It is commonplace to hear it proclaimed everywhere and at every turn as a proven truth that the State of Israel is violating international law. Interviewed by Sonia Mabrouk on February 11, Manuel Bompard once again made this accusation, even specifying a date to a violation that dates back 70 years! This accusation, which determines all the European Union’s relations with the Jewish state, justifies, for example, discriminatory practices against Israel that are unprecedented and never applied against any other state. Thus, we can read in the Journal officiel (24/11/2016, no. 81) under the heading “Miscellaneous,” regulations relating to:
“the indication of origin of goods from territories occupied by Israel since June 1967 published in the Official Journal of the European Union on November 12, 2015.
“In particular, it specifies that, under international law, the Golan Heights and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, are not part of Israel. Consequently, in order not to mislead consumers, food product labelling must accurately indicate the exact origin of the products, whether this is compulsory under Community regulations or voluntary on the part of the operator.
“In the case of products from the West Bank or Golan Heights that originate from Israeli settlements, a reference limited to ‘product originating from the Golan Heights’ or ‘product originating from the West Bank’ is not acceptable. Although these expressions effectively designate the wider area or territory from which the product originates, issuing the additional geographical information that the product originates from Israeli settlements is likely to mislead the consumer as to the true origin of the product. In such cases, it is necessary to add, in brackets, the expression ‘Israeli settlement’ or equivalent terms. Expressions such as “product originating from the Golan Heights (Israeli settlement)’ or ‘product originating from the West Bank (Israeli settlement)’ can be used.”
We see this text once again invoking international law without further clarification. We also note that the EU claims the right to decree of its own accord that the Golan Heights, the West Bank and East Jerusalem are not part of Israel. Is there a law allowing a group of powers to decree which provinces belong to a country and to change their historical names, such as Judea and Samaria transformed into the West Bank? Or to invent international borders where none existed before?
This text can only be seen as hateful and contemptuous of the Jewish people. Its aim is to establish in these Israeli lands a second Judenrein Palestinian state, as called for by the founder of the Arab Higher Committee, Amin al-Husseini, who united Christians and Muslims in the British Mandate of Palestine against the Palestinian Jews.
By the 1920s, al-Husseini, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, was so highly regarded in Europe that he spent the war years in Berlin. In radio recordings from this period, the German announcer can be heard describing the gathering in Berlin on November 2, 1943 of Arab nationalists mixing with the Nazis[1]:
“We are in the Luftwaffe building in Berlin, where Arab leaders are gathered to protest against the Balfour Declaration. The Hall is festooned with Arab flags and poster portraits of Arab patriots. Arabs and Moslems from every land pour into the hall. Among them are Moroccans, Palestinians, Lebanese, Yemenites, men from the Hedjaz, Indians, Iranians and Moslem representatives from all over Europe. Among the latter are a great many Germans friendly to the Arabs, high government officials, civilian and military, one of the S.S. chiefs, representatives of foreign embassies and at their head representatives of the Japanese Embassy. The audience runs into hundreds, and here now I see the Mufti of Jerusalem making his way into the hall. He is shaking hands with a number of notables and mounts the steps to the stage to deliver his address (p. 49).
“After several anti-Jewish quotations from the Koran, Haj Amin el Husseini, head of the Higher Arab Committee (Palestinian Arab National Movement) declares:
“Moslems throughout the Arab lands are united against the enemy which faces them today in Palestine and elsewhere—namely the British. The Treaty of Versailles was a disaster for the Germans as well as for the Arabs. But the Germans know how to get rid of the Jews. That which brings us close to the Germans and sets us in their camp is that up to today, the Germans have never harmed any Moslem, and they are again fighting our common enemy (applause) who persecuted Arabs and Moslems. But most of all they have definitely solved the Jewish problem. These ties, and especially the last, make our friendship with Germany not a provisional one, dependent on conditions, but a permanent and lasting friendship based on mutual interest (p. 49).
“Congratulations by telegram from Heinrich Himmler, Head of the SS.
‘The Grand Mufti. The National Socialist Party has inscribed on its flag ‘the extermination of World Jewry.’ Our party sympathises with the fight of the Arabs, especially the Arabs of Palestine, against the foreign Jew. Today, on this memorial day of the Balfour Declaration, I send my greetings and wishes for success in your fight (p. 50).
