The Golan Heights and the Syrian-Israeli Negotiations

By Dore Gold

1) Israeli negotiators will quickly discover three core areas in their discussions with the Syrians that they will not resolve easily: delineation of an agreed boundary, security arrangements, and the Syrian-Iranian alliance.
2) Just prior to the outbreak of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Syria deployed 1,400 tanks along the border against a total Israeli force of 177 tanks (a force ratio of 8 to 1 in favor of Syria). Should Syria's considerable missile forces be used to delay Israel's reserve mobilization, then the importance of the Golan terrain will increase as Israel's small standing army will have to fight for longer without reserve reinforcement.

3) When Israel reached its Treaty of Peace with Egypt in 1979, it agreed to fully withdraw from the Sinai Peninsula to the international border. Syria illegally occupied Israeli territories during the 1950s that were within Israel's international borders: the southern demilitarized zone at al-Hamma, the Banias area, and the strip of coastal territory along the northeast shoreline of the Sea of Galilee.

4) If Israel were to agree to the June 4, 1967, line, as Syria demands, it would be rewarding Syrian aggression. Moreover, it could compromise Israel's control of its largest fresh water reservoir. Israel should not have to be arguing with the Syrians over the question of whether a future Israeli-Syrian boundary should correspond to the June 4, 1967, line or to the older international border, for neither of these lines is defensible.

5) The U.S. has given Israel repeated diplomatic assurances in the past that Israel will not have to come down from the Golan Heights, beginning with a September 1, 1975, letter from President Gerald Ford to Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. It was renewed prior to the 1991 Madrid Peace Conference by Secretary of State James Baker. During the Clinton administration, Secretary of State Warren Christopher renewed the Ford commitment in a letter dated September 19, 1996.

6) Even if, by prior agreement with Tehran, the Syrians took steps that appeared to be downgrading relations, Israel's concession of the Golan Heights would be irreversible, while the political orientation of states in the Middle East is notoriously changeable. It would be a cardinal error for Israel to put into jeopardy its own security by agreeing to come down from the Golan Heights.

Go to http://tinyurl.com/6qxgmz to read the full article.

Forgotten Legal Rights

From Forgotten Legal Rights:

After most armed conflicts, the international community has sought to re-establish the status quo ante - the previous situation - as part of a political settlement. However, many aspects of the prewar status quo in 1967 were untenable, if not illegal. Jordan and Egypt previously occupied the West Bank and Gaza Strip as a result of an invasion by the Arab states in 1948 that the UN Secretary-General at the time, Trygve Lie, called an act of "aggression."

In the Six-Day War nearly 20 years later, Israel entered these territories in what was plainly a war of self-defense. Before Israeli forces moved in Jerusalem, Jordanian artillery fired nearly 6,000 artillery shells on the Israeli parts of the city.

Stephen Schwebel, who later became the president of the International Court of Justice in The Hague, wrote in 1970: "When the prior holder of territory had seized that territory unlawfully, the state which subsequently takes that territory in the lawful exercise of self-defense has, against that prior holder, better title."

UN Security Council Resolution 242, that would become the cornerstone of every Arab-Israel peace agreement for decades thereafter, did not call on Israel to withdraw from all the territories it captured in the Six-Day War. Resolution 242 called for establishing "secure" boundaries, with the understanding that the pre-war lines were not secure.

The "Saudi Peace Initiative," if implemented, would strip Israel of defensible borders, push it back to the vulnerable 1967 lines, and redivide the heart of Jerusalem.

Today, the Palestinian Authority and Hamas have replaced the Arab states as claimants to the territories that Israel captured and that have been disputed since 1967. Who would suggest placing the holy sites of Jerusalem under Hamas, whose ideological cousins are attacking churches and mosques across the Middle East?

Moreover, it is transparent today that if Israel were to withdraw from its security positions along the Jordan Valley barrier, al-Qaeda affiliates that are today penetrating Lebanon, Gaza, and Jordan would seize the opportunity and unleash a wave of jihadi volunteers to escalate attacks against Israel.

The writer, the former ambassador of Israel to the United Nations, is the author of The Fight for Jerusalem (2007). He is the president of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.

