When did the West Bank become "occupied territory"?
at what point, exactly, did the West Bank become "occupied territory" rather than "disputed territory" under international law? After 1947 the annexation of Jordan wasn't recognized so Mandate Law was considered to prevail as far as the U.N. was concerned and in Mandate Law Jewish settlement was explicitly permitted (though from 1947-1967 the Jews were evicted). The post-SixDay War UNSC 242 doesn't appear to change this sovereignty scheme.

Yet by the time UNSC 446 was passed in 1979 the West Bank was considered "occupied territory" and subject to the Fourth Geneva Convention and Israeli settlements (Jewish settlements, that is) thus declared illegal. (UNSC 446 is not a Chapter VII resolution and thus is non-binding under int'l law so the change had to have happened before that.)
- posted by Solomon2 @ 12:44 PM |

Would he say this to his fellow Arabs regarding Israel?


“Having grievances does not justify violence. There are bodies to look into those grievances -"

- Saudi Ministry of Interior spokesman Mansour Al-Turki link
- posted by Solomon2 @ 8:15 PM |

Mr. Tolerance: A Comic Book


Read the rest: link
- posted by Solomon2 @ 1:45 PM |

Egypt: Aftermath of a Revolution
Sam Tadros discusses the outcome in Egypt in the Tablet, best summed up as "Islamists’ electoral success vindicates the pessimists".

I met Mr. Tadros in 2007, while demonstrating against Mubarak in D.C. If I recall correctly, he minimized the import of the Muslim Brotherhood then, and Salafis weren’t even in our minds; we were both under the spell of Natan Sharansky’s The Case for Democracy.

Yet the democracy of a fanatic mob is no guarantee of liberty; you need an open political culture that protects and honors minorities and minority opinions, and Egyptians don’t appear ready for that. The lesson has been a bitter one for those of us who had higher hopes for Egypt, though admittedly there was no way to know for certain the principles Egyptians’ would choose to express until this election. It seems unlikely that liberty will be preserved in a state dominated by the MB and Salafis. It is very unlikely that a new constitution can be both crafted by elected Islamists and ensure the ability of the people to change their minds by kicking the Islamists out if they tire of them. even if this happens, I doubt its terms will be honored; rather, mob rule in the streets will enforce the Islamist rule that has been the dream of the MB since before WWII.

Egypt is in danger of becoming yet another country where Muslims believe if they follow their rituals and traditions exactly then their individual choices will automatically be ethically and unquestionably correct – a sure path to moral and civic corruption. The people willingly yoke the chain that weighs them down. Same old, same old.

Mr. Tadros realizes now what I’ve held for some years now: “[Anti-Semitism] is the glue binding the otherwise incoherent ideological blend, the common denominator among disparate parties.” Too many Egyptians blinded themselves here: if you want to pursue a just and liberal Egypt you have to attack anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist attitudes. The reason is that Israel’s existence and conduct is just and a worthy example to the world, and a society wearing blinders to avoid this also cannot see the path to the just and proper conduct they desire in their hearts for their own society. (That was also the root of the Pilgrims’ success at self-government in America and why Oliver Cromwell allowed the Jews to return to England.)

Had the liberals chosen to attack anti-Semitism as well as or instead of Mubarak their attitudes could have permeated society and the outcome of an election may have been very different, though Mubarak would not have fallen so soon.

Too late now. The best that the libs can hope for is that when the MB and Salafists fail the people – and they will – some sort of democratic process will allow the people to kick them out in favor of liberals who will then face the challenge of delivering services to a starved and desperate people. (H/T: Spengler)
- posted by Solomon2 @ 6:58 AM |

Response to "No kosher way to annihilate"
http://www.dawn.com/2011/11/24/no-kosher-way-to-annihilate.html

"Thou shall not kill" is NOT "Jews' "most sacred covenant". The commandment is "Thou shall not murder". We Jews are not forbidden the right to kill in self-defense nor the right to slaughter animals for food.

"Thou shall not murder" is a commandment not to commit slaughter your fellow man out of hatred for him. This the Israelis have certainly followed admirably compared to other nations. Not only is the murder and crime rate in Israel's orthodox communities close to zero, Israel's example - too often distorted into the opposite by the media - of acting against aggression yet NOT wontonly engaging in the mass slaughter of peoples whose leaders have vowed eternal enmity towards them has been emulated by other nations, specifically the United States and, lately, the Pakistani Army itself. Isn't that something the citizens of Swat and Wazirstan have to be thankful for?

