UN remembers the Holocaust as it abandons the Jewish People
The United Nations (UN) ceremony to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day was held on 27 January – as the UN was simultaneously continuing its incessant assault on the Jewish People that is once again giving rise to increasing Jew-hatred worldwide.
UN-sponsored Jew-hatred began with the establishment of The Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People under resolution 3376 (XXX) and the scurrilous “Zionism is racism” Resolution 3379 (XXX) – both passed by the General Assembly on 10 November 1975.
The following 47 years have seen three totally-fabricated statements formulated and repeatedly propagated by the UN and some of its various agencies:
- Jews have no right to live in Judea and Samaria (West Bank) and East Jerusalem
- Jews living there are doing so illegally in flagrant violation of international law
- Jews are the major obstacle to peace
Secretary-General of the UN – Antonio Guterres – enunciated these false statements demonizing the Jewish People as recently as 15 December 2021:
“I call on Israel to put a stop to all settlement activities immediately. Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, have no legal validity and constitute a flagrant violation of international law and United Nations resolutions. They undermine the prospect of achieving a two-State solution by systematically eroding the possibility of establishing a contiguous, independent, sovereign and viable Palestinian State”
Guterres was pushing his master’s odious three-point narrative – when he should have been forcefully rejecting it for the following reasons:
- Jews have the inalienable right to live in these specifically-designated areas of former Palestine for the purpose of reconstituting the Jewish National Home (“Inalienable Right) – legally conferred on them by article 6 and article 25 of the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine and preserved by article 80 of the UN Charter.
- Israel’s first Prime Minister – David Ben-Gurion – then the Representative of the Jewish Agency – emphasised the importance of the insertion of Article 80 into the UN Charter in evidence before the UN Special Committee for Palestine at Lake Success, New York on 7 July 1947:
- … there is also Article 80, and Article 80 was adopted for this very special reason of Palestine. Article 80 speaks also about trusteeship agreements: “… until such agreements have been concluded . . . “ and they are not yet concluded, and we do not offer to conclude a trusteeship agreement “nothing in this Chapter shall be construed in or of itself to alter in any manner the rights whatsoever of any states or any peoples or the terms of existing international instruments to which Members of the United Nations may respectively be parties.” This is the special Article of the Charter which applies to Palestine. It was introduced only because of Palestine.”
- Article 80 preserves the Jews Inalienable Right notwithstanding the demise of the League of Nations on 19 April 1946 and remains as alive and exercisable today as it was when unanimously adopted by all 51 Member States of the League of Nations on 24 July 1922 – (see letter following)
To the Editor:
In a recent news analysis, ”The West Bank and the Emperor’s Clothes,” Bernard Gwertzman accurately portrays the mindset of the officials who condescendingly dismiss President Reagan’s statement that Israeli settlements in the West Bank are ”not illegal.” But these officials and not the President are wearing the Emperor’s gossamer suit.
Israel has an unassailable legal right to establish settlements in the West Bank. The West Bank is part of the British Mandate in Palestine which included Israel and Jordan as well as certain other territories not yet generally recognized as belonging to either country. While Jewish settlement east of the Jordan River was suspended in 1922, such settlements remained legal in the West Bank.
All rights vesting under mandates were preserved by Article 80 of the United Nations Charter. And they survived the end of British administration in Palestine as a ”sacred trust” – exactly the legal posture for Namibia after South Africa ceased to be the mandatory power. Recognizing the legal force of these facts, those who are seeking to sabotage the President’s position fall back on a provision of the Geneva Convention of 1949 forbidding occupying powers to transfer their own populations to occupied territories. This article of the Convention was a reaction to Nazi policy in Czechoslovakia after the invasion of 1938. But Israel is not in the West Bank only as an occupying power, because the West Bank has never been widely recognized as Jordanian. Israel’s claims to the territory are at least as good as those of Jordan, since Jordan held the territory for 19 years after a war of aggression, whereas Israel took the area in the course of a war of self-defense, so far as Jordan was concerned. As a matter of convenience, Israel applies the Geneva Convention generally in its administration of the West Bank, but does not admit it is legally obliged to do so. Jordan is not the reversioner in the West Bank and therefore the protective provisions of the Geneva Convention do not apply. Whether Israel’s right to settle the West Bank should be exercised at a particular time is thus a matter of prudence, not of law. It is conventional wisdom that such settlements are an obstacle to peace. But the absence of such settlements between 1948 and 1967 did not encourage Jordan to make peace. The thesis, often mechanically repeated by our Government spokesmen, does not do justice to the principles of the Arab position: that the Balfour Declaration, the Mandate, and all that flowed from them were beyond the powers of the victorious Allies of 1914-18, the League, and the United Nations, and that the existence of Israel is itself an aggression against the Arab nation. Perhaps the realization that their continuing refusal to make peace with Israel is bound to have territorial consequences will help to persuade the Arabs that 35 years of intransigence is enough.
EUGENE V. ROSTOW, New Haven, Conn., Sept. 2, 1983
A version of this article appears in print on Sept. 19, 1983, Section A, Page 18 of the National edition with the headline: ISRAEL’S SETTLEMENT RIGHT IS ‘UNASSAILABLE’.
New York Times – 19 September 1983
Eugene Rostow was Dean of Yale Law School and served as Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs under President Lyndon B. Johnson
The following headline appearing over a statement issued on 27 January by UN News – the official UN media outlet – indicates the lengths the UN will go to bury Article 80:
“The Holocaust “defined the United Nations”, Secretary-General António Guterres told a virtual ceremony marking Holocaust Remembrance Day on Thursday, recalling that the UN Charter was drafted in San Francisco “as the Dachau concentration camp was liberated”.
The Charter defined the UN as giving it the responsibility under Article 80 to ensure the rights of the Jewish People created by the Mandate were preserved.
Excluding any mention of Article 80 contained in that Charter and the reasons for its inclusion continues to be the fuel that enables the UN to falsely condemn 600000 Jews for illegally living in areas where they are legally entitled to do so and from where all Jews were driven out and expelled between 1948 and 1967.
Abandoning the Jewish People by failing to recognise its vested rights under the Mandate for Palestine and the UN Charter brands the United Nations as the world centre for disseminating and inciting Jew-hatred. 193 Member States need to evaluate their continuing membership.
“Never again” is threatening to become “Yet again” – whilst the UN continues to act in flagrant violation of article 80 of its own Charter.
Author’s note: The cartoon — commissioned exclusively for this article — is by Yaakov Kirschen aka “Dry Bones”- one of Israel’s foremost political and social commentators — whose cartoons have graced the columns of Israeli and international media publications for decades.
And some Jews, such as “The New Israel Fund”, disseminate the hateful anti_Zionist, and therefore antisemitic propaganda about “occupied” and “illegal” and “Palestinian” territories, thus encouraging BDS and other assorted antisemites.
And they have the brazenness to pose( tragi-comically)as the virtuous humanitarians.
What priceless material for cartoonists!
Jewish organisations like the New Israel Fund and J Street that are ready to join ranks with the UN and assert that Jews do not have the legal right to live in Judea and Samaria as conferred on them by the Mandate for Palestine and article 80 of the UN Charter are contributing to the increasing rise of Jew-hatred world wide. That they fail to understand the enormity of their active participation in the vilification and demonization of Israel and the Jewish People being conducted by the UN is outrageous. We are a diverse people but forfeiting rights granted to us by the international community is the height of folly and stupidity.
David Singer’s wonderful scholarship is a joy to read, referenced and dispassionate.
Long may it continue.
Thank you David. Your comment is much appreciated.