This morning I saw this clip of Louis CK on Conan O’Brien, on why he hates cell phones.
Some parents really struggle with, like, “All the other kids have the terrible thing, so my kid has to. Yeah, let’s you know – let your kid go and be a better example to the **** kids. Just because the other stupid kids have phones, doesn’t mean, that “okay, well, my kid has to be stupid, otherwise she’ll feel weird.”
I heard him say that and I got a chill because isn’t that exactly like all the people pontificating about Israel’s “illegal occupation” and how “settlements are an obstacle to peace?”
I mean, according to international law, Israel is not an occupying power in Judea and Samaria or anywhere else. From the Jewish Virtual Library:
-
Jewish settlement in West Bank and Gaza Strip territory has existed from time immemorial and was expressly recognised as legitimate in the Mandate for Palestine adopted by the League of Nations, which provided for the establishment of a Jewish state in the Jewish people’s ancient homeland. Indeed, Article 6 of the Mandate provided as follows:
The Administration of Palestine, while ensuring that the rights and position of other sections of the population are not prejudiced, shall facilitate Jewish immigration under suitable conditions and shall encourage, in cooperation with the Jewish Agency referred to in Article 4, close settlement by Jews on the land, including State lands not required for public use.
-
Some Jewish settlements, such as in Hebron, existed throughout the centuries of Ottoman rule, while settlements such as Neve Ya’acov, north of Jerusalem, the Gush Etzion bloc in Judea and Samaria, the communities north of theDead Sea and Kfar Darom in the Gaza region, were established under British Mandatory administration prior to the establishment of the State of Israel. To be sure, many Israeli settlements have been established on sites which were home to Jewish communities in previous generations, in an expression of the Jewish people’s deep historic and religious connection with the land.
- For more than a thousand years, the only administration which has prohibited Jewish settlement was the Jordanian occupation administration, which during the nineteen years of its rule (1948-1967) declared the sale of land to Jews a capital offense. The right of Jews to establish homes in these areas, and the legal titles to the land which had been acquired, could not be legally invalidated by the Jordanian or Egyptian occupation which resulted from their armed invasion of Israel in 1948, and such rights and titles remain valid to this day.
Regarding settlements, from the same source:
-
International humanitarian law prohibits the forcible transfer of segments of the population of a state to the territory of another state which it has occupied as a result of the resort to armed force. This principle, which is reflected in Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, was drafted immediately following the Second World War. As International Red Cross’ authoritative commentary to the Convention confirms, the principle was intended to protect the local population from displacement, including endangering its separate existence as a race, as occurred with respect to the forced population transfers in Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary before and during the war. This is clearly not the case with regard to the West Bank and Gaza.
-
The attempt to present Israeli settlements as a violation of this principle is clearly untenable. As Professor Eugene Rostow, former Under-Secretary of State for Political Affairs has written: “the Jewish right of settlement in the area is equivalent in every way to the right of the local population to live there” (AJIL, 1990, vol. 84, p.72).
-
The provisions of the Geneva Convention regarding forced population transfer to occupied sovereign territory cannot be viewed as prohibiting the voluntary return of individuals to the towns and villages from which they, or their ancestors, had been ousted. Nor does it prohibit the movement of individuals to land which was not under the legitimate sovereignty of any state and which is not subject to private ownership. In this regard, Israeli settlements have been established only after an exhaustive investigation process, under the supervision of the Supreme Court of Israel, designed to ensure that no communities are established on private Arab land.
-
It should be emphasised that the movement of individuals to the territory is entirely voluntary, while the settlements themselves are not intended to displace Arab inhabitants, nor do they do so in practice.
-
Repeated charges regarding the illegality of Israeli settlements must therefore be regarded as politically motivated, without foundation in international law. Similarly, as Israeli settlements cannot be considered illegal, they cannot constitute a “grave violation” of the Geneva Convention, and hence any claim that they constitute a “war crime” is without any legal basis. Such political charges cannot justify in any way Palestinian acts of terrorism and violence against innocent Israelis.
But no matter how many times you lay out the facts for people, they’ll keep vomiting out those same lines: “The settlements are an obstacle for peace” and “Israel illegally occupies ‘Palestinian’ land.”
So I’m listening to Louis CK (whose paternal grandfather was Jewish) and I’m thinking: The BDS-holes and Jew-haters have to be stupid. Because otherwise THEY’LL FEEL WEIRD around the others.
Kids being stupid as a metaphor for Jew-hatred.
It’s like a light went on.
