A Matter of Origin

The EU guidelines on wine seem to inist on a "region" as the geographical identification unit as to where a product is made where as where the grapes are grown is another matter: 

"For most products, at least one of the stages of distillation or preparation takes place in the region. However, raw products do not need to come from the region". 

You might then ask why then does the EU insist on "Palestine" when "Judea & Samaria", regions, would do?

Well, it doesn't actually.

But in the first instance, those guidelines above refer solely to EU countries.  

In other words, what is good for the EU is not good for other countries.

The official EU position as regards Israel, however, as clarified for me from an official spokesperson, is this

The indication of origin of products from territories occupied by Israel is a technical consumer protection issue, based on the EU recognising Israel within its 1967 border. Goods of origin from these territories, as  other goods for import into the EU, need to be correctly labelled so that consumers in the EU have full clarity where the products come from.  

The EU does not support any elements of the so-called ‘BDS’ approach (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) against Israel, and hence also not the boycott of products from Israeli settlements.  

An Interpretative Notice of the European Commission was issued in November 2015 and it provides some clarity on the existing EU rules. The main purpose is to be helpful to a consumer in that an improper labeling would "mislead the consumer as to the true origin of the product".  It demands that the mandatory indication of origin be "correct and not misleading".  As they note

"Made in Israel" used for the products coming from Israeli settlements would mislead the consumer and therefore is inconsistent with existing EU legislation.

And further,

'product from Israel' should not be used for products from the Golan Heights or the West Bank (including East Jerusalem). For products from West Bank or the Golan Heights that originate from settlements, an indication limited to 'product from Golan Heights' or 'product from West Bank' would not be acceptable. In such cases the expression 'Israeli settlement' or equivalent needs to be added

Before we deal with why that instruction is in place, one more element need be emphasized. The EU asserts that the geographical area of origin must be "internationally recognised" and for the EU, Israel was and continues to be internationally recognized as defined by its "pre-1967 borders' so

In line with UNSC resolution 2334 of 2016, the EU considers Israeli settlements in occupied territories as illegal under international law.

Let's deconstruct this.

In the first instance, we need be clear there were no "borders" prior to 1967. They were, as defined in an internationally recognized Armistice Agreement and those lines were specifically categorized in Article II that being demarcated,

no military or political advantage should be gained

Furthermore there,

no provision of this Agreement shall in any way prejudice the rights, claims and positions of either Party hereto in the ultimate peaceful settlement of the Palestine question

In other words, Israel and Jordan could both put forward territorial claims beyond those lines. Indeed,

The basic purpose of the Armistice Demarcation Lines is to delineate the lines beyond which the armed forces of the respective Parties shall not move

Nothing political but rather a simple marking at which point the military forces had stopped operations.

Moreover, those lines were temporary in the extreme, with no permanancy as per

Article XII 3 which reads

The Parties to this Agreement may, by mutual consent, revise this Agreement or any of its provisions, or may suspend its application, other than articles I and III, at any time.

Jordan, invading Israel in June 1967, effectively put an end to the legitimacy of those lines.

To sanctify, as it were, the "pre-1967 borders" is an act of nonsense.

Now, between you and me, everyone knows Israel has extended its administrative rule to those regions of the Land of Israel that were under British Mandate rule until 1948, a rule quite legal and internationally recognized. That is the meaning of "belligerent occupation", that it si the rrsult of military engagement. Israel, in an act of self-defense, thwarted the intentions of the invaders and assumed administrationn over Judea and Samaria, as well as Gaza.

Those regions were geographically part of the area of 'historic Palestine' the League of nations awarded to the Jewish people to, among other purposes:

encourage, in co-operation with the Jewish agency. referred to in Article 4, close settlement by Jews, on the land, including State lands and waste lands

From 1922 until 1967, no recognized country or state legally ruled those areas except the Mandate. In Hebrew, the Mandate was translated as "Land of Israel". Jordan was an illegal occupier. 

