Étiquettes
Supporters of international humanitarian law must condemn the views espoused by DePaul University’s Jason Hill, a tenured philosophy professor, regarding his statements on Palestine-Israel, both in the past and in his recent article in The Federalist.
Hill’s opinions on Palestine-Israel must be examined carefully as a microcosm of the myths broadly perpetuated by the right wing to justify Israel’s military occupations, operations and land seizures in Palestine.
Hill’s article fails to present any primary-source and peer-reviewed material to justify his argumentation, instead providing only neophyte analyses, historical falsification and historical negationism.
The 1967 War With Jordan
Following the introductory paragraphs to Hill’s article, he presents his central argument: the “moral case for Israel” to annex “the West Bank and beyond” — on the historical basis of what he describes as “the 1967 defensive war with Jordan.”
Interestingly, there was no “1967 defensive war with Jordan.” There was, instead, a 1967 war between Israel and the allied Arab states: Egypt, Syria and Jordan, with military support from Iraq — a war collectively known as the “Six-Day War,” which occurred between June 5 and June 10, 1967. Upon the war’s conclusion, Israel had conquered Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Syria’s Golan Heights.
One part of the Six-Day War occurred on June 7, 1967, when Israel conducted its bloody Jordanian campaign, resulting in Israel’s seizure of Bethlehem and East Jerusalem from Jordanian administration. Twenty days later, Israel’s Knesset (legislature) passed two laws: the Law and Administration Ordinance Law and the Municipalities Ordinance Law, which together arbitrarily extended Israel’s “law, jurisdiction, and administration” upon any territories Israel claimed, and which permitted Israel’s minister of the interior to expand its municipal control over the “newly-included area” — carefully not mentioning “East Jerusalem” to avoid self-incrimination for this outright annexation. The next day, on June 28, 1967, the minister of interior implemented Israel’s municipal control over East Jerusalem, an effective annexation in all but name.
Thirteen years later, on June 30, 1980, the U.N. Security Council adopted U.N. Resolution 476 in response to Israel’s ongoing “legislative steps … with the aim of changing the character and status of the Holy City of Jerusalem.” U.N. 476 “deplor[ed] the persistence of Israel in changing the physical character, demographic composition, institutional structure and the status of the Holy City of Jerusalem” and “strongly deplore[d] the continued refusal of Israel, the occupying Power, to comply with the relevant resolutions of the Security Council and the General Assembly.” It went on to declare that “all such measures which have altered the … Holy City of Jerusalem are null and void and must be rescinded in compliance with the relevant resolutions of the Security Council.”
Defiantly, on July 30, 1980, Israel’s Knesset passed the “Basic Law: Jerusalem, Capital of Israel,” which explicitly declared that, “Jerusalem, complete and united, is the capital of Israel.” In response, on August 20, 1980, the U.N. Security Council adopted U.N. Resolution 478, reaffirming U.N. 476, formally censuring and refusing to recognize Israel’s “Basic Law” as legitimate or applicable to Jerusalem, and affirming that the “Basic Law’s” annexation “constitutes a violation of international law and does not affect the continued application of the Geneva Convention … in the Palestinian and other Arab territories occupied since June 1967, including Jerusalem.”
The U.N. maintains this stance toward Israel’s occupation of East Jerusalem. Yet, Israel has continually expanded the geographic borders of historic Jerusalem by swallowing-up neighboring Palestinian villages. However, 95 percent of Palestinians in Jerusalem, including from those villages that were annexed into the territorial jurisdiction of Jerusalem, are not accorded citizenship, but, instead, are assigned the second-class status of “resident,” which, among many discriminations, disallows Jerusalemite Palestinians from voting in the Knesset (general) elections.
Groupe Gaulliste Sceaux 