Molotov

Often on the news we hear the terms: "occupied territories", "67 borders", and "illegal settlements". And the story we usually hear sounds very simple: “During the Six-Day War, Israel captured the West Bank from the Palestinians; refused the United Nation's demand to retreat; and illegally built settlements". But is that really the case? Let's try to understand the situation a little bit better.

We'll start with a simple but extremely important question: From whom did Israel capture the West Bank? From the Palestinians? No. In 1967, there was no Arab nation or state by the name of "Palestine". Actually, was there ever? Israel took over the West Bank from Jordan in an act of self-defense, after Jordan joined a war launched by Egypt and Syria to destroy Israel. Oh, by the way, destroying countries IS rather illegal.

The United Nations, back in 1967, rejected repeated Arab and Soviet attempts to declare Israel as the aggressor. Security Council resolution 242 did not demand a unilateral Israeli withdrawal. Rather, the United Nations called for negotiating a solution which would leave Israel with “secure and recognized boundaries”. In effect: defensible borders.

But wait a second! What was Jordan doing in the West Bank in the first place? What was its legal justification? Well Jordan had the... You know what? It had no legal justification. Jordan simply occupied it during its previous attempt to destroy the newly established State of Israel in 1948, changing the commonly accepted name “Judea and Samaria” to the "West Bank". But that did not really convince anybody, and almost no one recognized the legality of Jordan’s occupation. Not even any of the other Arab states. So if Jordan had no legal claim to the land, and a "Palestine" did not exist, whose territory is it?

Let's go a little further back in time. Don't worry, not to the days of the Bible, only about 100 years. Until 1917, the Ottoman Empire occupied the whole region. After losing in World War One the Ottoman's relinquished their 500-year control to the Allied Forces, which decided to divide the old empire into countries. Britain’s Foreign Minister, Lord Balfour, recognized the Jewish people's historical right to their homeland. A small area, equivalent to about half of 1% of the Middle East, was designated for this purpose. Britain received a mandate from the League of Nations to promote the establishment of a Jewish Homeland.

But wait a second! Do you realize what happened? The Jewish Homeland originally included not only the west bank but also the east bank of the Jordan River. I guess you cannot say the Jewish people have not accepted some painful compromises already.

Anyway, the League of Nations' recognition of a Jewish Homeland, which includes the West Bank, was reaffirmed by the United Nations after the Second World War. With the British Mandate ending, United Nations General Assembly resolution 181 recommended the establishment of two states: one Jewish and one Arab. The Jews accepted it and went on to create the State of Israel, while the Arabs refused the compromise and launched a war to destroy the newly established Jewish State.

Resolution 181, a non-binding recommendation in the first place, remained with no legal standing.

At the end of the war a ceasefire line was formed where the Israeli and Arab forces stopped fighting. At the insistence of the Arab leaders, this line was defined as having no political significance. So, although this line is commonly referred to as “the 1967 border”, it is not from 1967 and it was never an international border.

This is why a more exact legal definition for the West Bank according to International Law, is really the same as in so many other areas where there are, or were, territorial disputes but which are not defined as "occupied". For example: Zubarah, the Tumbs Islands, the Western Sahara, amongst many others, They are not "occupied territories" but rather "disputed territories".

So let's return for a moment to our illustration and examine the complete chain of events. Israel's presence in the West Bank is the result of a war of self-defense. The West Bank should not be considered "occupied" because there was no previous legal sovereign in the area, and therefore the real definition should be "disputed territory".

The 1947 partition plan has no current legal standing, while Israel's claim to the land was clearly recognized by the international community during the 20th century. That is why the presence and construction of Israeli settlements in the West Bank should not be considered illegal. These are not just my own opinions; they are based on conclusions made by world-renowned jurists, like Professor Eugene Rostow, Justice Arthur Goldberg, and Stephen Schwebel.

So what's the solution for the dispute over the West Bank? Unfortunately, there is no magic solution. But the only way a solution will ever be reached, is if we base our negotiations on legal and historical facts. So please, let's stop using the terms "occupied territories", and "67 borders". They're simply not politically correct.

A year after the success of "We Are the World", which raised almost $100 million to fight hunger and famine in Africa, USA for Africa was back with another charity event, this time to raise money to fight homelessness in the United States in a massive undertaking that required nine months and a staff of 400 to plan it. At 3 p.m. on Sunday, May 25, 1986, approximately 6.5 million people held hands in a human chain for fifteen minutes along a path across the United States, with many contributing between $10 and $35 to reserve their place in line along the 4,125-mile route that ran through 550 cities across 16 states. Millions of ordinary and extraordinary Americans held Hands Across America, a sudden community offering a symbolic helping hand.


The human chain began in New York City, at the southern tip of Manhattan where the Statue of Liberty and a fireboat pumping red, white and blue water provided the picturesque backdrop. First in line was six-year-old Amy Sherwood of Brooklyn, who had spent most of the prior year living with her family of seven in a welfare hotel populated by drug addicts and prostitutes. The line of people then stretched along the World Trade Center, over the George Washington Bridge and south through Philadelphia and Baltimore. Inside New Jersey’s Rahway State Prison, hundreds of inmates linked hands as did divers in Maryland below the surface of the Susquehanna River. In Washington, D.C. the route ran by the U.S. Capitol and the Lincoln Memorial, where it was joined by Coretta Scott King, widow of Martin Luther King Jr., who had stood on that very spot 23 years earlier to deliver his "I Have a Dream" speech. It also passed inside the gates of the White House where President Ronald Reagan, dressed in a polo shirt and blue jeans, joined with First Lady Nancy Reagan and others on the steps of the North Portico.


From the American capital city, Hands Across America moved westward. In Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Catholic nuns and members of the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club clasped hands. Fifty Abraham Lincoln impersonators did the same in Springfield, Illinois, only to be topped by the 54 Elvis Presley look-alikes in Memphis, Tennessee. A cornfield in central Illinois served as center-point of the nation with 16,000 people in attendance along with the Silver Nickel Band and DJ Gerald Welch. The chain was not without its missing links, particularly through the searing deserts of the Southwest. Therefore in some places, ranchers filled the voids by placing their cattle hoof-to-hoof.


Celebrities were common sights along the entire route, but the stars truly came out for the event in Los Angeles, California. In Disneyland, Walt Disney Company president Frank Wells held the gloved hand of Mickey Mouse in front of Cinderella’s Castle. The event’s exclamation point came at Long Beach, California, with the extravagant old cruise ship Queen Mary as the backdrop. As a bookend to Sherwood’s family of seven in New York, Bill and Mary Jones and their five children, who all lived in a homeless shelter, were the last people in the nationwide string of hands.