22 thoughts on “Next Sunday, Protest The Sale of Settlements in Teaneck

  1. notice they’re not trying to get them to come to Israel – they’re trying to help them get rich from occupied territory. I wonder if the government will reimburse them come the evacuation?
    (BTW – this is, I think, legally problematic, too)

  2. BZ– yeah, denial, I guess.
    Amit– yeah, it’s rather pathetic. but honestly, it’s in the same vein as lot’s of american jewish relationships to Israel, which aren’t necessarily connected to reality. (e.g. jewish-disneyland syndrome).

  3. Applicable international law on the issue of the disputed territories is in the eyes of the beholder – territory captured in a defensive war has been historically considered to belong to the victor (otherwise virtually the entire map of post WWII Europe would have to be redrawn). And of course a brief history of the area would show that there has never been a recognized “state” in the area except that of Israel. So Israel has more a “right” to the area than any other claimant (which is not to say that political and demographic realities may not make it the wiser course to give up a piece of the West Bank).
    Criticize Israel if you’d like for bad politics, but not for defying international law. (Btw, where is the support for and independent Kurdistan? And why the support for an independent Kosovo, for millenia an integral part of Serbia? Lots of contradictions out there).

  4. hey now, I support an indepedent Kurdistan and Kosovo as well as Palestine. I also suppost Basque independence and British withdrawal from Northern Ireland.

  5. In my experience, when someone feels compelled to advertise something as being 100% legal, it is usually anything but.

  6. If the renters of your Yesh(a) lodging attack their Palestinian neighbors, I wonder if you could be charged by the US gov’t with providing material support to terrorists under the Patriot Act?

  7. Just to get us thinking— is it better that all kinds of uncaring-about-israel millionaires are investing in buildings and projects that religious armchair-zionists in Jersey? At least the yids in Jersey might actually care in the slightest for the well being of some communities living in Israel… But a big Saudi Arabianmagnate supposedly just bought a space fro a building in Jerusalem, Donald Trump has something pending… The whole trend in Israel since communism was crucified has been forign investors— big money. Isn’t it kinda interesting how much easier it is to hate on the people at the fringes of the Zionist Expansionist Exploitation project, and ignore the big forces at the center?
    Said better: why blame settlement expansion for the problem– it’s dirty profiteering all around! Why is Yesha economic zionist vacationeering worse than anywhere else? more destructive, or absurd? Why is there such a taiva amongst progresive zionists to hate on the settlers: because they’re visible, at the borders of the problem? Shrink the settlements down, the accusing finger will be pointing at wherever the frontier is.

  8. themicah – there’s one answer for your enquiring mind – law school

    My criminal law class didn’t cover that statute. 😉

  9. Tell me why building on the kosher side is less rooted-in-atrocity. i understand a little why builing on the other side of the green line is more visibly incendiary… though maybe I don’t, really. There’s only so many Palestinians corralled into the tiny West Bank/ Rammalah spaces because they were fleeing all those other parts of Israel that we feel safe and ok occupying now, because we can’t see any remains, or enough remains, or the arabs that used to live there. I may well be ignorant about this, but it looks to me like the Yesha Settlers are just easier targets for our internal consiences to blame because they’re closer to the frontier, but we’re all colonists and pilgrims nonethless. Like Tel Aviv wasn’t built on the stolen (or bought. same thing, right?) land of people living there for a long time as much, or mmuch more so than traditional Jewish habitations and settlements throughout Chevron Judea and smarian?
    school me, XisnotX, why are the zionist profiteering projects building anywhere in Israel less karmically wounded than the ones at least populated by religious idealists?

  10. but we’re all colonists and pilgrims nonethless: really? Then I expect Jews have no historical connection with Israel and Arafat was correct when he said it was a myth that the 1st and 2nd temples existed? and the state of Arab Palestine has had a long existence in what is now Israel? Thanks for the historical lesson.

  11. The legitimacy of states or settlements is a relative thing. I think that the legitimacy of Israel, within defined pre-1967 borders will go up once all the settlers are forcibly evicted from the West Bank, and sane Israelis find a good way to drown out the shrill noise of their whining.
    BTW, the international principle that land acquired by force cannot be incorporated into the territory of the victor is a UN principle, established in the aftermath of WWII. It requires that states agree with each other on changes of borders. This is one reason why Israel’s occupation is illegal: there is no state entity that can ‘approve’ a change to Israel’s borders. And any unilateral change as a result of war is – as mentioned – impermissible.

