That's Telling Him So He'll Understand

West Bank should not be 'Judenrein': Israel PM

JERUSALEM (AFP) — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the German foreign minister Frank Walter Steinmeier the West Bank "cannot be Judenrein" -- a Nazi expression meaning "cleansed of Jews" -- the Jerusalem Post said.

Using Israel's normal terminology for the occupied West Bank, Netanyahu said: "Judaea and Samaria cannot be Judenrein," the newspaper reported.

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In a follow-up, I was pointed to this article where I picked out this excerpt on the use of the term "Judenrein":

The justification for its employment has been somewhat historically self-serving, arguing two things.

First, it contends that because Jewish communities historically lived on the West Bank and in Jerusalem before 1967 (over 3,000 years except for 19 years of Jordanian occupation between 1948 and 1967, according to this argument) any insistence on the removal of the settlements would amount to a de facto ethnic cleansing.

Secondly it argues – as Jonathan Dahoah-Halevi did on 2 July in Yediot Ahronoth – that the international community has accepted an unequal proposition, "that the Palestinians should be allowed to establish a country based on the religion of the majority of its citizens" while denying that same right to Israel. By that logic, he concludes, "international politics will no longer have to deal with the 'Palestinian problem' but rather with the 'Jewish problem' in Palestine".

It is an argument born of desperation that is as stunning for its sophistry as it is for its denial of what the settlement programme post-1967 represented. For while it is true that Jewish communities existed on the West Bank before the six-day war, the settlement programme that followed the occupation is regarded by most international bodies as a serious violation of international law. That view is based on the interpretation of Article 49 of the Geneva Convention as well as a series of UN security council resolutions that have deemed aspects of the settlements to be illegal.

So stupid in his own sophistry. The reason the world granted Britain a mandate over the territory of what is today Israel, Judea, Samaria, Gaza and TransJordan in 1922 (although in 1923 it suspended Jewish settlement across the Jordan River temporarily) so as to reconstitute the Jewish national home was because the whole of the civilized world knew and recognized that the historical connection of the Jews with their homeland was not one of ancient history, of Biblical history but of an ongoing link over the centuries including immigration to and residence in Eretz-Yisrael, the Land of Israel.

And there was an ethnic cleansing operated by the Arab community in the Mandate years (and before) which resulted, together with the results following the war of aggression launched by the Arabs during 1947-1949, in an emptied-of-Jews region of Judea, Samaria and Gaza.

One cannot use a 1949 Convention to prohibit the reality of what was supposed to be as a result of international law, international decisions and the historical reality. Nor is the restitution of Jewish rights something illegal. The author is turning things on its head.