Israel, Jews, and indeed Zionism have faced, for over a century, a multi-front war. The campaigns in this war have been fierce, vicious, and injurious, even if at times no blood has been shed. And they are ongoing.
They have been waged on battlefields and in conference rooms; in halls of powers and on campus quadrants; in courtrooms and in trenches; in newspaper columns and on television broadcasts.
The first front is, of course, the armed effort designed to kill Jews and to eradicate Israel.
From murderous riots outside Jaffa Gate in April 1920 to Hebron’s Jewish Quarter in August 1929 to the 1948 War of Independence and all successive battles since, from Fedayeen to Fatah, to Hamas and Hezbollah.
The second front is the diplomatic efforts to deny Zionism its legitimacy and Israel its raison d’etre. This front is shared by the information public diplomacy engagements where there are, according to President Binyamin Netanyahu, “people who can’t put two words together [in English].”
The third front, the focus of this column, is that of the legal assault on Israel, employing claims of law to deny the national rights of Jews, by pushing a line that the Mandate for Palestine itself was a legal error – at best – and that Israel has no rights to Judea and Samaria.
One recent instance is what journalist Melanie Phillips termed “a contemptible letter... a disgrace to the legal profession,” referring to a letter sent to the United Kingdom’s prime minister and signed by 600 British lawyers. They asserted that Israel was breaking international law and potentially committing genocide in Gaza. As Ms. Phillips pointed out, they not only failed to quote correctly from the January ruling of the International Court of Justice (ICJ), but in their inability to do so misrepresented the court’s findings – essentially lying.
On a previous occasion, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International simply redefined the term “apartheid” in order to have in applied to Israel in its new form.
NGO Monitor released a report in December 2021, authored by Joshua Kern and Anne Herzberg, titled “False Knowledge as Power.” It addressed the legal vacuum that existed and how it permitted the charge of the apartheid calumny to invade the debates over Israel’s policies – and provided a full analysis based on international law. That campaign is ever ongoing.
A recent post with a rebuttal and a rejoinder, at the prestigious OpinioJuris blog, is worthy of attention. The blog seeks to inform discussion of international law by and among academics, practitioners, and legal experts. It is read in over 70 countries, daily. Its posts have been cited by international and domestic courts, international arbitrators, and government officials.
DR. ALONSO Gurmendi Dunkelberg of Kings College touted that Israel possesses no sovereign claim to Judea and Samaria, that is, the “West Bank” a la Dunkelberg. His arguments were refuted by Kohelet’s Avraham R. Shalev and were countered by Dunkelberg, all this over a two-month exchange.
Debunking claims
While my legal training is limited, it quickly became obvious that Dunkelberg’s knowledge of history was central to his interpretation of law. Moreover, that knowledge was one of a rigid ideological approach and a misrepresentation of history, while his background is Latin America. He had armed his view with illegal ammunition.
To deny Shalev’s assertion that Zionism is not a “colonial endeavor,” Dunkelberg points to the 1899 established “Zionist Colonial Trust” and to Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s writing in 1923 about Zionism’s “colonizing aims.” That, of course, is etymological claptrap. The term “colonization” there and then used was simply a synonym for “settlement.” Kibbutzim were “colonies.”
Zionists engaged in resettling Jews on their national land, planting it and rebuilding it. Moreover, they were required to do so through buying the land back from Arabs and others who had themselves occupied it, centuries earlier.
In another section, he argues on behalf of “Arab Palestinians” and their rights as if they existed as a distinct people. Yet, at the time, those Arabs themselves denied Palestine’s independence. Orientalist Philip Khoury Hitti was active in 1918 in an anti-Zionist Arab-American movement. The group lobbied for the establishment of a Greater Syria and at the 1919 peace conference, they asked that Palestine not be independent and not detached from Syria.
The First Palestinian Congress of January-February 1919 resolved: “We consider Palestine as part of Arab Syria... we desire that our district Southern Syria or Palestine should be not separated from the Independent Arab Syrian Government.” The King-Crane Commission was also so informed.
The Emir Feisal, the most senior Arab diplomat, meeting with Israeli president Chaim Weizmann in January 1919, accepted that there would be an Arab state and a “Palestine” for the “Jewish people.” Article VII of their agreement recognized a “Zionist Organization.”
In arguing that Israel was created “in Palestine” but itself is not “Palestine” nor did “Palestine” disappear, Dunkelberg conveniently ignores the existence of Jordan in Palestine territory in a colonial maneuver by Great Britain.
In addition, in his logic, the Ottoman Empire somehow wasn’t a colonial empire, occupying Judea, the Jewish national homeland but rather possessed sovereign rights that should only be transferred to Arabs, not Jews.
Dunkelberg suggests the territory cannot have a Jewish national identity, despite never existing as a separate, distinct state entity with an Arab character in any form.
Ignoring that a Palestinian nationality was specifically legislated in 1925 so that Jews could obtain naturalization status, Dunkelberg traipses through a purposeful misreading of history to the downgrading and disadvantage of the legal rights of the Jewish people.
His method is shared by many other denigrators of Zionism and is but a form of a totalitarian newspeak. As George Orwell wrote in his 1946 essay, “Politics and the English Language,” “if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” And as he added, “debased language... is in some ways very convenient.”
Israel needs better-trained warriors on its third-front battles.
The writer is a researcher, analyst, and opinion commentator on political, cultural, and media issues.