  12. ALL of US live in occupied land RIGHT HERE in America!!! We are not better than the Israelies, we are worse!! At least The Jews had a constant presence in the land and conection to it for thousands of years. The Arabs came much later and occupied it.
    We forget about the apartheid right here in the USA, the crimes against the native people of the Americas, and our continue building of settlements of this land.
    If you really care about occupation, you should LEAVE NOW and go back to EUROPE, or wherever your ancestors came from…..if you wanna stay here, you should stop this HYPOCRITYCAL non-sense.
    BTW: Peace now is a not a source for law. The International Humanitarian Law in the West Bank and Gaza Strip goes as follows:
    International humanitarian law prohibits the forcible transfer of segments of the population of a state to the territory of another state which it has occupied as a result of the resort to armed force. This principle, which is reflected in Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, was drafted immediately following the Second World War. As International Red Cross’ authoritative commentary to the Convention confirms, the principle was intended to protect the local population from displacement, including endangering its separate existence as a race, as occurred with respect to the forced population transfers in Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary before and during the war. This is clearly not the case with regard to the West Bank and Gaza.
    The attempt to present Israeli settlements as a violation of this principle is clearly untenable. As Professor Eugene Rostow, former Under-Secretary of State for Political Affairs has written: “the Jewish right of settlement in the area is equivalent in every way to the right of the local population to live there” (AJIL, 1990, vol. 84, p.72).
    The provisions of the Geneva Convention regarding forced population transfer to occupied sovereign territory cannot be viewed as prohibiting the voluntary return of individuals to the towns and villages from which they, or their ancestors, had been ousted. Nor does it prohibit the movement of individuals to land which was not under the legitimate sovereignty of any state and which is not subject to private ownership. In this regard, Israeli settlements have been established only after an exhaustive investigation process, under the supervision of the Supreme Court of Israel, designed to ensure that no communities are established on private Arab land.
    It should be emphasised that the movement of individuals to the territory is entirely voluntary, while the settlements themselves are not intended to displace Arab inhabitants, nor do they do so in practice.
    Repeated charges regarding the illegality of Israeli settlements must therefore be regarded as politically motivated, without foundation in international law. Similarly, as Israeli settlements cannot be considered illegal, they cannot constitute a “grave violation” of the Geneva Convention, and hence any claim that they constitute a “war crime” is without any legal basis. Such political charges cannot justify in any way Palestinian acts of terrorism and violence against innocent Israelis.
    Politically, the West Bank and Gaza Strip is best regarded as territory over which there are competing claims which should be resolved in peace process negotiations. Israel has valid claims to title in this territory based not only on its historic and religious connection to the land, and its recognized security needs, but also on the fact that the territory was not under the sovereignty of any state and came under Israeli control in a war of self-defense, imposed upon Israel. At the same time, Israel recognizes that the Palestinians also entertain legitimate claims to the area. Indeed, the very fact that the parties have agreed to conduct negotiations on settlements indicated that they envisage a compromise on this issue.
    ALSO:
    For more than a thousand years, the only administration which has prohibited Jewish settlement was the Jordanian occupation administration, which during the nineteen years of its rule (1948-1967) declared the sale of land to Jews a capital offense. The right of Jews to establish homes in these areas, and the legal titles to the land which had been acquired, could not be legally invalidated by the Jordanian or Egyptian occupation which resulted from their armed invasion of Israel in 1948, and such rights and titles remain valid to this day.
    Source:
    “Legal Interpretations of UNSC242,” in UN Security Council Resolution 242: The Building Block of Peacemaking, op. cit., p. 31.

  13. The NJ Attorney General may not have jurisdiction to prevent this land sale from happening. And while I doubt anyone who buys will be prosecuted under the Patriot Act, there is another potential way that a US Federal court could have jurisidiction over you, should you purchase there. In the last 25 years or so, a number of plaintiffs have sucessfully used the Alien Tort Claims act to get federal courts to take jurisdiction over events that have no connection to the US. This has been used to sue US corporations and federal agencies who have a presence in other countries and who may have aided, by their presence, human rights abuses, as well as *other violations of international law*. Obviously, whether or not this is an issue would depend on proving that the settlements are illegal under international law, etc. (I make no judgment about the legality of the settlements.) Also, this administration has been much more hostile to the use of the ATCA. But it’s still within the realm of possibility.

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