The case for palestine: An international law perspective

[P F Tinmore]

International law, in the sense of having any substantial impact on the actions of great powers or developments on the ground in the Israeli-Palestinian theater, has for decades proven almost totally irrelevant. Foreign powers, and local and regional actors alike, have consistently ignored, resisted, violated or condemned international legitimacy. Quigley is fully cognizant of this, and candidly admits that “most writers on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict find an emphasis on legal entitlement to be unrealistic, even counterproductive” (p.xii). Nevertheless, he asserts that he remains convinced that a peace “not based on justice may turn out to be no peace at all” (p.xii). Precisely so. But in this Age of Terror, with an American administration apparently unimpressed by international legitimacy and evidently committed to an almost endless war against al Qaa’ida, can Professor Quigley realistically expect even a modicum of deference to the prescriptions of international law? The fact that international legitimacy overwhelmingly supports the Palestinian rather than the Israeli case makes any application or enforcement of it difficult to imagine.

The Case for PalestineL An International Law Perspective.

 

[JStone]

Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz: A Palestinian State Must Be Rejected

The United Nations is being asked to grant the Palestinians the status of a "state," for at least some purposes. The question arises what kind of a state will it be? In an effort to attract Western support, the Palestinian Authority claims that it will become another "secular democratic state." Hamas, which won the last parliamentary election, disagrees. It wants Palestine to be a Muslim state governed by Sharia Law.

We know what the Palestinian leadership is saying to the West. Now let's look at what its saying to its own people, who will, after all, be the ultimate decision makers if Palestine is indeed a democracy.

The draft constitution for the new state of Palestine declares that "Islam is the official religion in Palestine." It also states that Sharia Law will be "the major source of legislation." It is ironic that the same Palestinian leadership which supports these concepts for Palestine refuses to acknowledge that Israel is the nation state of the Jewish people. Israel, in contrast to the proposed Palestinian state, does not have an official state religion. Although it is a Jewish state, that description is not a religious one but rather a national one. It accords equal rights to Islam, Christianity and all other religions, as well as to atheists and agnostics. Indeed, a very high proportion of Israelis describe themselves as secular.

The new Palestinian state would prohibit any Jews from being citizens, from owning land or from even living in the Muslim state of Palestine. The Ambassador of the PLO to the United States was asked during an interview whether "any Jew who is inside the borders of Palestine will have to leave?" His answer: "Absolutely"! After much criticism, the Ambassador tried to spin his statement, saying that it applied only to Jews "who are amid the occupation." Whatever that means, one thing is clear: large numbers of Jews will not be welcome to remain in Islamic Palestine as equal citizens. In contrast, Israel has more than 1 million Arab citizens, most of whom are Muslims. They are equal under the law, except that they need not serve in the Israeli army.

The new Palestine will have the very "law of return" that it demands that Israel should give up. All Palestinians, no matter where they live and regardless of whether they have ever set foot in Palestine, will be welcome to the new state, while a Jew whose family has lived in Hebron for thousands of years will be excluded.

To summarize, the new Palestinian state will be a genuine apartheid state. It will practice religious and ethnic discrimination, it will have one official religion and it will base its laws on the precepts of one religion. Imagine what the status of gays will be under Sharia

Push for Palestinian state at UN must be rejected: It will hurt Arabs and Jews alike - New York Daily News

 

[P F Tinmore]

Dershoputz

 

[JStone]

Dershoputzl::ll::lo:

What are your credentials? You aren't able to even achieve 1 rep point on a message board.