Pakistanis suffer from many problems. Among them is this: having driven out every Jewish voice from the country, some Pakistanis have been tempted to invent their own interpretations of Jewish Law as a means of ridiculing and demeaning Jews or Israelis. It appears Jawed Naqvi is one of these.

Furthermore, I find it hard to believe that he is acting out of ignorance of Jews, given the close association he cites with them in India and elsewhere (though he may have been misled by dishonest intellectuals like Chomsky); rather, isn't it most likely he is trying to mislead Pakistanis, including himself? After all, I'm not the only one to note that Pakistani intellectuals deal with large amounts of cognitive dissonance every day. Yet that is no excuse for leading his countrymen down the road of aggressive war and damnation, is it?

Respectfully yours,

- Solomon2
http://solomon2.blogspot.com

[emailed to Dawn and Mr. Naqvi]
- posted by Solomon2 @ 2:10 PM |

Responding to the USS Liberty calumny
"During the 1967 War with Egypt and Syria, the Israeli Air Force knowingly bombed the USS Liberty — an American surveillance ship — and blamed it on the Egyptians." link

The Liberty, operating just outside Egyptian waters, was indeed attacked by Israeli warplanes. It was a "fog of war" mistake:

The Liberty was not far away when an ammo dump on shore suddenly exploded - thought to be by a bombardment from ship. Although identified earlier as an American warship, the Israelis did not maintain contact - they were looking for Egyptian warships and subs - and the Israelis thought, talking to the U.S. naval attache, that the Liberty was gone from the area; however, these orders had been mis-routed. The Liberty remained offshore but after the explosion proceeded (by unhappy coincidence, having reached the eastern end of its patrol area) towards Egyptian waters at high speed, and was then mis-identified as an enemy vessel fleeing the scene of an attack.

These facts are available from both U.S. and Israeli official sources and U.S. documentation. [Ref: Michael Oren, Six Days of War] I hope all readers note that very few, if any, Pakistani, Muslim, or Arab writers exerted themselves in the slightest fashion to unearth the true story, as best as it is known.

Over and over even "liberal"-minded Pakistanis miss the truth about Israel and its actions, preferring to wallow in demonisation instead. How many realize that the mind-set necessary to do this is EXACTLY the mind-set that invents reasons to bomb mosques and rape and kill innocents in their own country? The same mind-set that gives the O.K. to corruption rather than good government? I guess such thoughts, too horrible to evaluate, simply vanish on contact - and so Pakistan's terrible decay continues and its citizens continue to sink into a vast moral morass.

The Arab writer, Abdulateef al-Muhim, formerly a Saudi naval commodore, has often wondered how history would have been different had the Arabs recognized Israel in 1948 instead of vowing to eliminate the country and exterminate its Jewish population.link So do I: perhaps there might never have been a Saudi-supported Pakistani curriculum promoting the distortion of fact and fraud on an ummah-wide level. Muslims would have realized that by supporting extermination-minded Muslims against Jews that they are supporting criminality, not justice. Can Pakistanis gather the strength to change their own nature?

***

The Express Tribune refused to publish the comment.
UPDATE 11/21/11: My comment was published, after all.
- posted by Solomon2 @ 9:29 PM |

Book Review: Pakistan: A Hard Country

Ever since late 2008 I've spent most of my "Solomon2" time over at the Pakistani Defence Forum. I've also done a lot of reading on Pakistan. However, one exchange revealed I didn't that there are no jury trials in Pakistan.

Jury trials are the very intersection of society and the institutionalized process of justice. Since I didn't know there were no jury trials, I concluded that I was missing something very basic: while I had studied Pakistan's military and the decision-making process of its policymakers and such knowledge might be of some utility, my knowledge of Pakistani society was not.

Back to the books, then! The most-recent comprehensive view of Pakistan is the 500-page Pakistan: a Hard Country by Anatoly Lieven - an experienced British author who is also a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, an outfit that has invited me to several mid-east and Pakistan-related events, for reasons unknown.

Both Lieven and Zbigniew Brzezinski are scions of European aristocrats displaced by the Bolsheviks; while the experience drove Brzezinski to help support an insurgency in Afghanistan in the 1970s, Lieven's heritage seems to have compelled him to investigate the current result of such impetuosity. The author has toured Pakistan extensively twice, twenty years apart. This has helped him distinguish long-term attitudes from spur-of-the-moment popular trends, and taught him to be cautious at evaluating Pakistani public opinion.

On the minus side, Lieven makes several unsupported cuts against Israel - possibly his admission ticket to a Pakistan where, as one interlocutor once told me, "Pakistanis say they can't be openly pro-Israel because their throats could be slit twenty minutes later." Or maybe his anti-Israel attitude is honestly felt, expressing the current bias of Britain's intellectual class.