“On 1 March 1944 at 12:30 PM., speaking on Radio Berlin, the Mufti, after vilifying Jews, Britain, and America, called on the Arabs ‘to rise and fight.’
“Arabs, rise as one man and fight for your sacred rights. Kill the Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God, history and religion. This saves your honour. God is with you (p. 51).
In 1945, World War II ended, as did, incidentally, the genocide of the Jews. Forgiveness was limited to Europe only, as by then, the Arab anti-Jewish war was bloodying communities throughout the Arab world. France discreetly welcomed and sheltered Amin al-Husseini, providing him with a passport and a false name so that he could travel to Cairo in 1946, where he was received as a hero. From there, he organized the continuation of the anti-Jewish war in its theological jihadist version, since it could not — at least for the time being — continue in Europe.
On April 2, 1947, faced with the murderous anarchy of the Arabs in Palestine, Great Britain declared that it was relinquishing its mandate and asked the United Nations for an opinion on the measures to be taken after its departure. The General Assembly appointed an ad hoc commission, the United Nations Special Commission for Palestine (UNSCOP), whose report, accepted on November 29, 1947, became Resolution 181. This non-binding resolution proposed the creation of two states in the territory of mandatory Palestine west of the Jordan River.
It is important to clarify the following points concerning this Resolution:
- The Mandatory Power, Great Britain, asked the General Assembly to set up a Commission to prepare for the Assembly’s consideration of the future government of Palestine. There was no question of dividing up a territory whose sovereignty already belonged to another people, the Jews, as previously determined by four international treaties.
- The Commission recommended that the General Assembly adopt and implement its partition plan. It was only a recommendation that could not have been carried out without the annulment of previous treaties recognizing the sovereignty of the Jewish National Home over this territory, after the defeated Ottoman Empire had acknowledged its withdrawal. The ad hoc Commission had no power to dismember a territory and allocate its parts.
The UNSCOP report, and Resolution 181 of November 29, 1947, therefore, violate the legal decisions of the four international treaties, the Treaty of Versailles of 1919, the San Remo Resolution of 1920, the Treaty of Sèvres 1920 and the Treaty of Lausanne of 1923, which, after the First World War and the dismemberment of the defeated Ottoman Empire, recognized the historic sovereignty of the Jewish people over this territory and dedicated it to the Jewish National Home.
This procedure had been clearly specified at a meeting of the League of Nations in September 1922, when the British government, which held the mandate over Palestine, proceeded to extract 70% of the territory of Palestine to create a new country east of the Jordan River, Transjordan. In the presence of all the members of the Council of the League of Nations and the Secretary-General, the British delegate, Lord Balfour, explained that this division was intended to cancel in Transjordan the specific directives for the establishment of the Jewish National Home provided for in all the territory of the Palestine Mandate.
It is important to point out that this famous territory called Palestine was never more, in the Islamic empires, than a province with changing borders. It was the WWI Allies who, in 1918, gave it borders based on biblical topography, namely, the history of the Jewish people. The decision taken by Great Britain in 1922 created two distinct entities on the territory of the Palestine Mandate, where none had existed before. One, Palestine, stretching from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River, remained directly ruled by the British and was planned to become a Jewish state, based on the 3,000-year-old history of the Jewish people rooted in this territory. The other entity was Transjordan, an Arab state east of the Jordan River on the remaining 70% of Palestine. This decision was approved on 16/9/1922 by the Council of the League of Nations.
In an interview on October 11, 1947 with Akhbar al-Yom, Abdul Rahman Azzam, first Secretary-General of the newly-created Arab League, said:
“I personally wish that the Jews do not drive us to this war, as this will be a war of extermination and momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Tartar massacre or the Crusader wars. I believe that the number of volunteers from outside Palestine will be larger than Palestine’s Arab population, for I know that volunteers will be arriving to us from [as far as] India, Afghanistan, and China to win the honor of martyrdom for the sake of Palestine … You might be surprised to learn that hundreds of Englishmen expressed their wish to volunteer in the Arab armies to fight the Jews… [the war] will be an opportunity for vast plunder… it will be impossible to contain the zealous volunteers arriving from all corners of the world…”
Even before the departure of the British in May 1948, Amin al-Husseini, who had returned to Palestine from Europe, had established his militia of Muslim Nazi veterans who, hiding in Arab villages, sowed chaos and death among the local Jews. In May 1948, as soon as the State of Israel was proclaimed, five Arab armies invaded the new country and seized land granted to the Jewish State by all previous treaties, without any protest from Europe, which, except for Czechoslovakia, had refused to sell it arms.