All this leaves us with a simple solution for the requirement of the EU to note the origin of the product: the Land of Israel.

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The Neo-Yevsektsyists

As I have blogged previously, the involvement of American Jews in anti-Zionist and anti-Israel activities preceded claims of an "illegal occupation" by over a half-century.

Many groups were involved. From assimilationists to Reform rabbis. The American Council for Judaism. Bundists and other various socialists and communists. Then Breira. On on to today's IfNotNow, JVP, et al.

One group I left out, mainly because I felt uneasy including them because of the immoral actions they were involved in and the operations they themselves initiated against the their fellow brethren was the Yevsektsyia.  It was founded in 1918 and abolished in 1930, when their appointed task was achieved - the destruction of the traditional framework of Jewish life.

The Tarbuth Hebrew educational system was suppressed while Yiddish was elevated. Zionist activity was prohibited. Immigration to Mandate Palestine was severely restricted. By the way, it was for a Hungarian non-Jewish communist, László Rajk in 1949, that the phrase 'international Zionism' was coined.

At the Yevsektsiya's second conference in July 1919, it demanded that the Zionist organisations be dissolved. After an appeal from the Zionists, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee issued a decree in that the Zionist organisation was not counter-revolutionary and its activities should not be disrupted. The campaign continued, however. In 1920, the first All-Russian Zionist Congress was disrupted by members of the Cheka and a female representative of the Yevsektsiya. At its third conference in July 1921, the Yevsektsiya demanded the "total liquidation" of Zionism.

David Collier has noted the parallels between then and now as regards a renewed Yevsektsyia phenomenon. 

I just hope these neo-Yevsektsiyists remembered that the Communists eradicated the old ones, usually through torture, show trials and hangings.

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Move Over Cordoba, Here Comes Reccopolis

You know of my posts regarding Cordoba, where Muslims are attempting to take back a mosque built on a church that the Spanish reestablished as a cathedral.

Now, I have been alerted, there's an earlier mosque in Spain.  From the article:

Finally, the orientation of several buildings appears to be influenced by ideological considerations....One large (approximately 20 × 40m) newly discovered feature is certainly oriented quite differently from the palatine church (Figure 3.6); indeed, it is the only building with this particular orientation so far discovered. What appears to be its broad side faces towards the south-east (Figure 5a–b). In light of the site’s early Islamic phase, this feature requires further exploration. 

The earliest mosques in Iberia date to the eighth century...The two eighth-century mosques in Iberia at present identified archaeologically correspond to the first phases of the Umayyad Great Mosque of Cordoba (AD 785–788; Ewert 1995) and the Great Mosque of Zaragoza (Hernández Vera 2004: 75). The tendency in Islamic Iberia was to orient mosques between south-east and south (Rius 2000: 105).Insofar as can be discerned from the geomagnetic data, the plan of the large structure at Reccopolis recalls those of Umayyad mosques in the Levant, particularly that at Jerash, Jordan...Although the geomagnetic survey is inconclusive, the Reccopolis structure might also indicate a three-aisled hall (Figure 5b); such features are characteristic of Levantine Umayyad mosques—notably the Great Mosque of Damascus, the newly discovered mosque in Tiberias, and that of Khirbat al-Minya (Figure 5d), 14km north of Tiberias (CytrynSilverman 2009: 49–51, 2012).

But getting back to church-mosque-cathedral and its relevance to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, I was astounded to read this about Cordoba:

Moors created an inclusive and pluralistic society where religion was important but did not dictate public policy.

If that is true, why cannot Jews share the Temple Mount with Moslems? 

And by the way, that Islamic Professor, S. Amjad Hussain in the article writes

By 1492 all the Moor-controlled areas had been wrestled back by Christian kings. Muslims and Jews were given the choice of either converting to Catholicism or leaving the country. Hundreds and thousands of Jews and Muslims took refuge in Morocco across the Straits of Gibraltar. Countless others were burned at stake for refusing to convert.