Succos plus Shabbat being a three-day holiday my reading plans were set. In between family time, prayer time, community time, and by stealing some hours from sleep I accomplished my purpose, for the book is a real eye-opener.

First, nothing else I've read so far comes close to depicting Pakistani society in breadth with illustrative episodes of detail.

Second, it strongly suggests that my conception of Pakistan was fundamentally wrong. I had thought that of Pakistan as a strong state dominated by a military lording it over society. Instead, Lieven depicts a weak state dominated by multiple strong societies within. Many a time the military finds it more effective to solve problems - even deadly ones - by negotiation, realizing that killing off kin-leaders can be counterproductive to building a successful Pakistan.

So Pakistan isn't really a mini-Roman Empire on the verge of coming apart. It's been in pieces since the beginning. Within the weak state the military is dominant but it only serves as a kind of glue holding fissiparous kin-groupings and ethnicities together. Not an empire decaying into feudalism but a feudal collective existing under the state - not particularly happily, as many are convinced life was better under previous princely rulers than under today's irresponsible bureaucrats and ministers.

(This again suggests to me that seeking a presidential- or parliamentary-type system in Afghanistan and Pakistan has been a mistake; constitutional monarchies with free cities would have been better. Monarchs at least own responsibility for their actions. Elected officials can usually obfuscate matters to hide their own involvement, something easy to do when the populace is mostly illiterate and there are no good checks and balances.)

Third, Pakistanis are corrupt, and this corruption is both personal and collective. Any Pakistani who has any power at all, even a tiny amount, uses it to improperly manipulate the state to his or his kin-group's advantage. If an individual commits a crime the courts often fail to convict because he can instantly enlist ten family members (even distant cousins) to provide alibis for him. Swearing on the Koran is not allowed: Since it is assumed that all witnesses lie doing so would discredit Islam, which is forbidden. With corruption the rule, politics and crime (closely related in Pakistan) are reduced to power-sharing negotiations between different parties: the "negotiated state" as Lieven puts it. The most effective law enforcement measures are "encounter killings" - extrajudicial executions of murderous miscreants, usually at night.

Fourth, about juries: Jury trials were forbidden in British India as incompatible with the colonial system and Pakistan and India both kept this after independence. At PDF both Indians and Pakistanis approved this: "We had it many decades ago but it was done away with as being unsuitable to our socio-economic environment" "We are different doesn’t mean we are evil and lesser beings"

(While Colonial America did have jury trials the Americans had greater experience with self-government and a higher literacy rate. One should also remember that the Vice-Admiralty courts of the late Colonial period, set up to enforce trade laws, had no juries - and were very much hated by Americans.)

Fifth, confirmation that, as I had gathered from my readings and on-line conversations, Pakistanis are greatly afflicted by self-deception usually expressed in but not limited to conspiracy theories. The problem is as wide-spread as I imagined, permeating all classes, and in the intellectual class going right up to the level of university president. The amazing and upsetting part is that such unsupported (and unsupportable) pronouncements are taken as more authoritative than pronouncements backed up by serious research. The author writes that the conspiracy-theory mentality is bred by the Army itself.

Sixth, the dacoits. This was a surprise. I had no idea that the Pakistani elite still employed professional robber-killers on retainer. I had thought this a thing of the past.

Seventh, the media. As I had strongly suspected from the moderation of my comments on Pakistani newspaper sites, the media can be very strongly influenced by the military. "The change in media coverage was crucial to the change in Pakistani public opinion" regarding operations in Swat. Such success naturally makes me wonder how much more could be done, should the military put its will into it.

Eighth, it isn't all about Islam. There is also the code of the Pathan, pashtunwali, and for women in particular that is much worse. Reading this, I realized that when President Bush criticized the Taliban for its treatment of women a few years back he was not criticizing sharia law, as I thought at the time, but pashtunwali. If I made this mistake then I suppose other Americans have done the same.

Additional conclusions thus far:

1) Pakistani police need to be better-paid, need better training and access to forensic equipment, and a greater division between local and national outfits; currently they are not tools of security as much as traffic cops or political tools to employ against rivals.

2) I have a somewhat more sympathetic attitude towards the Pakistani military than I did before, but only slightly. The P.A.'s moral judgments lead to much suffering among Pakistan's neighbors. Its nuclear weapons whet militant appetites and disorder. And its domestic meddling has kept society together but also kept many problems from being solved and allowed others to fester. The word that comes to my mind is embrittlement.
- posted by Solomon2 @ 8:20 PM |