Within days, following a government decision to leave the people in the house for at least a few weeks, until further investigations could be concluded, Netanyahu gave (...) a green light to expel the building's residents (...).
Last night HaAretz correspondent Chaim Levinson published an article citing the ostensible reason for the expulsion: Fear of the goyim.
Levinson writes: (AG) Weinstein reportedly told (PM) Netanyahu and (DM) Barak that the expropriation of Palestinian land and homes, such as the Hebron takeover, could lead to Israeli officials being indicted at the International Criminal Court in The Hague…Sources in the Justice Ministry indicated that they fear the State of Israel or Israeli officials could be charged by the ICC, in operation since 2002. According to the Fourth Geneva Convention, an occupier moving population into occupied land constitutes a war crime.
Accordingly, Netanyahu gave Barak the green light to throw the Jews out.
There are a few minor issues here.
1. First, is the use of the word 'expropriate' (l'hafkiya in Hebrew). This is defined as dispossession of ownership, usually by a ruling power or government. In other words, any legal purchase by Jews from Arabs in Hebron, or perhaps anywhere in Judea and Samaria, is viewed, by the Attorney General of the State of Israel, as 'expropriation.' Purchase is 'dispossession of ownership.' It makes no difference that the property was purchased for legal tender. It makes no difference if the party selling the property agreed to the sale, and preferring cash to real estate.
2. The attempt to use the Fourth Geneva Convention to prevent Jews from purchasing property has already been disproven by the Israeli government itself. A position paper, published on May 20, 2001, by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, clearly states:
International humanitarian law prohibits the forcible transfer of segments of the population of a state to the territory of another state which it has occupied as a result of the resort to armed force. This principle…was intended to protect the local population from displacement, including endangering its separate existence as a race, as occurred with respect to the forced population transfers in Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary before and during the war. This is clearly not the case with regard to the West Bank and Gaza.
The attempt to present Israeli settlements as a violation of this principle is clearly untenable. As Professor Eugene Rostow, former Under-Secretary of State for Political Affairs has written: "the Jewish right of settlement in the area is equivalent in every way to the right of the local population to live there" (AJIL, 1990, vol. 84, p.72).
The provisions of the Geneva Convention regarding forced population transfer to occupied sovereign territory cannot be viewed as prohibiting the voluntary return of individuals to the towns and villages from which they, or their ancestors, had been ousted.
3. After all of this, since when (...) should the Prime Minister of Israel fear being charged with war crimes as a result of settlement of Eretz Yisrael – the Land of Israel?! Buying a house in Hebron is a war crime?!?!?
Roosevelt said the only thing to fear, is fear itself. (...) G-d did not command us to fear Hague, certainly not people, who, if they had their way, would have prevented the rebirth of our people in our land, people who did nothing to prevent extermination of between six to seven million Jews a few decades ago, people, whose governments participated, actively or passively, with Nazi Germany.
The Prime Minister of Israel, together with his government, should be an exemplary model of Jewish faith, of Jewish attributes, of Jewish pride and courage.
אין תגובות:
הוסף רשומת תגובה