Did that burning-at-the-stake relate to Muslims as well?

So I asked an expert and received this reply:

Muslims, who ruled a portion of the Iberian peninsula until the demise of the Kingdom of Granada (Eastern Andalusia) in January 1492, were expelled from the Kingdom of Castile and the Catalan-Aragonese confederation in 1609 (mainly in order to crush the economy of the latter and substitute the Muslim population by Castilian nationals), but normally no Muslims were burnt at the stake. After 1492, no Jews remained in Spain...Some of them were indeed burnt at the stake, as Christian apostates (in fact all of them were Jewish apostates), were burnt at the stake. According to their own laws, Christians cannot burn Jews. 

This article tries to substitute the Jews with a mix of Jews and Muslims, and, in addition, it adds a spin of a Spanish imperialistic idea (that the three cultures lived together in harmony). In fact, when the Almohad Berbers invaded the Iberian peninsula in the second half of the Twelfth century CE, Jews were harshly persecuted. The Jewish community of Lucena, which once was called "the Jerusalem of Al-Andalus", totally disappeared, and the Rambam had to flee with his family from Cordova, like many others. In the Iberian peninsula, according to Jewish Chronicles, good places for Jews were Cordova (between the Seventh and the Eleventh centuries), Toledo (between the Eleventh and the Twelfth centuries, Gerona and Barcelona (between the Ninth and the Fourteenth centuries) and Narbonne (in France today, but also within the Jewish concept of Sepharad, during all the Middle Ages until the end of the Thirteenth century).

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Abbas Goes Crazy for Canaan

As published:

Abbas Says Palestine For Canaanites...Outsiders Will LeaveSunday, 11 August, 2019 

Ramallah - Kifah Ziboun
Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas said Saturday that outsiders will be deported from the Palestinian land to the "dustbin of history" because this land is for the Canaanites.

“We are the Canaanites,” he stressed.

Addressing the crown in Jalazone refugee camp in Ramallah, Abbas said the Palestinians will remain “steadfast, patient and resilient.”

“We will remain in our homeland, and the outsiders on this land has no right in this country. The land is for its inhabitants, this land is for the Canaanites who were here 5,000 years ago, and we are the Canaanites.”

Abbas’s rhetoric was sharp compared to his usual diplomatic speeches...Abbass added that Jerusalem will remain Palestine’s capital, stressing that all Palestinians and Islamic and Christian Arab nation will visit this capital one day.

Screenshot:

[and now at PMW]

So, what do we do with Saeb Erekat's Natufian theory from 2014?

As Arabs arrived here from Arabia (h/t IMRA), does he kick out his own people?

I treated that Canaanite twist here ten years ago.

Is he going crazy?

P.S.  This is ridiculous.

UPDATE

The national soccer team of Palestine is nicknamed...Lions of Canaan. And it has Israeli Arabs on the squad.

P.S.S.  He's done this before.

Background.

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GraphicZionism

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Comments on Dimitri's Diatribe

The sacrastic, hate-dripping diatribe of Dimitri Verhulst 

Credit

caused some criticism and I bring you some exceprts:

Because God has His darlings and His chosen ones should have their privileges, the Palestinians were driven out of their homes in 1948 in favor of God's little ones. Moses had written it down, the chosen people heard there and nowhere else, so that did count as an argument. 

Serge Gainsbourg, himself with a bloodline where anti-Semitics are going to law their knives, was more laconic about it and said: “Being a Jew is not a religion; there is not a single God who would give His creatures such an ugly nose."*
Talking to the chosen is difficult. As soon as you start talking about Israel and the fate of the Palestinians, they look at you as if you have subscribed to the Holocaust, which is your purest quatsch...The crooked reasoning: I am a racist because I denounce that 2.3 million Palestinians are dependent on emergency aid, and 1.6 million of them are malnourished...[and Israelis in] the last 17 years have killed around 10,000 Palestinians. Israeli bullets don't know ten commandments.
There is no promised land. There is stolen land. There are stolen lives.

