My Letter is in the Jerusalem Post

A bit edited from the original but it's finally in:-

You can't 'occupy' your own home

Sir, - I suspect that Amnon Rubinstein has allowed personal political ideology to overcome principles of jurisprudence and rational thought. In writing "Settling Jews outside of Israel proper is... illegal in international law and defective morally," while basing himself on the Fourth Geneva Convention, claiming that document "prohibits such settlements," he is misrepresenting facts ("The folly at Givat Ze'ev," March 25).

Firstly, that convention, like any contractual obligation, applies to those who are signatories, defined as the "High Contracting Parties." As there was no "Palestine" when the convention was produced, Israel cannot be considered as occupying its territories.

Secondly, David Ben-Gurion, in a Knesset statement on December 3, 1949, declared that the UN resolution of November 29, 1947 - the Partition Plan - no longer had any moral force and was null and void.

Taken together with the reality that the official representative bodies of the Arab community of the British Mandate refused to acknowledge the plan, the area administered currently by Israel since 1967 - what Rubinstein refers to as "occupied" - is, in essence, still part of what the League of Nations Supreme Council defined on July 24, 1922 as the area to be reconstituted as the national home of the Jewish people.

A state institution representing the Jewish people - Israel - cannot be an "occupier" in its own country.

Moreover, Jews moving to places such as Givat Ze'ev and Shiloh are fulfilling the principle established in the League of Nations decision which guaranteed them the "right to immigration to and close settlement on the land" (paragraph 6). Therefore, even if Israel is not actively encouraging such acts, individual Jews surely maintain those rights up to this day.

Thirdly, since Jews lived in, owned and tilled property in those "territories" for hundreds of years prior to the wars of aggression in which Arabs, local and foreign, sought to eliminate the State of Israel in 1947-49 and 1967, they are only returning home.

Certainly Jews must protect the civil liberties of the non-Jewish population (note: the term "Arab" appears nowhere in the text of the Mandate decision because the international community and its law did not recognize any specific Arab ethnic or national right to the area of the Mandate). But that does not affect Jewish rights as stated above.

YISRAEL MEDAD
Shiloh