http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/132430#replies
Israel National News
by Gil Ronen
As two Israeli missile-class warships joined a navy submarine in the Red Sea, an Israeli defense source made it clear that the moves are intended as a threatening message to Iran.
“This is preparation that should be taken seriously,” the unnamed source told the London Times. “Israel is investing time in preparing itself for the complexity of an attack on Iran.”
“These maneuvers are a message to Iran that Israel will follow up on its threats,” he emphasized.
The exercises “come at a time when Western diplomats are offering support for an Israeli strike on Iran in return for Israeli concessions on the formation of a Palestinian state,” the Times said. It quoted an nanonymous British official as saying that if the deal completed, it would make an Israeli strike on Iran realistic “within the year.”
Diplomats said that Israel had offered concessions “on settlement policy, Palestinian land claims and issues with neighboring Arab states, to facilitate a possible strike on Iran. “ A senior European diplomat, also unnamed, said that “Israel has chosen to place the Iranian threat over its settlements.”
Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit said in a news conference Wednesday that the ships passed through the canal with Egypt’s permission, and that “ships may pass through the canal as long as they do not threaten the country which controls the canal.” He noted that the international agreements regulating which ships may pass through the Suez Canal date back to 1888.
The two Saar-class ships, INS Eilat and INS Chanit, sailed into the Red Sea Wednesday in what was the report described as “a clear signal that Israel was able to put its strike force within range of Iran at short notice.”
Ten days earlier, a Dolphin-class submarine with nuclear-missile strike capabilities passed through the Suez Canal into the Red Sea as well. Later reports said it, too, was accompanied by two Israeli missile boats – meaning that four missile boats have now crossed the canal. Israel has six Dolphin-class submarines, three of which are believed to carry nuclear missiles, the Times said.
Later this month, the Israel Air Force will hold long-range exercises in the U.S. and will test a missile defense shield at a U.S. missile range in the Pacific Ocean.
While local Israeli media have played up alleged tensions between Egypt and Israel over past statements by Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, the Times report says that Israel “has strengthened ties with Arab nations who also fear a nuclear-armed Iran” and quotes an Israeli diplomat who said that relations with Egypt, in particular, have grown increasingly strong this year over the “shared mutual distrust of Iran.”
The report estimates that Israel’s missile-equipped submarines and its fleet of advanced aircraft could simultaneously strike at more than a dozen nuclear-related targets in Iran.
The Arrow interceptor system that will be tested in the Pacific is designed to defend Israel from ballistic missile attacks by Iran and Syria. According to Lt.-Gen. Patrick O’Reilly, Director of the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency, this month’s test will be against a target with a range of more than 1,000km. This range is too long for testing in the eastern Mediterranean, where Israel held its previous tests of the Arrow.
The Israeli Air Force, meanwhile, will send F16C fighter jets to participate in exercises at Nellis Air Force base in Nevada later this month, and Israeli C130 Hercules transport aircraft will participate in the Rodeo 2009 competition at the McChord Air Force base in Washington.
“It is not by chance that Israel is drilling long-range maneuvers in a public way. This is not a secret operation. This is something that has been published and which will showcase Israel’s abilities,” an Israeli defense official said.
Israeli settlements are more than legitimate by Rozenman
December 12, 2009 in Commentaries | Tags: Israel, legitament, Middle East, settlements, west bank | Comments closed
By Eric Rozenman December 11, 2009
President Obama asserts, seconded by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, that “America does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements” in the West Bank. Both have praised the 10-month freeze on new residential building — excluding eastern Jerusalem — that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced late last month.
Netanyahu now calls for Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to resume negotiations or take the blame for lack of progress when the “one-time-only” freeze expires. Abbas’ precondition — adopted after Washington’s pronouncements — is that all Israeli construction, including in eastern Jerusalem, must cease permanently.
Too bad international diplomacy doesn’t have a replay button. If it did, the parties could look back at history, which would show that Israeli settlements not only are legitimate under international law but positively encouraged.
The basic relevant provision, the League of Nations’ 1922 British Mandate for Palestine, Article 6, encourages “close settlement by Jews on the land, including state lands and waste lands not required for public use.” Most Israeli settlements in the West Bank have been built on land that was state land under the Ottomans, British, Jordanians and, after the 1967 Six-Day War, under the Israelis, or on property that has been privately purchased.
The United States endorsed Article 6 by signing the 1924 Anglo-American Convention, a treaty stipulating acceptance of the mandate. The League of Nations is long gone, but Article 6 remains in force. The United Nations’ 1945 Charter, Article 80 — sometimes known as “the Palestine article” — notes among other things that “nothing in the charter shall be construed to alter in any manner the rights whatsoever of any states or peoples or the terms of existing international instruments.”
Eugene Rostow, U.S. undersecretary of State for President Lyndon Johnson — who is an authority on international law and the coauthor of U.N. Security Council Resolution 242, which outlines requirements for Arab-Israeli peace — reaffirmed this principle. In 1990, he said: “The Jewish right of settlement in the West Bank is conferred by the same provisions of the mandate under which Jews settled in Haifa, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem before the state of Israel was created.”
As for Resolution 242’s call for “secure and recognized boundaries,” according to Rostow in 1991 in another piece, a careful look at the wrangling over the resolution in 1967 makes it clear that it did not mandate Israeli withdrawal from all of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Golan Heights and Sinai peninsula to the post-1948 armistice lines.
Many who allege that Jewish communities in the West Bank violate international law cite the 4th Geneva Convention, Article 49. It states that an occupying power “shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.” But Julius Stone, like Rostow a leading legal theorist, wrote in his 1981 book, “Israel and Palestine: An Assault on the Law of Nations,” that the effort to designate Israeli settlements as illegal was a “subversion . . . of basic international law principles.”
Stone, Stephen Schwebel, a former judge on the International Court of Justice, and others have distinguished between territory acquired in an “aggressive conquest” (such as Nazi Germany’s seizures during World War II) and territory taken in self-defense (such as Israeli conquests in 1967).
The distinction is especially sharp when the territory acquired had been held illegally, as Jordan had held the West Bank, which it seized during the Arab states’ 1948-49 war against Israel.
Further, Article 49 of the 4th Geneva Convention was intended to outlaw the Nazi practice of forcibly transporting populations into or out of occupied territories to labor or death camps. Israelis were not forcibly transferred to the West Bank, nor were Palestinian Arabs forced out of it. Two years after President Carter’s State Department determined that Israeli settlements violated international law, President Reagan said flatly that they were “not illegal.”
One can argue, as Reagan did and Obama does, that Israel’s establishing towns in the disputed territories after 1967 obstructs diplomacy, or, as some Israeli critics do, that building Jewish communities near Palestinian Arab population centers disperses the country’s Jewish majority too widely. But one cannot accurately declare the settlements illegal.
Eric Rozenman is Washington director of CAMERA, the Boston-based Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America.
Copyright © 2009, The Los Angeles Times