Book: The Fight For Jerusalem

Jerusalem has always been at the heart of the battle between Islam and the West. From the Crusades until today, expansionist Islam has understood the significance of resting control over Jerusalem. For them, taking Jerusalem is tantamount to driving a spear into the heart of Judeo-Christian civilization.

Dore Gold's new book is a brilliant historical and contemporary analysis of The Fight For Jerusalem. Dore has unearthed facts, quotes,and photographs that give positive proof that Jerusalem is a primary target of our enemies. This is a must read for policy makers, bloggers, elected officials, reporters, and everyone else who cares about the future of the West.

http://www.onejerusalem.org/

Video: Bring Ahmadinejad to Justice!

This post was moved to SmoothStoneBlog

Bring Ahmadinejad to Justice for Incitement to Genocide

The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations joins in inviting leaders of the member organizations to a special symposium:

Bring Ahmadinejad to Justice for Incitement to Genocide!
Featuring important national and international legal scholars who will discuss the repeated threats by President Ahmadinejad of Iran in violation of the 1949 Genocide Convention. Among those who will address this timely and critical issue are:

Ambassador John Bolton, Outgoing U.S. Ambassador to the UN
Amb. Dore Gold, Former Ambassador of Israel to the United Nations
Professor Alan Dershowitz, Harvard Law School
MP Irwin Cotler, Former Minister of Justice of Canada
Amb. Meir Rosenne, Former Israeli Ambassador to the United States
Amb. Eytan Bentsur, Former Director General, Israel Foreign Ministry
MK Danny Naveh, Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee
Professor Ruth Wedgewood, Johns Hopkins University
Martin Peretz, The New Republic

Thursday, December 14
10:00 am - 12:00 noon
New York County Lawyers' Association
14 Vesey Street, (between Broadway and Church Street)
Lower Manhattan
Seating is limited so please respond immediately to (212) 339-6993 or rsvp@conferenceofpresidents.org

Moves to Charge Ahmadinejad with Incitement to Genocide

From Financial Times: A 68-page study produced by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs and the International Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists argues that Iranian President Ahmadinejad's declaration that "Israel should be wiped off the map" is part of a hate campaign punishable under international law.

Remarks by Ahmadinejad, including one in which he reportedly questioned whether Zionists were human beings, "constitute direct and public incitement to genocide," the study alleges. "While the Hutus in Rwanda were equipped with machetes, Iran, should the international community do nothing to prevent it, will soon acquire nuclear weapons," it notes.

Dore Gold, a former Israeli ambassador to the UN, said that while "most people think of [legal proceedings against] genocide in terms of setting up tribunals after the crime has been committed," the challenge was to stop genocide before it begins. "What specifically can be done? Let the Security Council meet and discuss the issue," he said.

See also Full Text: Referral of Iranian President Ahmadinejad on the Charge of Incitement to Commit Genocide

The Iraq Study Group: Implications for Israel

From The Iraq Study Group: Implications for Israel by Dore Gold:

Baker confirmed on December 6, 2006, that the Iraq Study Group derived some of its inspiration from the "six-plus-two" talks on the future of Afghanistan at the UN. But in Afghanistan, back in the 1990s, Iran sought to contain a radical Sunni regime under the Taliban. In 2006, in contrast, Iran seeks to dominate Iraq through its Shiite majority. The two situations are entirely different.

Should the Bush administration adopt this approach from the Iraq Study Group, it would not be seeking a radical shift in Iranian and Syrian policies from a position of strength. From the perspective of Teheran and Damascus, the U.S. would be seeking their help after they had succeeded in defeating coalition forces. As a result, the price for their cooperation would be exorbitant.

The Iraq Study Group suggests that "the Israelis should return the Golan Heights." There is no negotiation over the withdrawal as in UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338. It appears that the Golan Heights are being used as an inducement to obtain cooperative Syrian behavior on Iraq. On the Palestinian track, the Baker-Hamilton report does not call for talks over "refugees," but rather over "the right of return," adopting Palestinian legal nomenclature and undermining Israel's legal position.

