Green-Lined: A Red Line to the Green Line

 The Jerusalem Post has reported on an upcoming court case that human rights group Yesh Din, which opposes Israel's continued presence in Judea and Samaria, claims that "Israel's practice of transferring 75 percent of the rock and gravel it mines in the West Bank into areas within the Green Line is illegal," and they hope that the High Court of Justice will issue a ruling that "Israel's mining activity constitutes blatant infringement of international humanitarian law and the laws of occupation, and may even constitute pillage and/or war crimes."
 
IDF spokesman Miki Galin has said that the approval procedures for quarries were in line with "the relevant directives of international law" and Israel's interim accords with the Palestinians, and legal representatives for the Council of Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip could not be reached for comment.

The attorneys representing Yesh Din, Sfard and Avisar Lev, have written in their petition that continued quarrying was "a practice reminiscent of occupation patterns in ancient times, [when]… the winner was entitled to plunder the occupied territory, enslave its economy and citizens for its own purposes, and transfer their treasures to his own land."
 
The framing of their petition is plain chutzpah.
 
As Howard Grief has shown, the rather foggy area of Israel's rights to and in Judea, Samaria and Gaza has always been a stepchild of our political establishment. In fact, essentially he has been forced to publish a book on the subject, in which he has set down the legal rights and title of sovereignty of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel and Palestine under international law. According to Grief, the whole of what the international world knew as "Palestine," on both sides of the Jordan, was reserved exclusively for the Jewish people as their national home and future independent state.
 
Grief further explains that it was the Smuts Resolution, endorsed by the Council of Ten on January 30, 1919, that had "Palestine," as envisaged in the Balfour Declaration, named as one of the mandated states to be created. Grief asserts that the official creation of the country took place at the San Remo Peace Conference where the Balfour Declaration was adopted by the Supreme Council of the Principal Allied Powers, and that was followed by confirmation by the League of Nations on July 24, 1920, the Franco-British Boundary Convention of December 23, 1920 and the Anglo-American Convention of December 3, 1924.
 
The term "Jewish National Home" was defined by the British Government  to mean a state already at a Cabinet session which approved the Balfour Declaration on October 31, 1917. "Palestine" referred to the whole country, including both Cisjordan and Transjordan. The boundaries were fixed in a separate treaty, the Franco-British Boundary Convention of December 23, 1920 as "from Dan to Beersheba," implying that the whole of Jewish Palestine would be reconstituted as a Jewish state. Nevertheless, portions of historic Palestine in the east, north and north-east were subsequently illegally excluded from the Jewish National Home.
 
After the aggression by Arabs in the 1947-1949 war, what evolved was that the areas of Judea, Samaria and Gaza were in the illegal possession of neighboring Arab states who had no sovereign rights to them and were themselves occupiers. It is Israel which has inherited the sovereign rights of the Jewish people over "Palestine" and it cannot be accused by anyone of "occupying" lands which under international law were clearly part of the Jewish National Home or the Land of Israel.
 
The Knesset, in 1967, adopted an amendment to the Law and Administration Ordinance of 1948.  Section 11B was added, allowing the extension of Israel sovereignty to areas formerly under League of Nations Mandate authority.  Actually, back in September 1948, the Area of Jurisdiction and Powers Ordinance was legislated which required Israel to incorporate immediately any area of the Land of Israel which the Minister of Defense had defined by proclamation as being held by the Defense Army of Israel.
 
Yes, legal matters can be complicated, but one need not too nervous about them and, in this Yesh Din case, I would hope that the supreme court judges who sit on the petition will finally realize that they have a major responsibility of historic proportions.
And yes, I am well aware that the entire body of world opinion considers Israel to be an illegal presence in Judea and Samaria and that I am,  to them, an "illegal settler." Well, as someone once observed, for many centuries all of Christendom thought that Jews were Christ-killers and were therefore to be punished and made subservient. The Muslim world once considered, and many unfortunately still do,  Jews to be descendants of apes and pigs, enemies of Muhammad. 

Not everything defined as "well-known" and "international opinion" is correct.
 
Take off your "Green Line" glasses and see the reality of Jews living in their historic national homeland.