By Professor Khurshid Ahmad
Immaculate is He who carried His servant on a journey by night from the Sacred Mosque to the Farthest Mosque whose environs We have blessed, that We might show him some of Our signs. Indeed, He is the All-hearing, the All-seeing. (Surah Al-Isra’: 1)
The Foundations of the Legitimacy of a State
The question of recognizing a country relates to international law, diplomacy, and trade. It is not necessary for every country to recognize each and every country, or to establish diplomatic or trade relations with it. This issue is mainly related to two aspects: first, whether the country with which relations are under consideration is a legitimate and sovereign entity; and second, whether it is in the national interests of a country to establish diplomatic and trade relations with it.
From a purely legal perspective, to recognize a country is to accept it as a legitimate entity. According to international law, a country should meet four conditions for this:
- Defined geographic borders,
- Population,
- Sovereignty, and
Thus, a country or area that is under the control of some other force cannot be recognized as sovereign as it lacks legitimacy.
The Status of Israel
The case of Israel is altogether different from other countries. The Palestinian land was not the original habitat of Israelis, who entered it 1,300 years BC and occupied it after 200 years of battles. They were twice moved out of the land. Romans expelled them completely from Palestine in 135 CE. In the history of 6,000 years, Israelis’ stay was just about four to five hundred years in Northern Palestine and about eight to nine hundred years in the South, whereas Arabs have been living for 2,500 years in the Northern and for 2,000 years in the Southern areas.
Divine Pledge or Myth?
Zionists base their claim on the Palestinian land on a so-called Divine pledge in the Bible. This is no more than a myth. Based on this make-believe imaginary right, Europe’s rich and politically ambitious Jews launched a Zionist movement towards the end of the 19th century and by pitching Arabs and Turks against each other, they got a foothold in this land during the times of the British mandate. Thus, the goal of establishing the Jewish state of Israel was realized apparently under a UN General Assembly resolution on 14 May 1948, but in reality by the use of military might, forceful expulsion of Palestinians, and genocide.
In 1914, just 3,000 Jewish families were living in Palestine and their number could only reach 56,000, despite the large-scale emigration of Jews to Palestine, after the First World War, whereas there were 644,000 Palestinian living there at that time. When the state was formed with the use of force, bloodshed, and oppression, Jews held just 5.6 percent of the Palestinian land and barely constituted 33 percent of Palestine’s population. It is worth mentioning here that the Jewish population had increased ten-fold as Jews from 80 countries of the world had been settled here for over a period of 30 years while Palestinians were being expelled and their towns were being destroyed.
Through the UN resolution, 56 percent of the Palestinian land was presented to Jews on a platter while the remaining 44 percent was sanctioned to the independent State of Palestine. However, Israel’s extremist groups occupied 78 percent of the land when it was still the year 1948 and this was followed by the occupation of what was to remain as Palestine, including Eastern Jerusalem, in 1967.
A ‘Stolen’ Land
We do not intend to narrate the whole tragic episode, we want to highlight the historical fact that Israel is not a real and natural State coming into existence on the basis of the right of self-determination of the people of the region. Rather, it is a ‘stolen’ land and a state that has come into being by expelling the original inhabitants from their lands and settling the colonizers from outside. Without understanding the genesis of this State, it is impossible to know its position in the region. Israel is not a Middle Eastern State, it is the outcome of colonizing power’s domination and suppression and it is a state that is devoid of legitimacy under international law.
Occupation by Force- UN Charter Violated
Israel’s Jews were not the original inhabitants of the region – nor are they to this date. They were collected from all over the world and were settled there by expelling the original inhabitants with sheer use of force and under the umbrella of a colonial power. Then, the United Nations was used for giving it legitimacy.
Israel is the only country in the world that has come into being on the basis of the UN General Assembly’s resolution in utter violation of the UN Charter according to which people of a region can achieve freedom only by exercising their free will and their right of self-determination. Since Arabs were 66 percent of Palestine’s population, the UN refused to opt for a plebiscite in connivance with the US and Britain and instead passed a resolution for Palestine’s division and the establishment of two states.
Even the manner in which this was done is quite questionable. The vote in the General Assembly was twice deferred due to lack of majority as only 30 of the then 56 members favored it, 13 opposed it and 13 remained neutral. By deferring the vote twice and employing pressure and money, the US and the Zionist lobby forced three neutral countries (Haiti, Philippines, Liberia, which all were under the United States’ influence) to vote for the resolution. Hence, this resolution was adopted by committing three violations of the UN Charter:
- a) Decision about a country’s future without a plebiscite,
- b) Deferment of the vote two times, and
- c) Obtaining three countries’ consent ‘under duress’
No Specified Borders
Israel is the only state, per se, the borders of which are not yet defined. It got 56 percent of the Palestinian land in the wake of the UN resolution, which was enhanced to 78 percent through military aggression in 1967. After the 1967 war, directives for its retreat to pre-war positions were issued through UN resolutions 242 and 383, which were repeated in more than 20 other resolutions, but Israel refused to heed these calls.