Baker report demands Israel leave Golan Heights

Only a number of days after the UN passed a resolution calling Israel’s sovereignty over Jerusalem illegal, former US Secretary of State James Baker says Israel must leave the Golan Heights.

The comprehensive report, which primarily addresses the situation in Iraq, was prepared by Jew-hater Baker and a former Democratic congressman, Lee Hamilton.

It states that if the United States does not take a more leading role in the Mideast Israel-Arab conflict, there is no hope of America achieving its goals in the region.

According to former Israeli UN Ambassador Dr. Dore Gold, the report indicates that American involvement in Iraq will diminish in the coming two years. He called the American demand that Israel retreat from the Golan Heights "worrisome."

How can we let Ahmadinejad enter NY next week? We must not.

From Ahmadinejad in New York:

If the Holocaust-denying, nuclear bomb-building, terrorism-sponsoring president of Iran thinks he's going to flit into New York next week for the UN General Assembly and escape unchallenged, boy is he going to be in for a surprise. Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel Tuesday added his name to a small but high-powered international group of private citizens who are pushing to have Iran thrown out of the UN in response to Iran's violations of the 1948 Convention to Prevent and Punish the Crime of Genocide.

President Ahmadinejad will also be met with a large rally on September 20 outside the UN at noon organized by the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York, and the UJA-Federation of New York. The executive vice chairman of the Conference, Malcolm Hoenlein, said Tuesday that he's received requests from as far away as Texas, Arkansas, Ottawa, and New Hampshire to participate in the rally.

The legal effort in which Mr. Wiesel is involved, established at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, includes a former Israeli ambassador to the UN, Dore Gold, and a former Israeli ambassador to America, Meir Rosenne. "It is hard to believe that at a time when the president of Iran is making statements denying the Holocaust and does not hide his intention to erase Israel from the map, the enlightened world is planning to host Ahmadinejad at the opening of the General Assembly instead of evicting his country from the UN altogether," the group said in a statement.

Read Confront Ahmadinejad. An excerpt:

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has applied for a visa to enter the U.S. and address the upcoming UN General Assembly. As human rights activist and former Canadian justice minister Irwin Cotler said this week, Ahmadinejad is in clear breach of the UN's post-WWII Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide - international legislation designed precisely to prevent the kind of mass-murder that Iran's president so relentlessly encourages.

Resources obtained from Daily Alert.

See You in Court, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

Via See You in Court, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad:
--------------
Next month, a new element will be introduced into the discussions about the international community's attitude toward Iran, which is becoming a nuclear power. A group of Israelis, headed by former UN ambassador Dr. Dore Gold, recently completed the composition of a lawsuit to be referred to the International Criminal Court in The Hague against Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, for incitement to genocide in violation of the 1948 UN Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. According to the convention, "direct and public incitement to committing genocide" is a criminal offense, with genocide defined as an activity "committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group." "The time has come to go on the legal attack," says Gold.

"It is easy to imagine what would happen if Israel announced that it desired to destroy another country," says Meir Rosenne, former legal adviser to the Foreign Ministry and Israeli ambassador to France and the U.S. "Sanctions against it would be applied immediately. Were the threat only theoretical, we could live with it. But we are talking here about a country of about 70 million people, which is increasingly arming itself, and in addition is arming organizations that it sponsors, such as Hizballah, which are acting directly against Israel."

Deterrence Against Hamas

From Deterrence Against Hamas by Dore Gold:

When Israel completed its disengagement from Gaza, many assumed that after the withdrawal, Israel would have far greater legitimacy to conduct deterrence operations there if Israeli territory would be attacked in the future. As a result, Israel would be able to create the same sort of deterrence that it had projected along Israel's northern border against Hizballah. But Israeli deterrence against the Palestinians failed, and now there is a serious deterioration in the south. What happened?

Israel's north has been relatively stable. Syria has come to understand that if Hizballah launches rockets against Israel, then the Israeli Air Force will attack Syria. As a result, Syria must restrain Hizballah and some kind of deterrence - even if fragile - exists.