The Arab war of aggression of 1948, and subsequent Arab military aggressions against Israel, consigned to oblivion Resolution 181, which in any case had no legal value and violated the international treaties of 1919, 1920 and 1923, and above all Article 80 of the UN Charter. In his study on this subject, David Elber[2] demonstrates that the UN has no possession of territorial sovereignty and therefore cannot decree the allocation of a territory over which it has no sovereignty (on the basis of the universal principle of law nemo dat quod non habet — no one can give what he does not possess), especially when this decision violates previous treaties endorsed by the UN itself.
Resolution 181 only made suggestions to avoid the threat of war from the Arabs. In fact, the Resolution envisaged the establishment of three states in the remaining territory reserved for the Jewish National Home: a tiny Jewish state, yet another Arab state, and an enlarged “internationalized” Jerusalem (demanded by the Vatican). Indeed, anyone reading Resolution 181 cannot but be amazed at the incredible incompetence and stupidity that emanate from the unreality of its vision, so much so that one is surprised not to find the color of streetlamps recommended in it.
When one considers the circumstances surrounding Resolution 181 — the genocide of six millions Jews in Europe with the help and collaboration of Muslim SS and soldiers under German command and the ideological guidance of Amin al-Husseini, who planned with Hitler the extermination of the Middle East’s Jews — one realizes the cynicism of this resolution and its disdain of the realities on the ground, by pretending that weakening the Jews would be the solution.
Resolution 181 bears the scars of the mentality that prevailed in the countries of Europe that made up the Third Reich. It demonstrates contempt for the Jewish people, who had been ruthlessly mass-murdered in a genocide that ended only two years earlier in Europe. Although these countries were not signatories, their elites and senior officials, albeit disguised under various political labels, retained their decision-making powers. Thus, no European country ever condemned the invasion of Israel in 1948 by the armies of Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Transjordan, Lebanon, along with al-Husseini’s Nazi militia.
Al-Husseini got along well with France’s WWII Vichy regime. High-ranking Arab officers collaborated with the German military, and Muslim military formations integrated into the SS and Wehrmacht, and trained in the German-rules countries. They were among friends. So why should we be surprised by Resolution 181?
On May 14, 1948, the Vatican’s official daily L’Osservatore Romano commented on the restoration of the State of Israel in the following terms:
“… modern Zionism is not the true heir to the Israel of the Bible, but a secular state…. Therefore the Holy Land and its sacred places belong to Christianity, which is the true Israel.”[3]
In July 1949, La Documentation Catholique, the official bi-weekly periodical of the French Catholic Church, published Pope Pius XII’s encyclical Redemptoris nostri cruciatus and commented:
“[W]e have now, after careful investigations, arrived at least at part of the truth, and we can only agree with a statement frequently heard that Zionism is Nazism in a new guise.”[4]
In 1919, Chaim Weizmann, wanting to understand France’s radical opposition to Zionism, met Georges Clemenceau for a brief moment, who is reported to have told him: “We Christians can never forgive the Jews for having crucified Christ.”
Did Clemenceau really say this? Millions of Christians opposed anti-Semitism and became Zionists. Clemenceau’s remark would describe only a fraction of churches and Christians: those that conceived the discriminatory status of the Jewish people, and imposed exile and, in the 20th century, genocide on them for having violated their orders through Zionism.
In 1973, the European Economic Community (which eventually became the European Union) renewed the Nazi alliance with the Palestinian jihad of the Mufti’s successors, and perpetuated the Euro-jihadist war against Israel on a financial, media and international level, in exchange for oil and Arab markets.
