british foreign office pulling laws out of a magic hat
Post on 03-Apr-2018
213 Views
Preview:
TRANSCRIPT
-
7/29/2019 British Foreign Office Pulling Laws Out of a Magic Hat
1/5
Nisan 4, 5772, 3/27/2012
isan 4, 5772, 3/27/2012
British Foreign Office-Pulling Laws Out of a Magic Hat
Im posting this letter (with permission), written by attorney Howard Grief to the British Ambassador
to Israel for having given the typical British claim that Israel is occupying Arab land, without having
any valid law to back up their claim.
Needless to say, the Ambassador allegedly gave the same broken record response, which has no
connection to proving Israel is occupying any land other than being the sovereign rulers of the land
belonging to the Jewish National Home.
Howard founded our organization, the Office for Israeli Constitutional Law and is probably the worlds
greatest expert on Jewish rights to the Land of Israel under International Law.Mr. Grief has researched the subject for more than a quarter of a century and is the Author ofThe
Legal Foundations and Borders of Israel Under International Law (Jerusalem: Mazo Publishers,
2008).
Part I is Howards letter to the Ambassador and a separate letter to a representative of the BritishForeign Office. I know it is a bit long, but the information is important. The second part weill be
posted next time:
H.M. Ambassador Matthew Gould
British Embassy,192 Hayarkon Street,
63405 Tel-Aviv.
Dear Ambassador Gould,
You may recall that, at a meeting that took place this year on March 8, 2011 at the Jewish Agency
Building in Jerusalem, sponsored by the group Europeans for Israel and chaired by Leah Zinder, I
asked you the following question:
Upon what document of international law does Foreign Secretary William Hague rely
when he asserts thatJewish settlementsin Judea and Samaria are illegal underinternational law?
The stock answer you gave me, which I was fully expecting, was that Jewishsettlements were a
violation of Article 49, paragraph 6 of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, which states that theOccupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it
occupies. The only problem with your answer is that Judea and Samaria are not, nor were they ever
in a legal sense Israel occupied territories, but rather are and have always been integral parts of theJewish National Home that was internationally recognized explicitly in 1920, 1922 and in 1924, and
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Blogs/Message.aspx/4947http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Blogs/Message.aspx/4947#http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Blogs/Message.aspx/4947#http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Blogs/Message.aspx/4947#http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Blogs/Message.aspx/4947#http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Blogs/Message.aspx/4947http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Blogs/Message.aspx/4947#http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Blogs/Message.aspx/4947# -
7/29/2019 British Foreign Office Pulling Laws Out of a Magic Hat
2/5
therefore Article 49 is inapplicable to the situation.
In the moderators desire to move on to other questioners, I was not given the chance to rebut your
incorrect explanation and moreover, I was surprised that no one in the audience you addressed saw fit
to challenge you on youranswer.
After your address, I spoke to you briefly and gave you a copy of my book, The Legal Foundation andBorders of Israel under International Law, with the hope that you might take the time to read it and
perhaps disabuse yourself of the false notion that Israel is an Occupying Power of the various regions
of the Jewish National Home.
I have written extensively on the question of what constitutes occupied territories under internationallaw, and you are free to consult these writings if you care to download my articles from the internet.
Recently, I have dealt with this same question again in a letter I wrote to Mr. David Lee of London
(Kingston-upon-Thames), Surrey, England to rebut the oft-stated remarks by Foreign Secretary William
Hague that Israel illegally occupies Arab lands. A copy of this letter, dated November 1, 2011, isherewith enclosed so that you may better appreciate the legal and historical truth that Judea and
Samaria are not Arab territories that are under occupation in violation of international law.
I also enclose my article on the meaning of Article 80 of the United Nations Charter which impactsdirectly on the question of the legality of Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria, and renders themperfectly legal under international law.
Finally, I enclose a letter I wrote on the subject of Israels legal rights to Judea and Samaria (and Gaza),
which I sent to Mr. Ilkka Uusitalo of the European External Action Service whose jurisdiction includes
the Middle East.