PROFESSOR ALAN M. DERSHOWITZ of Harvard Law School has been described by Newsweek as "the nation's most peripatetic civil liberties lawyer and one of its most distinguished defenders of individual rights." The Italian newspaper Oggi reported that he is "the best-known criminal lawyer in the world," and his law practice has been called "the most fascinating on the planet." Time magazine, in addition to including him in the cover story on the "50 Faces for the Future," called him a "legal star" and "the top lawyer of last resort in the country—a sort of judicial St. Jude." Business Week described him as "a feisty civil libertarian and one of the nation's most prominent legal educators," ABC commentator Jeffrey Toobin characterized him as "a national treasure," and Floyd Abrams, the great First Amendment lawyer, called him "an international treasure." His students have praised him as "the master of the hypothetical—answer one correctly, and he's got one in his arsenal that's guaranteed to tie your tongue in knots." He has been profiled by every major magazine ranging from Life ("iconoclast and self-appointed scourge of the criminal justice system") to Esquire ("the country's most articulate and uncompromising protector of criminal defendants") to Fortune (an "impassioned civil libertarian" who has "put up the best defense for a Dickensian lineup of suspects") to People ("defense attorney extraordinaire") to New York Magazine ("one of the country's foremost appellate lawyers") to TV Guide (one of "America's top attorneys"). He has been included on lists of America's most influential and successful lawyers as well as of influential Jews. The Forward called him, “America’s most public Jewish defender” and “Israel’s single most visible defender – the Jewish state’s lead attorney in the court of public opinion.”

Dershowitz, who has been characterized as a "public intellectual par excellence," has been a pioneer in making the legal profession accessible to the general public. He was the first law professor to write regularly for the New York Times in its Week in Review, op-ed and Book Review sections. He was also the first to appear regularly on Nightline, The McNeil-Lehrer NewsHour, Firing Line, Larry King Live, Today, and Geraldo Rivera. Rivera has called him "eyond a doubt… the smartest lawyer I know." Buckley has described him as a "deeply thoughtful man," "a master of the law," and "a masterful advocate."

Dershowitz is the author of 27 non-fiction works and two novels. His writing has been praised by Truman Capote, Saul Bellow, William Styron, David Mamet, Aharon Appelfeld, A.B. Yehoshua, Elie Wiesel, Richard North Patterson, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. More than a million of his books have been sold worldwide.

Dershowitz has been interviewed by most major television and radio shows. He has been featured on the covers of several magazines, including The American Bar Association Journal, New York Magazine, The Jerusalem Report, California Lawyer and Newsday. He has also been interviewed by numerous American magazines and newspapers such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, U.S News & World Report, Playboy, and Boston Magazine, as well as by the foreign news media throughout the world. He is regularly invited to write commentaries for the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, and other newspapers. He has also published hundreds of articles in magazines and journals. He has written more than 1,000 op-ed articles. His essay "Shouting Fire" was selected for inclusion in The Best American Essays of 1990 and has been reprinted dozens of times, as has been an earlier essay entitled "Psychiatry in the Legal Process: A Knife that Cuts Both Ways." For two years, he hosted a radio talk show about the law, for which he received the 1996 Freedom of Speech Award from the National Association of Radio Talk Show Hosts.

Dershowitz's writings have been translated into French, German, Hebrew, Japanese, Thai, Chinese, Korean, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, Danish, Dutch, Russian and other languages.

He has also published more than 100 articles in magazines and journals such as The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post. The Wall Street Journal, The New Republic, The Nation, Commentary, Saturday Review, The Harvard Law Review and the Yale Law Journal, and more than 300 of his articles have appeared in syndication in 50 national daily newspapers. Professor Dershowitz is the author of 27 fiction and non-fiction works with a worldwide audience. His most recent titles include Rights From Wrong, The Case For Israel, The Case For Peace, Blasphemy: How the Religious Right is Hijacking the Declaration of Independence, Preemption: A Knife that Cuts Both Ways, Finding Jefferson – A Lost Letter, A Remarkable Discovery, and The First Amendment In An Age of Terrorism, and The Case For Moral Clarity: Israel, Hamas and Gaza.