Who is the Syria of the south? The fact is that there is no state that plays that role. Israel has a peace treaty with Egypt and Cairo has a far more complex relationship with Hamas than Damascus has with Hizballah.

What about deterring Hamas directly? Many politicians declared in 2005 that if after Israel's withdrawal from Gaza, Hamas even dares to fire a Kassam rocket, Israel will retaliate with enormous firepower.

The reality is that Israel is not about to erase whole civilian towns. Massive retaliation of that sort will have Israel sitting on the bench of the accused in the UN Security Council and begging President Bush for a U.S. veto, which he may not have the political capital to provide. More importantly, such action also violates the moral standards of the IDF and Israel as a whole since 1948.

There is a simple lesson from the Gaza experience: the formula of full withdrawal backed up by the threat of punishing deterrence operations simply doesn't work. In the next stages, Israel must re-establish its doctrine of defensible borders, in accordance with its international legal rights under UN Security Council Resolution 242.

The writer is president of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs and served as Israel's ambassador to the United Nations.

David and Goliath

Exploding the myth of Palestinian victimhood. An excerpt from David and Goliath, via FrontPage:

Simultaneously, the Palestinian psychology of “occupation” continues, as we witnessed after Israel implemented its disengagement plan from Gaza. It was remarkable to see official Palestinian spokesmen make the argument that Gaza disengagement changed very little and that, as far as they are concerned, Gaza remains “occupied” territory. Mahmoud Abbas stated clearly on July 7, 2005, that “the legal status of the areas slated for evacuation has not changed.” And now, following the Tel-Aviv bombing, Sheikh Mohammad Abu Tir, a Hamas member of parliament, was quoted saying, “Israel and the occupation are responsible. Before the attack, less than two days before, Israel killed 18 Palestinians.”

Folks, the foremost document in defining the existence of an occupation has been the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention "Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War." Article 6 of the Fourth Geneva Convention explicitly states that "the Occupying Power shall be bound for the duration of the occupation to the extent that such Power exercises the functions of government in such territory...." If no Israeli military government is exercising its authority or any of "the functions of government" in the Gaza Strip, then there is no occupation.

For more facts on the mythology of the palestinian claim of "occupation", click here.

Keyword(s): "occupation"; Dore Gold; palestinian mythology.

Iran Elected to UN Disarmament Commission -- 04/17/2006

I really don't understand how Iran has been elected to a vice-chair position on the U.N. Disarmament Commission, whose mission includes deliberations on preventing the spread of nuclear weapons! Fron CNS:

Under threat of United Nations Security Council sanctions for its own nuclear program, Iran has been elected to a vice-chair position on the U.N. Disarmament Commission, whose mission includes deliberations on preventing the spread of nuclear weapons. On the first day of the commission meeting, Iran along with Uruguay and Chile was elected as one of eight vice-chairs, elected to serve for one year.

Dr. Dore Gold, former Israeli Ambassador to the U.N. said that electing Iran to a leadership position on the UN Disarmament Commission was like asking the "cat to guard the milk."

Prof. Anne Bayefsky, who edits the Eye on the U.N. website, quoted U.N. Undersecretary-General for Disarmament Affairs, Nobuaki Tanaka, as saying that the commission "played a unique role" with "the advantage of being a fully universal deliberative body."

"This is the U.N. fiction, which brings us close to nuclear war with each passing day," Bayefsky said. "The allusion is to universal democracy, though the majority of voters is non-democratic and include thugs, racists and war-mongers."

Putting "Palestine" on the Map?

From Putting "Palestine" on the Map?:

It was bad enough that "Paradise Now" was nominated for an Oscar. But then the official Academy Awards website listed the film's country of origin as "Palestine." This sparked protests from Israeli officials since no state of Palestine exists.

"Unfortunately, Israel often concedes the struggle over terminology and then pays the price in negotiations later," asserts Dore Gold, a former Israeli ambassador to the UN. He points to the widespread application of the phrase "occupied territories" rather than "disputed territories" to the West Bank and Gaza.

Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, asks: Why would Palestinians compromise if they feel they are "getting everything," including international recognition, already?

Palestine does not exist, folks.

