israelnationalnews.com/news.php3?id=97799). Also, Hillel Fendel, "Police use excessive violence to destroy Amona homes," Think-Israel,
(www.think-israel.org/fendel.amona.html).

Dr. Yoram Shifftan is a scientist who has published many articles on Israeli hasbara in publications such as Ha'aretz, Ma'ariv, Hatzofeh, Hamodia and Ha'Uma. He has also presented a special series about hasbara on Arutz-7 radio. His articles in Think-Israel have been on hasbara and the legal basis of Israel's ownership of Biblical Israel. This article was submitted May 7, 2006.

Editor's Note: There is a Dr. Yoram Shiftan (one "f") at the Technion. He is NOT the author of this article.