Mr. Ambassador, just as I advised Mr. Barry Griffiths who is on the staff of the British Foreign Office, Irecommend that you look deeper into the subject before stating that Judea and Samaria are occupied
territories. You owe it to yourself as a Jewish representative of Her Majestys Government in Israel to
be aware of the true historical and legal facts. Of course, the Foreign Secretary is authorized todetermine policy, but one would expect it to be in concert with valid international law, and not based on
prevarication and falsification that echoes Arab pretensions.
Yours sincerely,
Howard Grief
___________________________________________________________________________________Jerusalem
4 Marheshvan 5772
November 1, 2011
Mr. David Lee
Dear David,
Thanks for forwarding me the letter you received from Mr. Barry Griffiths of the Near East Group,
who responded to your earlier letter to the British Foreign Secretary William Hague about the lattersidiotic remark that Israel is illegally occupying Arab lands, upon which false assumption Mr.
Griffiths bases his entire letter to you. The Griffiths letter is replete with misleading statements and
nonsensical interpretations of the actual meaning of UN resolutions on the Question of Palestine and
the Land of Israel. I can only deal here with some of the points he raised in his letter that, however,unfortunately represents official long-standing British thinking.
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Blogs/Message.aspx/4947#http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Blogs/Message.aspx/4947# -
7/29/2019 British Foreign Office Pulling Laws Out of a Magic Hat
3/5
Griffiths asserts that the Mandate for Palestine, which he incorrectly terms the Palestinian Mandate,
was awardedby the League of Nations to Britain. This statement reveals that Griffiths never read the
minutes of the San Remo Peace Conference for April 24 and April 25, 1920, nor the final text of the
San Remo Resolution of April 25, 1920, that resulted from that Conference, otherwise he would knowthat the League of Nations did not do what he says it did. It was the Supreme Council of the Principal
Allied Powers that conferred or entrusted the Mandate for Palestine to Great Britain in order to create
the political, administrative and economic conditions in the country to secure the establishment of theJewish National Home and future independent Jewish State, as set out in Article 2 of the Mandate. The
League, which had just come into existence only three months earlier upon the ratification of the Treaty
of Versailles on January 10, 1920 and had barely begun to operate, had no role whatsoever in eitherconferring the Mandate upon Britain or in selecting Britain as the Mandatory Power. Before he
attributes unfounded powers to that body, Mr. Griffiths can verify this important point by simply
reading the Preamble to the Mandate for Palestine, particularly Recitals One and Four. He would alsodo well to read Lord Balfours statement on the subject of Mandates and the exact role played by the
League in regard to them:
The Mandates are neither made by the League nor can they in substance be altered by
the League a Mandate is imposed by the Allied and Associated Powers themselves
in the interests of what they conceived to be the general welfare of mankind; and theyhave asked the League of Nations to assist them in seeing that this policy should be
carried into effect. But the League of Nations is not the author of the policy but its
instrument (Charles H. Levermore, Third Book of the League of Nations, p. 137; citedon p. 47 of the bookBritish Rule in Palestine by Bernard Joseph, published by Public
Affairs Press, Washington DC, 1948).
Griffiths makes the astounding statement that the Balfour Declaration ceased to have legal effectwhen the UK discharged its Mandate. Britain never executed the Mandate for Palestine in accordance
with the original purpose noted above. In truth, the Balfour Declaration, as a British policy statement in
1917 that Prime Minister David Lloyd George described as a bargain or contract between WorldJewry and Britain, was converted into a document of binding and irreversible international law by theadoption of the San Remo Resolution by the Supreme Council of the Principal Allied Powers on April
25, 1920, that subsequently became Articles 94 to 97 inclusively plus Article 132 of the Treaty of
Svres. This Resolution, insofar as Palestine was concerned, was then incorporated into the first threerecitals of the Preamble of the Mandate for Palestine, subsequently approved by all 52 members of the
League in 1922 and separately by the United States. The San Remo Resolution is the founding
document not only for the State of Israel under international law, but also for that of Iraq and Syria. Asstated in my previous letter to you, it continues in legal force today, mutatis mutandis, contrary to what
Griffiths asserts, and no action taken by the United Nations today or by Britain itself can nullify this
binding act of international law upon which the State of Israel draws its legal existence. If it were
otherwise, the states of Israel, Syria and Iraq would have no legal right to exist under international law,and the Ottoman Empire would not have been disbanded. For Mr. Griffiths information, the San Remo
Resolution means that allof Palestine is Jewish land, not Arab land, and that any partition of this land
is perforce illegal and null and void. For his further edification, I would advise him to read Chapter Oneof my book, The Legal Foundation and Borders of Israel under International Law, that discusses in
detail the juridical significance and import of the San Remo Peace Conference and the San Remo
Resolution on Palestine, as well as Chapter Four on the Meaning of the Balfour Declaration. He maythen learn to his dismay about the existence of Jewish legal rights to allof Palestine and furthermore
that such information and knowledge is stored and found in the British diplomatic archives to which he
-
7/29/2019 British Foreign Office Pulling Laws Out of a Magic Hat
4/5
presumably has access. As a Foreign Office staffer, he certainly has a duty to be cognizant of what the
British archives reveal on the Question of Palestine as it emerged in the early period before Britain
adopted a different direction beginning with the ascension of Winston Churchill to the Colonial Office
on February 14, 1921 and the convening of the Cairo Conference in mid-March 1921.