It used to, but so did Biafra. I don't hear AP or Reuters or the United Nations refer to Biafra which only existed as a break-away secessionist state from Nigeria, for around two years from May 30, 1967, to Jan. 15, 1970. How come no one refers to Biafra but everyone, including Jews, refer to "Palestine" as if it already existed as a state? Is "Palestine" a kleptocracy? You better believe it. But is it a legitimate and sovereign nation? Nope. And it never was. Never.

Unanswered query to the Israel Minister of Justice

To: Justice Minister Tzippi Livni
From: David Bedein
Bureau Chief
Israel Resource News Agency
Israel

According to the study, http://jcpa.org/jlmbldg.htm, published by the JCPA, the center directed by Ariel Sharon's Advisor, Dr. Dore Gold, in a study that was issued in cooperation with Ehud Olmert, there are more than 6000 illegal homes built by Arabs in Jerusalem.

According to a briefing that was held yesterday at the office of the Prime Minister of Israel, a special unit was set up just before the PM's stroke to enforce the law in this regard.

Why, then, do you not demand that the law enforcement system enforce the law concerning these 6000 Arab homes?

Why do you exclusively invest the energy of the law enforcement system to destroy 18 Jewish homes?

We all await your reply, Tzippi...

Establishing Defensible Borders for Israel

After the Gaza Disengagement: Establishing Defensible Borders for Israel (American Enterprise Institute)

On June 27, 2005, Dr. Dore Gold and Maj.-Gen. (res.) Yaakov Amidror of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs unveiled their study of Defensible Borders for a Lasting Peace at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C.

Dr. Dore Gold: President George W. Bush on April 14, 2004, gave a number of assurances to the State of Israel about future stages of the peace process. One of the most important is the assurance that Israel, at the end of the day, will get secure, defensible borders.

This assurance of President Bush has been at the heart of a consensus in U.S. foreign policy that dates back to UN Security Council Resolution 242 of November 1967. There was a broad U.S. consensus that Israel wasn't going back to the '67 lines, or what is sometimes called the 1949 armistice lines.

Defensible borders are not borders created by U.S. security guarantees or by NATO troops. They relate to Israel's ability to defend itself by itself.

Gen. Yaakov Amidror: The meaning of "defensible borders" is a very technical question related to topography. The fact is that the West Bank is higher than the strategic heart of the State of Israel, which is located along the Mediterranean coast. If you lose the high ground, your capability to defend is not as good as when you have the high ground.

Israel cannot build its defense system on optimistic scenarios of the future. We must take into consideration some more realistic scenarios, such as the possibility that Egypt will be under the influence of radical Islam, or that Jordan will become a Palestinian state, or that Iraq will be a Shiite country hostile to Israel under an Iranian nuclear umbrella.

Gen. John Foss [former commander of the U.S. 82nd Airborne Division]: As a soldier I would tell you that the pre-'67 borders are not defensible in the long run for Israel. They absolutely cannot live with those borders with those distances.

Richard Perle [former Assistant Secretary of Defense]: There has been far too little discussion of the physical realities of the State of Israel in relation to those who would destroy it. Most of the population of Israel is within artillery range of the West Bank. This is a threat that no country relying on its own defense could begin to contemplate.

I believe that it is fundamentally in the interests of the U.S. that we not bear responsibility for the defense of Israel. And therefore, Israel has to be able to defend itself and that means borders that can be defended.

Despite Israeli Alerts, UN Transfers Thousands to Hamas Affiliates

Folks, the UN is a human cesspool. Read what the corrupt and dirty men there have done this time:

Long after Israel warned of the terror connection, the UN Development Program transferred thousands of dollars to a Palestinian Arab charity affiliated with Hamas though the UN publicly claimed payments to the organization had stopped.

The UNDP was headed by Mark Maloch Brown, who has recently been appointed Secretary-General Annan's chief of staff.

Dore Gold, the former Israeli ambassador to the UN, exposed UNDP support for charity committees affiliated with Hamas in a recent op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal.