Expansionist Agenda
It should be clearly understood that Israel’s ideological basis is founded on ‘expanding boundaries’, which is but another name for imperialism and a threat to the whole region. Israel and its entire leadership have never kept the matter a secret and have openly declared that “Greater Israel” is their goal. Ben Gurion had said in 1948:
“The Achilles heel of the Arab coalition is Lebanon. Muslim supremacy in this country is artificial and can easily be overthrown. A Christian State ought to be set up there, with its southern frontier on the Litani. We would sign a treaty of alliance with this state. Thus when we have broken the strength of the Arab Legion and bombed Amman, we could wipe out Tran Jordan; after that Syria would fall. And if Egypt dared to make war on us, we would bomb Port Said, Alexandria, and Cairo. We should thus end the war and would have but paid to Egypt, Assyria, and Chaldea on behalf of our ancestors”. (Ben Gurion diary, May 21, 1948)
“Before this, at Versailles Peace Conference in 1919, World Zionist Organization had presented a map of its proposed Jewish State. According to this map, the areas that Israel wants to occupy include Egypt up to the Niles, the whole of Jordan, the whole of Syria, the whole of Lebanon, a big portion of Iraq, the Southern region of Turkey, and the upper Hijaz up to Madina Munawwarah”. (My Diary at the Conference of Paris with Documents, D.H. Miller, Vol. 5, p 17)
Addressing the Israeli parliament Knesset in 1982, just three years after the Camp David Accords, Israeli Prime Minister Manaehan Begin had clearly said:
“By rights, the northern border of the Land of Israel ought to include the Golan Heights. That it was not included following the break-up of the Ottoman Empire in 1918 and the establishment of Britain’s mandate over Palestine was due to the arbitrariness of colonial rulers in an era that has passed, never to return. We are not bound by this arbitrariness.”
“Palestine is a territory whose chief geographical feature is this; that the river Jordan does not delineate its frontier but flows through its center”. (Vladimir Jabotinsky, at the 16th Zionist Congress in 1929)
“Take the American Declaration of Independence for instance. It contains no mention of the territorial limits. We are not obliged to state the limits of our state”. (Ben Gurion’s Diary, May 14, 1948)
“To maintain the status quo will not do. We have to set up a dynamic state bent upon expansion.” (Ben Gurion in Rebirth and Destiny of Israel, The Philosophical Press, New York, 1954).
“During the last 100 years, our people have been in a process of building up the country and the nation, of expansion, of getting additional Jews and additional settlements in order to expand the borders here. Let no Jew say that the process has ended. Let no Jew say that we are near the end of the road”. (Moshe Dayan in Ma’ariv, July 7, 1968)
Israel’s Defense Minister Moshe Dayan had said in an interview with the Times:
“Our fathers had reached the frontiers which were recognized in the Partition Plan. Our generation reached the frontiers of 1949. Now the Six-Day generation has managed to reach Suez, Jordan, and the Golan Heights. This is not the end.”
So, such is the case of the so-called state of Israel. Is there still any doubt about the fact that by its nature Israel is not a legitimate state but a colonialist power?
A Racist State
The matter does not stop here. Israel is not just a colonial and expansionist State; it is also a racist one.
Weizman, leader of the World Zionist Organization and first President of Israel, ridiculing the democratic principle of majority and minority in the wake of the Balfour Declaration, had contemptuously declared that Jews were “qualitatively” better than the “native” Arabs. He had said:
“The democratic principle reckons with the relative numerical strength, and the brutal numbers operate against us for there are five Arabs to one Jew…This system does not take into account the fact that there is a fundamental qualitative difference between Jews and Arabs. The present system tends to level down the Jew politically to the status of a native.”
When Einstein asked him what would become of Arabs if Palestine was given to Jews, Weizman shrugged:
“What Arabs? They are hardly of any consequence.”
The first Israeli Prime Minister Professor Ben Zion Dinur once wrote:
“In our country, there is room only for the Jews. We shall say to the Arabs: Get Out! If they do not agree, if they resist, we shall drain them out by force.” (Quoted by Roger Garudy, The Case of Israel: A Study of Political Zionism, London, 1983, p 38)
It is for such views that Arabs do not have the rights of second and third grade citizens in Israel, while under the Law of Return every Jew living in any corner of the world has the racial right to Israeli citizenship. The law that the Israeli parliament has recently passed – the repeal of which has been demanded by the UN Human Rights Commission – holds that if an Arab man living on the West Bank in Palestinian marries an Arab woman living in Israel, the couple would have no right to live in Israel.
In his charge sheet against Israel, renowned French scholar Roger Garudy maintains: The Zionist state of Israel possesses no legitimacy – historical, Biblical or juridical – in the place where it has been established. Nor does it possess any moral legitimacy. This state sprung from a false ideology and from a series of acts of violence and terrorism and was created by an illegal decision by the United Nations Organization (dominated at the time by the Western powers). The Zionist State of Israel is simply one state among the rest, without any halo or privilege, or sacred character. (Roger Garudy; The case of Israel: A Study of Political Zionism, London, 1983, pp157-158)
The issue of Israel’s recognition is not just about recognizing or not recognizing a State. The land of Palestine is important not only for Palestinians or Arabs; it is an important sacred site for all Muslims. Al-Qudus is a place of sanctity for Muslims where there are Masjid Al-Aqsa and the Dome of the Rock. For, it being the first Qibla for Muslims, it is the most sacred place after Masjid Al-Haram in Mecca and Masjid Al-Nabawi in Medina.
Source: http://www.victorynewsmagazine.com