Dershowitz has been called the "winningest appellate criminal defense lawyer in history." Over the course of his 35-year career as a lawyer, Dershowitz has won more than 100 cases—a remarkable record for a part-time litigator who handles primarily criminal appeals, which generally have a very low rate of reversal. Dershowitz takes half of his cases on a pro bono basis and continues to represent numerous indigent defendants and causes. In a series of recent moot courts, he has defended Jesus (hung jury), Abraham (acquitted) and Hamen (convicted but sentence commuted to life imprisonment). In the summer of 2003, he participated in a highly praised televised mock trial of Pete Rose on ESPN. He has been a consultant to several presidential commissions and has testified before congressional committees on numerous occasions, including as a witness against President Clinton's impeachment. He has advised presidents, United Nations officials, prime ministers, governors, senators, and members of Congress as well as business leaders about legal and political issues. He has also represented and consulted with major media companies on free-speech issues. He helped obtain the largest fee in history for lawyers against the cigarette industry.

The New York Criminal Bar Association honored Dershowitz for his "outstanding contribution as a scholar and dedicated defender of human rights." The Lawyers' Club of San Francisco has honored him as a "Legend of the Law," and the Atlanta Bar Association included him in the category of legal "superstar." NBC selected Dershowitz as a participant on the American team to debate a trio of Soviet representatives on a nationally televised confrontation, and after the debate, William Buckley proposed the American team for Medals of Freedom.

At Yale Law School, Dershowitz graduated first in his class and served as editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal. After clerking for Chief Judge David Bazelon and Justice Arthur Goldberg, he was appointed to the Harvard Law School faculty at age 25 and became a full professor at age 28, the youngest in the school's history. Since that time, he has taught courses in criminal law, psychiatry and law, constitutional litigation, civil liberties and violence, comparative criminal law, legal ethics, human rights, the Bible and justice, great trials, neurobiology and the law, and a collaborative philosophy course called "Thinking About Thinking."

Dershowitz has lectured throughout the country and around the world to more than a million people - from Carnegie Hall to the Kremlin. In 1979 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for his work in human rights. In 1981 he was invited to China as a guest of the government to lecture and consult on their criminal code. He returned in 2001 to lecture to lawyers and law students. In 1987 he was named the John F. Kennedy-Fulbright Lecturer and toured New Zealand University lecturing about the Bill of Rights. In 1988 he served as Visiting Professor of Law at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and lectured in Israel on civil liberties during times of crisis. In 1990 he was invited to Moscow to lecture on human rights, and the following year was selected as a Father of the Year and a recipient of the Golden Plate Award. At Harvard, he is currently the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law, a chair established in honor of the great justice's work in constitutional law. Dershowitz has been awarded honorary degrees and medals by Yeshiva University, Syracuse University, Hebrew Union College, the University of Haifa, Monmouth College, Fitchburg College and Brooklyn College. He has been active in the American Civil Liberties Union, and the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith.

 

[P F Tinmore]

I used to really like Dershowitz but he has gone to crap in his old age.

 

[docmauser1]

The fact that international legitimacy overwhelmingly supports the Palestinian rather than the Israeli case makes any application or enforcement of it difficult to imagine.

Ah! The usual suspect, Antony T. Sullivan and his bullshiteria. In words of Nawab Agha and Salim Mansur, describing him, "Antony T. Sullivan was a supporter of Sami Al-Arian (Palestinian Islamic Jihad) and is an inveterate apologist for radical Islam as a Middle East studies specialist.", and his shop "The Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy (CSID) is a Washington-based think tank that professes to support moderate Islam, with a target audience primarily in the U.S. Government. ... Put simply, CSID is a front for some of the most obnoxious members of the "Wahhabi lobby" in America."

 

[docmauser1]

The fact that international legitimacy overwhelmingly supports the Palestinian rather than the Israeli case makes any application or enforcement of it difficult to imagine.

Ah! The usual suspect, Antony T. Sullivan and his bullshiteria. In words of Nawab Agha and Salim Mansur, describing him, "Antony T. Sullivan was a supporter of Sami Al-Arian (Palestinian Islamic Jihad) and is an inveterate apologist for radical Islam as a Middle East studies specialist.", and his shop "The Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy (CSID) is a Washington-based think tank that professes to support moderate Islam, with a target audience primarily in the U.S. Government. ... Put simply, CSID is a front for some of the most obnoxious members of the "Wahhabi lobby" in America."