UN undersecretary-general for communication Shashi Tharoor claimed in a letter to the editor of the Journal that "no further payments were made by the UN" to the Hamas affiliates after a June 25, 2003, letter from Timothy Rothermel of the UNDP to the Israeli army. Yet according to a UNDP letter that was seen by the Sun, the agency transferred $6,000 to the Jenin Charity Committee on September 11, 2003. A subsequent letter from UNDP, dated October 3, 2003, states that the transfer was a mistake and "was intended for the Tul Karem Charity Committee."

UNDP spokesman William Orme said Thursday that his agency is checking into the new facts, and that if the documents are accurate, an internal investigation will be launched immediately. "We were told no payments were made following June 2003," he said.

Folks, who do you believe?

Despite Israeli Alerts, UN Transfers Thousands to Hamas Affiliates

What If Bush Invited Sharon and Abu Mazen to Camp David?

Folks, Dr. Dore Gold is one of the greatest writers and defenders of Israel. Dore Gold is President of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. He served as Israel's Ambassador to the United Nations (1997-1999), Foreign Policy Advisor to former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and advisor to Prime Minster Ariel Sharon. He was involved in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations between 1996 and 1998 in both the Hebron Protocol and the Wye Plantation Conference. He and David Keyes have written the following Viewpoint for Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.

At President Clinton's failed Camp David peace summit in mid-2000, Barak offered more than any Israeli prime minister in history. Yet the talks exposed vast remaining disparities between Israel and many of today's post-Arafat Palestinian leaders.They maintain that there are several key issues that must be considered before the Bush administration dispatches a "presidential envoy" or risks convening yet another peace summit in the period ahead:

Here they are:

• Refugees: As recently as January 1, 2005, Abu Mazen reiterated: "We won't forget the right of return of refugees who have been exiled from their land for more than half a century." "The right of return means a return to Israel, not to the Palestinian state," Abu Mazen wrote in the London Arabic daily al-Hayat several months after Camp David.
  
• Borders: The Palestinians insisted that the June 1967 line be the recognized international boundary and even demanded the Latrun salient, which includes a section of the main Tel Aviv-Jerusalem highway. The Palestinians rejected any Israeli sovereignty over national consensus suburban areas just beyond the municipal borders of Jerusalem, such as Maale Adumim and Givat Ze'ev.
  
• Jerusalem: Former Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben Ami noted that Abu Mazen, who had a reputation for moderation, suddenly became energized at Camp David and rejected U.S. proposals for compromise on Jerusalem.
  
• Security Arrangements: Israel requested early warning stations in the West Bank for security purposes and the right to deploy forces in the event of an Arab coalition attack from the east. The Palestinians insisted that no Israeli soldier be on any of their territory and also rejected Israeli control of air space. Furthermore, the Palestinians made clear at Taba that they would not accept a demilitarized Palestinian state, either.

In 2001, Abu Mazen admitted, "Had the Camp David summit been convened again, we would have taken the same position" on the permanent status issues.

During the Oslo years, the explicit declarations of Palestinian leaders were often ignored and treated as statements for internal consumption alone. This does not mean that in 2005 no "window of opportunity" exists; rather, its actual size must be accurately measured. In the present context, a partial cease-fire or other limited arrangements are more realistic than significant progress on any of the substantive issues raised at Camp David in 2000.

What If Bush Invited Sharon and Abu Mazen to Camp David? The Prospects for Negotiations in the Post-Arafat Era

Can the UN Be Redeemed? - Dore Gold

The UN was born in 1945 at a moment of extraordinary moral clarity. To become a founding member, states had to declare war on one of the Axis powers. There was no doubt then that Nazi Germany stood for evil and the Allies for good. But within a few years, UN standards became muddied with the addition of new members, who sought to alter the organization's ethos to serve their own authoritarian agendas.

The change from the original 51 members to today's 191 member states meant a UN that had been dominated by democratic values became a tool of Third World authoritarians, who quickly raised the value of "noninterference" above that of human rights. This dramatic distortion came to roost in the UN failures of the 1990s, which were characterized by confusion between aggressor and victim. One reason the Oil for Food scandal went on for so long, according to former UN official Michael Soussan, was that the UN had more sympathy for Iraq's predicament than its own mandate to root out Iraq's WMD programs.