*
A Belgian daily that published an op-ed describing Jews as land thieves with “ugly noses” and superiority complexes removed the facial feature reference on Wednesday amid international criticism.


Comments:

1. God loves us so much that he caused the Holocaust is what he is writing? Or, maybe the Arabs of Palestine brought their calamity on themselves? No compromise and constant rejection of diplomatic efforts while terrorizing Jews since 1920, killing many hundreds, 525 between 1936-1939 along? This is not serious thinking or knowledge of the Arab conflict with Zionism.

2. We do have privileges. We have the simple right as all other nations do to live in our national homeland and establish therein a state. Moreover, that right was recognized by the League of Nations in 1922 and by the UN in 1947.

3. Not all Arabs who resided in Palestine, many thousands recent arrivals by the way (as otherwise, why does UNRWA define a Palestine refugee has living but two years in the Mandate area?), were driven out. Most had left by May 1948 before the invasion by seven Arab countries, perhaps to avoid the heavy fighting or maybe even as they knew the Arabs not only were in the wrong, but that they were bound to lose.

4. We Jews don't really need God (although it helps) to convince a non-Jew of our rights. The Mandate was based on the Jewish people's historical connection with that territory, in fact, going back 3000 and more years. A tribal federation, two monarchies, Jews coming to the Land of Israel over the centuries in all sorts of conditions and, a mention in the New Testament and the Quaran. That this Dmitiri is ignorant, besides being boorish and hateful, is not a new discovery of the type of people who hold his views. 

5. And neither was the Holocaust a justification. It proved the need for a state prior to the mass murder.

6. The Arabs are their own worse enemy and it is they, through their rejectionism and goal to eradicate Jews, who obring upon them suffering.

7.  The 'stolen land' is that which Arabs stole from us in the 7th century.

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A 'Who Said' Quiz

Who said:

We do not believe that there should be a Palestinian nation between Israel and Jordan and some Arabs agree with us privately. The Palestinian entity should have a tie to Jordan so that the radicals cannot build a disruptive military force. 

___________________

Answer:

8791 '2 ʎɹɐnuɐɾ 'ɹǝʇɹɐƆ ʎɯɯᴉſ ʇuǝpᴉsǝɹԀ S∩


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MacDonald Does In The Jews in 1939

What was the understanding of the phrase "civil and religious rights" contained in the League of Nations Mandate decision of 1922?

That Mandate decision's preamble, in part, reads

the Mandatory should be responsible for putting into effect the declaration originally made on November 2nd, 1917, by the Government of His Britannic Majesty, and adopted by the said Powers, in favor of the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, it being clearly understood that nothing should be done which might prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, 

Let's review the person in charge in 1939, Malcolm MacDonald, the then Colonial Secretary, responsible for the infamous White Paper of that year.  While the new policy radically altered the Mandate's premise, severely restricted Jewish immigration and limited land purchases, MacDonald was confronted by the commission members' questions regarding the obvious distinction made by the original Mandate decision between the rights and privileges of the two ocommunities residing in the country.

Here is from his statement on June 15, 1939 at the Permanent Mandates Commission in Geneva:

The authors of the Balfour Declaration and of the mandate who envisaged duties towards the Jews and duties towards the Arabs, which should be of equal weight, cannot have supposed that those duties would be in conflict, but that they would be mutually reconcilable. They cannot have intended that these two sets of obligations should contradict each other, and meet only in a violent clash. What then are these obligations? On the one hand was the promise of "the establishment in Palestine of a National Home for the Jewish people" and on the other was the assurance that "nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine"...

But they could contradict as the intentions of the framers was that the country become the Jewish National Home. 

