good terrorists, but no good occupations?

Good Terrorists, But No Good Occupations?
by Ya´akov-Perez Golbert, Adv.
Aug 15, '04

In February of this year, several young Israelis were sentenced to prison terms for refusing, on grounds of conscience, to serve in the army, because it is an army of occupation. Now a young Israeli woman has been arrested and accused of having assisted her ex-lover, an important terrorist in Jenin, in carrying out mass murder of Israelis, justifying it as "resistance to occupation."

They all believe they will be recognized as moral heroes. They are wrong. They will be recognized for the foolish dupes that they are.

Mind you, they are in good company. They have been influenced and encouraged in their path by some of the most respectable people around.

The US State Department has accepted the position of the Arab and Islamic countries that people resisting occupation have the right to commit any atrocities against the occupying power and its civilian population. The "doctrine" is that "there is no such thing as a good occupation." The European countries have also bought the line enthusiastically. They have found justification in that "doctrine" for allowing Israel no way to defend herself. A British Member of Parliament says she "understands" why Arabs become suicide bombers and states that, if she were subjected to the daily "humiliations" that they endure, she would become one also. And the International Court of Justice (sic) denies Israel the right to defend itself against terrorist murderers and that it must pay compensation to Arabs inconvenienced by the fence it built to do so.

The world would have us believe that all this condemnation is because Israel is occupying the Palestinians. The Belgian ambassador once reminded Israel that Belgium was under occupation twice in the last century and, therefore, sympathizes with the suffering of the occupied. The Finnish Foreign Minister declared that there is no difference between Israel and Nazi Germany. The Danish Foreign Minister pretty much said that the Palestinians have every right to murder Israeli children because they are under Israeli occupation. Norway's ambassador also intoned the observation that, in his country, when they were under occupation, people who shot Germans and bombed their public places were called "resistance fighters". (Note, in what role this casts Israel in the current situation. The equation is simple: Occupiers are Nazis. The occupied have the right to kill them and their population.) Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, has toed the line that nothing is terrorism if it is done against an occupier. Some learned diplomat proclaimed piously that "there is no such thing as a good occupation."

All that is patent nonsense, however. No one ever objected to the Allied occupation of Germany. Not even Belgium or the Scandinavian countries and certainly no Member of the British Parliament. If Germans had taken to shooting Allied soldiers and their dependents and bombing the bars and clubs they frequented, it is quite certain that no one, not even the Belgians or the Scandinavians, would have graced them with such a nice name as "resistance fighters". One can be certain that the American Secretary of State would not have called it a "gray area" in which there can be "differences of opinion". There would have been zero tolerance for the notion that "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter."

The reason is clear, of course. Germany had just waged a war of aggression against the whole of Europe and had inflicted enormous suffering on the population, culminating in mass enslavement, wholesale slaughter and genocide. Germany had to be de-Nazified. Of course. Similarly, Japan had to be reconstructed in the mold of a responsible member of the world community. Of course.

Let's try to state it in a way that even minority Parliamentarians, the pinstripes at the State Department and European foreign offices, and impressionable and idealistic Israeli youth might understand. The fact is that there are two categories of occupation, not one. There are Bad Occupations and Good Occupations. The occupations of Norway and of Denmark and of Belgium were Bad Occupations. The occupation of Germany was a Good Occupation.

Israel's occupation of the Palestinians is clearly a Good Occupation. The Arabs are the ones who launched not one war of aggression, but several, all for the goal of "driving the Jews into the Sea" and "turning the Mediterranean red with Jewish blood." How can the foreign offices of Europe forget? The difference is only that Germany was successful for a time and the Arabs were not, thank God. That does not make the Arabs victims, however, nor does it make Israel a Nazi occupier. Israel's mistake was in not even de-Nazifying the Arabs under Israeli rule.

Moreover, the principle that territory may not be acquired by force never included territory taken in a defensive war. Pomerania, Silesia, East Prussia, the Sudetenland and the Free City of Danzig (which was also German, really), as well as the Kurile Islands and the southern half of Sakhalin Island were all annexed unilaterally after the advent of the UN Charter by victims of aggression who had less justification than Israel has in Judea, Samaria, Gaza, Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. Yet, no one ever referred to Gdansk as "Occupied Danzig" or to Gdinia as an "illegal settlement".

In fact, NATO has recently admitted two of those states, which annexed territory unilaterally. In both cases, annexation was accomplished by bloodshed and "ethnic cleansing" on a massive scale. Both states have recently been admitted to the European Community. I refer to Poland, which expelled the indigenous German population of Pomerania, Silesia, Danzig and its half of East Prussia, and the Czech Republic, which expelled the indigenous German population of the Sudetenland. Both of them then annexed those territories unilaterally. Moreover, Israel has far greater claim to Judea, Samaria, Gaza, the Golan Heights and Jerusalem than those states has to the areas they have occupied and annexed.

The fact is, the world has no standards and no principles. It professes very sanctimoniously to have them, of course, but it does not. If the world had standards, it would insist that Israel not withdraw to the June 4, 1967 lines on the Golan. Those lines include Banias and territory along the eastern shore of the Kinneret that were seized by Syria in a war of aggression against Israel in 1948 - and the UN Charter prohibits acquisition of territory by force, as the Arabs never tire of repeating.

Or is that another Good Occupation?