With respect to Israel, the UN systematically condemned Israeli defensive measures, without addressing the terrorism that forced Israel to act. When the General Assembly improperly activated the UN's judicial arm, the International Court of Justice, to stop Israel's security fence, Annan's office sent reams of supporting documents to The Hague, without touching on the suicide attacks that had forced Israel to build the fence.

The UN certainly has a role to play in giving out food and tents in an emergency. But in the critical field of international peace and security, there may be no substitute for the kinds of "coalitions of the willing" used by Bill Clinton in Kosovo and by George W. Bush in Iraq, outside of the formal authorization of the UN Security Council. These coalitions have a clear sense of who their allies and adversaries are; therefore, they are not crippled by the moral confusion that characterized the judgments of the Security Council in failed interventions over the last decade.

The writer, Israel's former ambassador to the UN, is the author of Tower of Babble: How the UN Has Fueled Global Chaos, and is president of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.

Jerusalem Post

AN ANSWER TO THE NEW ANTI-ZIONISTS: Rights of the Jewish People to a Sovereign State in their Historic Homeland by Dore Gold and Jeff Helmreich

• A new critique of Israel proposes its elimination and replacement with a bi-national Palestinian-Jewish state. Israel's new detractors doubt the legitimacy of Jewish statehood, though they say nothing about the validity of dozens of new states that have emerged in the last half century, many of which lack any firmly rooted national identity. The new attack on Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state is particularly ironic since Jewish nationhood preceded the emergence of most modern nation-states by thousands of years.

• The new critics of Jewish statehood neglect the fact that Israel's communal expression - like that of many communal states around the world - in no way infringes the rights of minority citizens, who enjoy full equality under the law and the political system. They also ignore that this form of national expression is not unique; indeed, most states identify in some formal way with the religious or cultural heritage of their predominant communities. Yet only Israel is singled out for criticism.

• Israel is the only state created in the last century whose legitimacy was recognized by both the League of Nations and the United Nations. The League of Nations Mandate did not create the rights of the Jewish people to a national home in Palestine, but rather recognized a pre-existing right - for the links of the Jewish people to their historic land were well-known and accepted by world leaders in the previous century.

• By 1864, a clear-cut Jewish majority emerged in Jerusalem - more than half a century before the arrival of the British Empire and the League of Nations Mandate. During the years that the Jewish presence in Eretz Israel was restored, a huge Arab population influx transpired as Arab immigrants sought to take advantage of higher wages and economic opportunities that resulted from Jewish settlement in the land. President Roosevelt concluded in 1939 that "Arab immigration into Palestine since 1921 has vastly exceeded the total Jewish immigration during the whole period."

• Israel's new detractors seek to delegitimize Jewish national rights by arguing that their assertion was an extension of European imperialism. In fact, Jewish underground movements waged an anti-colonial war in the 1940s against continuing British rule. Israel was an anti-imperialist force when it first emerged, while the Arab states were aligned with the imperial powers, their armies trained and supplied by the French and British Empires.

• There was no active movement to form a unique Palestinian state prior to 1967. In 1956, Ahmad Shuqairy, who would found the PLO eight years later, told the UN Security Council: "it is common knowledge that Palestine is nothing but southern Syria." In the early 1960s, many Palestinians looked to Egypt's Abdul Nasser as their leader as much as to any Palestinian. Given the historical background, it is impossible to argue that the Palestinians have a claim to the Land of Israel superior to that of the Jews, as Israel's detractors contend.

• The new assault on Israel is partly based on ignorance of Jewish history in today's highly secularized world. But it also emanates from a new anti-Semitic wave reflected in a public opinion poll by the European Commission showing Israel as the country most regarded by Europeans as a threat to world peace. The president of the European Commission, Roman Prodi - alluding to the anti-Semitic underpinnings that led to the poll's results - said, "to the extent that this may indicate a deeper, more general prejudice against the Jewish world, our repugnance is even more radical."
  

Read the rest of the Answer to the New Anti-Zionists here: Rights of the Jewish People to a Sovereign State in their Historic Homeland - Dore Gold and Jeff Helmreich