Let me examine these undertakings further. First, the term "National Home" which is used throughout the Declaration and the mandate, is somewhat ambiguous and has been open to various interpretations. It has been claimed that it meant that Palestine should ultimately become a Jewish State. There can be no doubt that the possibility of a Jewish State was not excluded; it was regarded as a definite possibility by some of the leading statesmen who were familiar with the intentions of those who drew up the Balfour Declaration. Thus President Wilson spoke early in 1919 of laying in Palestine "the foundations of a Jewish Commonwealth", and General Smuts towards the end of the same year foretold an increasing stream of Jewish immigration into the country and "in generations to come a great Jewish State rising there once more". His Majesty's Government accept that the possibility of Palestine becoming a Jewish State was not precluded.

The obvious become "ambiguous". 

Yet in the Balfour Declaration and the mandate the terms Jewish State and Jewish Commonwealth are not employed. Instead, a term which was without precedent in constitutional charters, a term which lacked clear definition, the term "Jewish National Home" was used. It was deliberately used...Those responsible for the Balfour Declaration and the mandate were aware of these uncertainties hidden in the future, and so they chose deliberately to describe this part of their objective in Palestine by a phrase--"a Jewish National Home"--which might mean either a Jewish State or else something very much less.

Might. 

...From the beginning, the Balfour Declaration recognised certain duties to the non-Jewish population. While promising the Jewish people a National Home, it declared that "nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine". This principle is reflected in the operative clauses of the mandate where--for example, in Article 2--it is laid down that "the civil and religious rights of all the inhabitants" are to be safeguarded, and in Article 6 that "the rights and position" of the non-Jewish sections of the population are not to be prejudiced.

However, since nothing comparable to a "national home" was promised to the non-Jewish residents, it would seem obvious that the Jews were awarded a certain political primacy. 

There has sometimes been controversy as to what these phrases were intended to mean. Some exponents have sought to minimise the significance of the words and to suggest, for instance, that "civil rights" meant little more than civic rights. That is an untenable position...

Why untenable? 

And he goes off to discussing an irrelvelant document. Gibberash, actually.

...That assurance to the Arabs [referring to the Hogarth mission] must surely mean that Palestine could not one day become a Jewish State against the will of the Arabs in the country.

He continues to misinterpret the phrase: 

The words of the Balfour Declaration on the matter are strong. "Nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish communities". The mandate says that the Administration "while ensuring that the rights and position of the other section of the population are not prejudiced, shall facilitate immigration under suitable conditions". The rights referred to are the normal political rights of a people. And, normally, those rights would include the power to have their voice heard against a flow of immigration which threatened to relegate them to a position of virtual inferiority in their own country. It seems to His Majesty's Government that the rights guaranteed to the Arabs in the mandate would be definitely prejudiced if, now that immigration has made the Jewish population a vast proportion of the whole population, and given it a position already of economic dominance, the mandatory Power were to continue to permit indefinitely a flow of further immigration against a strong national protest which is supported by every articulate section of Arab opinion.

Note: immigration of...Jews.  Settlement on the land by...Jews.  Obviously there is a distinction.  The whole idea behind the Mandate was, indeed, to turn it into a Jewish national home.

Perfidious Albion.

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Shumsky's Fooling Us on Jabotinsky

In a review of Dmitry Shumsky's Beyond the Nation-State: The Zionist Political Imagination from Pinsker to Ben-Gurion, Brian Horowitz writes:

The chapter on Jabotinsky permits a different reading from the usual interpretation. In 1906, at the Helsingfors Zionist Conference (which took place right after the failed Russian Revolution of 1905), Jabotinsky formulated a conception of minority rights based on the writings of Rudolph Springer (Karl Renner). In this conception, minorities would have full national autonomy to develop their character through separate cultural, educational, and legal institutions. Although these ideas were designed to reconfigure the Russian Empire along national lines, Jabotinsky saw them as applicable to any multicultural politic. Thus, he conceived of Jewish-Arab coexistence in the Ottoman Empire during the period of the Young Turk Revolution, and then in Mandate Palestine. Jabotinsky placed his stress on the development of the nation in concrete territory rather than the construction of a nation-state. In this interpretation, Jabotinsky showed himself as a believer in something like a binational Palestine in which the country would contain Arabs who would have equal civil and national rights, albeit as a national minority.