This policy, initiated by the Euro-Arab Dialogue (1974), was reinforced after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran, which made Europe fear for its oil supply. Europe’s main concern, however, was to avoid the Arab League freezing relations with it, after the separate Egyptian-Israeli peace, which it had reluctantly recognized at a time when the PLO and the Arab League had broken off relations with Egypt. To make amends for this misdeed, Europe produced the Venice Declaration (1980). The following appears on the Medea.be website, which published the Euro-Arab Dialogue meetings and activity from their beginnings:
“The activity of the [Euro-Arab] Dialogue was suspended in 1979 upon request of the League of Arab States, following the Camp David Agreements, after only four sessions of the General Committee. With the Venice Declaration in June 1980, the Community decided it was time to work on the political aspects of the Dialogue and organized a preparatory meeting for the General Committee in Athens in December 1983. Egypt’s conspicuous absence due to its suspension from all activity of the League of Arab States was enough to prevent full resumption of activity.”
With the Venice Declaration, the European Economic Community demanded the creation of a Palestinian state on the territories liberated by Israel in 1967, which had been illegally occupied and rendered Judenrein [ethnically cleansed of Jews] by Arab countries since 1949. Since that time, the EEC/EU have never ceased to impose the concept of “Palestinian people” instead of Arab refugees, in order to justify its claim to a state that it has been striving to build for decades by monitoring, restricting and harassing Israelis in their own country, recognized by international treaties.
For the past 40 years, the EEC/EU, which wants to get rid of Israel at all costs, has invented a false people, the Palestinians, devoid of national particularisms and history, artificially constructed as a look-alike to Israel, even though they claim to follow the Koran, embody jihad against unbelief and adhere to Nazism.
UN Resolution 181, falsely called international law, authorizes the delegitimization of the Jewish presence in Jerusalem according to the 2,000-year-old anti-Semitic tradition, and the reduction of the Jewish state to an indefensible parcel that will soon be made to disappear. It has already created Palestinian ministries and ambassadors for a people that is not a people, but which it is determined to create in homage to the Hitler-Husseini alliance that symbolizes the jihad against Israel.
Defamatory terms such as “settlers”, “occupiers”, “Nazis” and “occupied Palestinian territories” project a demonic character onto Israelis that evokes the anti-Jewish verbal violence of the Nazis. The role of the Eastern Churches, which call themselves Arab, in this maelstrom of hatred cannot be overstated — even if we know that their survival for 13 centuries, with the Muslim scimitar at their throats, has turned them into Pavlovian Islamist propagandists. The EU has exploited this reflex in its anti-Israeli policy. These extracts from remarks made on official Palestinian Authority television on April 22, 2002, by Father Manuel Musalam, head of the Latin Church in Gaza, are by no means an exceptional example:
“The Jew has a principle that we suffer from and that he tries to impose on people: the “Gentile” (non-Jewish) principle. For him, the gentile is a slave. To the Palestinians who work in Israel, they give only a piece of bread and tell them: ‘This piece of bread that you eat is taken from our children; we give it to you so that you do not live as free men in your land but as proletarians and slaves in Israel, to serve us’. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion are based on this principle, and anyone who reads the Protocols understands that they apply to our current relationship with the Jews… The Church, the Pope, Christians and the New Testament clearly state that, according to the Christian faith, it was the Jews who killed Jesus. It’s impossible to deny or forget this… It was the Jews who killed Jesus, then they killed the Christians, then they killed the Muslims. Now they’re killing Muslims and Christians again. Throughout history, we have seen that the Jews, who persecuted Christians in the early days of the Church, are now persecuting the Church and Islam again.” [Note: The Protocols of Zion was a libelous fabrication. Ed.]
Let us emphasize that Musalam’s remarks are in total contradiction to the recommendations of Vatican II.
Over the last few decades, the EU’s alliance with the Palestinian jihad — a war to Islamize the planet that is not exclusively anti-Jewish — has metastasized in Lebanon and into the very foundations of the West. In its relentless fight against Israel, Europe has sacrificed its own territory and people to Palestinianism. Today, in a strange coincidence, we see the same alliances as in the 1940s: the majority of European countries, united under the government of the Third Reich, allied with Islam and at war with Russia and the Jewish people in a global anti-Semitic tsunami. Is history always repeating itself?
[1] Moshe Pearlman, Mufti of Jerusalem, London 1947, p.149
[2] David Elber, Il diritto di sovranità nelle Terra di Israele, Salomone Belforte, Livorno 2024.
[3] Bat Ye’or, Islam and Dhimmitude, Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press, 2001.
[4] Bat Ye’or, Islam and Dhimmitude, Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press, 2001.
{Written by Bat Ye’or and reposted from Gatestone Institute}