 

[JStone]

Since the Romans created "Palestina," let's send the so-called Palestinians to Italy. They are Italian, right?

 

[JStone]

Can anyone name the capital of the "nation" of "Palestine" No? Prolly, because there has never been a nation of Palestine.

Amir Taheri: Palestine Is Not A Nation http://www.asharq-e.com/news.asp?section=2&id=26840

A recent creation, the modern state is the political expression of a nation’s existence. One must first have a nation and then look for a state to express its existence. Is Palestine a nation, in the modern sense of the term as described by Herder at the end of the 18th century? You might be surprised, even angered, by this question. However, none of the dozens of political parties that have claimed to represent the Palestinians in the past seven decades ever described itself as national. Words such as “nation” and “national” do not feature in the designation of such movements as Al Fatah and Hamas. Instead, they, and many other smaller ones, use adjectives such as “Islamic” or “people’s”. The subtext is that the Palestinians are, at most, “a people” but not a nation. They are regarded as part either of a larger, and mythical, Arab “nation” or an even more problematic Islamic Ummah.

Wedded to leftist or Islamist ideologies, Palestinian political formations systematically rejected the concept of the nation, the backbone of modern statehood.The contrast with modern national liberation movements throughout the world is telling. For all of them the word “nation” is the key to their identity. Thus, we have the African National Congress in South Africa, and the National Liberation Front (FLN) in Algeria. Even Communist-dominated Vietcong described itself as a National Liberation Front.

Islamist or leftist, Palestinian political movements treat Palestine as a “cause” rather than a political project. But what is that “cause”? This was clearly put by Hamas leader Khalid Mishal in a speech in Tehran on 3 October. “Our aim,” he said, “is liberating all of Palestine from the River to the Sea.” In other words, the cause is not to give Palestinians a state but to destroy Israel. Ramadan Abdallah Shallah, leader of the Islamic Jihad for Palestine was even more explicit. “When we come to power we shall not allow the Zionist regime to live a single moment,” he said in Tehran.

According to the daily Kayhan of 4 October, both men paid tribute to “Supreme Guide” Ali Khamenei as the man who should have the final word on Palestine. Mishal said: “The esteemed Commander of the Islamic Revolution, Imam Khamenei, is our Guide and Leader. His wishes will be the cause of the Palestinians. Our sovereign and master is Khamenei.”

This, of course, is not the first time that Palestinian leaders have auctioned “the cause”. There was a time when Abdel Nasser was bootlicked as “guide and master”. In 1991, Yasser Arafat sold “the cause” to Saddam Hussein. A few years later in Oslo, he re-sold it to Shimon Peres. In his speech, Khamenei promised that, once Israel is destroyed, he would organize a referendum in which Palestinians from all over the world and some citizens of Israel would decide what to do with “liberated Palestine”. Mischievous tongues in Tehran say that one option could be to attach “liberated Palestine” to Khamenei’s “imamate” empire. This is not fanciful. After all, Nasser, too, had hoped to annex “liberated Palestine” for his Arab Republic. Saddam Hussein had dreams of turning Palestine into Iraq’s “counter on the Mediterranean”, a scheme that would have also required the destruction of Jordan as an independent country. Hafez al-Assad fancied Palestine as part of “Greater Syria”.

Mishal and Shallah’s flattery towards Khamenei implies that there is no Palestinian “nation”. A sovereign nation would not demand that the leader of a foreign country decide its future. The quest for a Palestinian state starts with the Palestinians themselves. They must decide whether they are a modern nation or a fragment of larger entities beyond their control....As a member of the United Nations, a state cannot adopt the destruction of another UN member as its “cause.”

Palestine must choose what it wants to be a “cause” or a state.