Friday, September 19, 2008

Land for Peace is Fuel for Terror

Land-for-peace, peace plans which demand of the non aggressor state loss of land are the antithesis of the path to a true and lasting peace. Therefore any such peace process, including the Oslo Accords and the Roadmap to Peace only serve to strengthen the hold of terrorists within the Palestinian side. That means extremism within Palestinian leadership is encouraged by current Western Policy in the Middle-East. Some supporters of Palestinians have been afraid to face the truth, perhaps out of fear that putting Arabic rights at Israel’s mercy would risk loss of Arabic rights. Yet for those who know her, Israel’s mercy is its most potent character trait. The moment the gangster-like tactics of terror stop, the violence will end, and peace will come soon, it’s that simple.

Is not the goal of Western Foreign Policy to seek peace which will bring economic prosperity to all? But before you can bring actual peace, you must face the actual truth of things. This conflict is not Israel and the Palestinians with equal claims. Like the person who knows he is losing an argument, so he begins to shout his opinion louder rather than restating it more logically, because there is not enough logic to support it. So too is the people that resort to violence against a peaceful democracy rather than pacifistic civil disobedience. Is Israel’s human rights record truly comparable to China’s? Did Palestinians before the Intifada fear for their lives from the Israel’s military machine? No. The truth, for those who care to hear it is no. The truth is the Palestinian Arabic choice for terror proves that they know deep down that they have no equal claim to the land as does Israel.

The West Bank, by International Law, is Israel’s already (defacto annexation pending final status determination). If this is true, then the idea of avoiding any Israeli land for peace, peace process is not just right wing propaganda, but the basis for any real path to peace. Not just from the concept of being fair to Israel, but from the reality that today’s injustice brings tomorrow’s war. It does not matter which sides looses today’s negotiation. If there is objective International Law to back up a claim that is entirely ignored, there will likely be violence in the future unless a true peace process is implemented instead. A peace process such as the Everyone Wins peace plan, that endeavors to meet the needs of the bi-societal – specific, internal and delicate – healing processes before it tries to carve up territories and attempts to write out maps.

It is unjust to support terror. Land for Peace has become a symbol of a reward for Palestinian Terror, rather than what it should have been from the start, a required gift to a needy people. There should have been a grassroots movement by the Palestinian Arabs to express humble gratitude of a refugee nation over being given a new homeland by its benefactor, Israel. For if a Palestinian state is founded upon the ravenous bloodshed of terror then its future would be fleeting at best, logistically speaking. Morally speaking, support of terror makes the Palestinians’ the aggressor even if Israel has more power and also makes the Palestinian case wrong even before you review the facts. Legally speaking, once you do review the facts, however, it is clear that Israel has more legal rights to the land than the Palestinians under International Law. Allow me to illustrate:

The state is the primary actor in International Law. Individuals, when severed by International Legal Standards from statehood, are not complete entities to International Law, per say, as they are not in the hallowed designation of “State”, whereas individuals within a state are generally viewed as subservient to the greater needs of the greater state in which they reside, unless a universally accepted fundamental Jus Cogens law is clearly violated. Freedom of religious expression, for example, is not currently listed as a universal Jus Cogens law, even though it as I have argued it should be and it is very clearly a Human Right. (This explains why the U.N. is slow to react to Human Rights abuses throughout the world.) An example of this concept is found by refugees who are former members of a state that has completed the legal act of Succession or Cession (as is the case of Jordan in regards to the entire Arabic population of the West Bank, both Judea and Samaria). To keep this essay from getting too long, let’s cite the example of England who used this same premise to keep Northern Ireland as it’s own after its peace deal with the IRA; the full state comes first. But after terror is used by the conquered party, certainly then, no sane nation would assume that the attacked nation had even less rights because it was being terrorized. England certainly did not feel this way. Neither should Israel be made to forsake land for peace due to threat or fiction.

Further you can argue that Ireland was a full state itself before being conquered by England, whereas the Palestinians Arabs were not a full state, but members and former citizens of either Jordan (West Bank) or Egypt (Gaza Strip) before becoming refugees, nations that have abandoned their lands. Israel thus has even more right to the West Bank and Gaza than England has to Northern Ireland. Yet where is the international pressure for England to clear out of Ireland? Is something less than evenhanded afoot? Is it right wing to say emphatically, YES? Or it is simply correct to say so?

Yet political left and right are irrelevant to the issues at play here. Consider the source that tells you this. God blessed me with the Everyone Wins peace plan not only out of my desire to stop the bloodshed and protect Jewish religious rights to their land and Holy sites, but also from my desire to allow everyone, Jew and Arab alike to keep their homes, and out of a desire to enrich the civil rights of West Bank and Gaza Arabs. The only way to do all this is by facing the absolute truth of the matters at hand. That as of today Israel is the logistic, moral and legal owner of the entire Judea and Samaria.

True, it is unjust to support terror. So too, it is also unjust to support being heavy handed against the true land owner, Israel, in any final status negotiations. The restoration of moderation in attitudes toward Israel by those currently biased against her, is a must, just for a basic perception of the plain facts to occur.

The bottom line is, Israeli land-for-peace, peace deals are clearly fuel for terror and the world need only correctly identify the real aggressor in the conflict for true peace to come. For so long and with so much bloodshed the wrong way to peace has been pursued. The time has come to try it the right way.

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