Griffiths then cites UN Security Council Resolution 242 regarding the inadmissibility of the
acquisition of territory by war, a sound principle of law which, however, does not apply at all to
Israels liberation or repossession in June, 1967 of territory that constitutes the Jewish National Home.What Griffiths fails to understand is that Israel never acquired title to Judea, Samaria and Gaza by war,and it is therefore under no obligation to withdraw from those regions that the Allied Powers accorded
to or recognized as belonging to the Jewish People. As the devolee or assignee of the Jewish People,
the State of Israel has inherited all the legal rights derived from the San Remo Resolution and theMandate for Palestine that were vested in the Jewish People by the unanimous decision of the Supreme
Council of the Principal Allied Powers. As a direct result of this decision, Palestine, to use Griffiths
term, was awarded to World Jewry represented by the Zionist Organization to establish their NationalHome there with the full agreement of Britain, while the great bulk of former Ottoman territory in the
Middle East (over 90%) was set aside for the Arabs for their own national self-determination. In the
Six-Day War of June 1967, Israel was only recovering territories that were originally designated or
intended for the Jewish State by the Principal Allied Powers. The same situation obtained when Francerecovered Alsace-Lorraine in 1918 from Germany that had annexed the French territory in 1871 as a
result of the Franco-Prussian War in which France was soundly defeated. Would Griffiths have called
Alsace-Lorraine French-occupied Germany, as he does for Israels recovery of Jewish land in theSix-Day War, and would he say that it was inadmissible for France to re-acquire its former territory
by war?
Griffiths stands on very shaky ground when he claims that Judea and Samaria (misspelled by him as
Sumaria) are held by Israel in belligerent occupation, to which the Fourth Geneva Conventionapplies. It is only because Griffiths and the British Foreign Office he represents are so completely
ignorant of the significance of the San Remo Resolution and the provisions of the Mandate for
Palestine that he can with a straight face say that the territories liberated or repossessed by Israel in
1967 are under belligerent occupation. If Griffiths were right, that would mean that such territories, i.e.,Judea, Samaria and Gaza, had never been part of Mandated Palestine and the Jewish National Home.
He is also misleading regarding the position of the Israeli Supreme Court in this matter, which is more
complex than what he thinks. The Court has never decided on the merits or accepted as a provenargument that Judea and Samaria are occupied territories under international law, but merely adopted
the position of the Government of Israel, that it adjudicate all cases before it as if Judea and Samaria
were governed by the laws of war embodied in the Hague Regulations and Fourth Geneva Convention,without ruling on the actual legal status of these territories. In adopting this egregious policy based on
the erroneous legal advice of then Military Advocate-General Meir Shamgar, the Government of Israel
violated its own constitutional law and caused foreign states to believe that this indeed was the legal
status of those regions, even though, ironically enough, Shamgar himself, later President of theSupreme Court, issued a disclaimer stating that he did not consider these military administered
territories to be necessarily occupied territories. Despite his disclaimer, he did refer to them in that
incorrect sense in an article he wrote and then published in a book he himself edited (see MilitaryGovernment in the Territories Administered by Israel 1967-1980: The Legal Aspects, Hemed Press
[Jerusalem], Reprint Edition, 1988, pp. 13; 28; 31).