That is misleading.

Jabotinsky forcefully oppose binationalism (I have just translated two oof his articles on the subject).

I also have posted on his famous 1940 article, "The Arab Angle - Undramatized". Here is a copy and the article begins on page 211.

His willingness to afford national minorities rights extended to the non-political for those who refused to see themselves as part of the political entity they resided in.

The Arabs, and others, were not nationalities but ethno-communitites.  And these are the areas of activity:

The following matters shall be delegated by the State to each ethno-community with regard to its members: 
(a) religion and personal status; 
(b) education in all its branches and grades, especially in the compulsory elementary stages; 
(c) public relief, including all forms of social assistance; 
(d) settlement of ordinary law cases arising out of the above-mentioned matters. 
3. Each ethno-community shall elect its National Diet with the right to issue ordinances and levy taxes within the limits of its autonomy, and to appoint a national executive responsible before the Diet. 
4. A permanent Minister of Cabinet rank, independent of all parties, shall represent each ethno-community in the country's government. 

And he added this:

Whether the Arabs would find all this a sufficient inducement to remain in a Jewish country is another question. Even if they did not, the author would refuse to see a tragedy or a disaster in their willingness to emigrate. The Palestine Royal Commission did not shrink from the suggestion. Courage is infectious. Since we have this great moral authority for calmly envisaging the exodus of 350,000 Arabs from one corner of Palestine, we need not regard the possible departure of 900,000 with dismay. The writer, as he has already said, cannot see any necessity for this exodus: it would even be undesirable from many points of view; but if it should appear that the Arabs would prefer to migrate, the prospect can be discussed without any pretence of concern.

Sorry, but he is reinterpreting Jabotinsky according to his own world-view.

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Stephen Wise's 'Fallacious Reasoning"

In this September 23, 1929 Memorandum by the Chief of the Division of Near Eastern Affairs, Gardiner Howland Shaw, who rose to become Deputy Secretary of State, some 7 weeks after the riots in Mandate Palestine, he details being contacted by Rabbi Stephen S. Wise. Wise, then head of Keren Hayesod, wanted to know the views of the Secretary of State, Henry L. Stimson, no friend of Jews and Zionism, "with respect to the American Zionists retaining the services of a prominent American lawyer to assist in presenting the Jewish point of view before the Shaw Commission of Investigation".

Wise pointed out that as American citizens had been murdered during those riots and their property damaged, "this move would be eminently proper". 

The response:

The Secretary said he could see no objection to Rabbi Wise’s suggestion, it being distinctly understood that the American lawyer chosen had no official status and that the steps necessary to enable him to appear before the Shaw Commission should be taken by the American Zionist Organization in collaboration with the Jewish Agency in London and the British Colonial Office. 

It was pointed out to Rabbi Wise that the presenting of the Jewish or Zionist point of view before the Commission of Investigation was one thing and the presentation before the competent authorities of private claims for damages on account of the killing of American citizens was something quite different and the two should not be confused. It was suggested to Rabbi Wise that to argue that because eight American citizens had been killed in Palestine therefore the American Government was under some sort of obligation to assist in presenting the Zionist side before the Commission of Investigation was clearly fallacious reasoning. 

Why should the American Government assist in presenting either the Jewish or the Arab side? If on the other hand the competent Zionist authorities desired to retain the services of an American, a German or a Polish lawyer to assist Sir F. Boyd Merriman, that was entirely a matter to be settled through the Jewish Agency and the Colonial Office.

The reply was marked “O K” by the Secretary of State.

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