To call Judea, Samaria and Gaza the Occupied Palestinian Territories is not only an oxymoron but
also an abuse of the English language in the service of the imperialistic Arab cause, as well as anoutright denial or attempted erasure of the legal, political and diplomatic history of the Palestine
-
7/29/2019 British Foreign Office Pulling Laws Out of a Magic Hat
5/5
Question. For Griffiths, this history only begins in 1967, which is why he and Foreign Secretary
William Hague can duplicitously proclaim that Judea, Samaria and Gaza are or have been under
belligerent occupation ever since that year. There is no doubt that all of the State of Israel constitutes
Palestinian territory and that no part of former Mandated Palestine including Judea, Samaria andGaza, whether included or not in the borders of the State of Israel can be considered Israeli occupied
territories. If that were truly the case, such an appellation would make a mockery of the San Remo
Resolution and Mandate for Palestine since, as already noted, all of Palestine was meant to be includedin the Jewish State. The claim made by the British Foreign Office, especially in the wake of the illegal
and now-lapsed Oslo Accords, that Judea, Samaria and Gaza belong to a fictitious Palestinian
Nation that was invented circa 1969 by the Arab League with the assistance of the United Nations isa complete falsification of international law. If Mr. Griffiths and his superiors were more honest or did
more of their homework, both he and they would come to the same conclusion I have reached that
Judea, Samaria and Gaza are not and have never been Israeli occupied territories.
Britain, as the country most responsible for the adoption of the San Remo Resolution as a result ofwhich it received the Mandate for Palestine to create the Jewish State has slipped into amnesia in
regard to what it was committed to do but never did. Any facetious argument that an independent
Jewish State was not the intended goal of these basic documents is belied by the evidence in the British
archives and the statements made by the British and French leaders at the time of their formulation.When Foreign Secretary George Nathaniel Curzon called the San Remo Resolution the Magna Carta of
the Zionists in a letter addressed to Prime Minister Lloyd George dated October 29, 1920, he spoke the
absolute truth. In that letter, Curzon was certainly referring to all of the land of Palestine, includingundoubtedly Judea, Samaria and Gaza.
The British Foreign Office has a duty to review its own diplomatic archives and records during the
Balfour-Curzon period, to learn how Palestine came into being as the Jewish National Home before it
acts on the pro-Arab, anti-Zionist conception that Judea, Samaria and Gaza should become the 22ndArab state in the world. Moreover, it should bow its head in contrition for assenting to the artificial
claims of the so-called Palestinians to appropriate internationally recognized Jewish land for that
nefarious purpose and for turning its back on the noble cause of Zionism that it once so eagerlysupported when doing so suited the goals of the British Empire. No less a great British statesman as
David Lloyd George accused his own country, upon hearing of the 1939 White Paper, of committing
an act of national perfidy vis-a-vis the Jewish People for not keeping its plighted word to the Jews,who, he said, had honourably kept their part of the bargain to help the Allied cause in World War I (see
my book, The Legal Foundation and Borders of Israel under International Law, pp. 406-408). Mr.
Griffiths should reflect on Lloyd Georges condemnation of this British perfidy which continuesunabated even today.
David, you have my permission to send a copy of this letter to Mr. Griffiths and to Foreign Secretary
Hague, as well as the letter I wrote on the San Remo Resolution to the Prime Minister of Canada, Mr.
Stephen Harper, and my letter to Ilkka Uusitalo, as you see fit. Let us hope that they will not only read
these letters, but appreciate their significance.Best regards,
Howard
Tags:international law,William Hague,occupation ,Howard Grief,British Foreign
Office ,Ambassador Matthew Gould
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/Tag.aspx/703http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/Tag.aspx/703http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/Tag.aspx/4384http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/Tag.aspx/12388http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/Tag.aspx/12388http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/Tag.aspx/15065http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/Tag.aspx/15066http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/Tag.aspx/15066http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/Tag.aspx/15067http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/Tag.aspx/703http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/Tag.aspx/4384http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/Tag.aspx/12388http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/Tag.aspx/15065http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/Tag.aspx/15066http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/Tag.aspx/15066http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/Tag.aspx/15067
top related