Monday, January 10, 2011

Minority Report


Is it just me, or is this ongoing EU disparagement of Israel's sovereign rights looking increasingly like the film Minority Report? Let me be blunt: there is no Palestinian state. It does not yet exist. It may never exist. We don't arrest people for murders they haven't committed. Yet, the EU continues to charge Israel with an occupation of Palestinian land. By this logic, we must also charge Spain with occupation of Basque land and declare Pamplona the capital of a Basque state.

As I've written before, no part of Jerusalem was ever designated to belong to an Arab state. The 1947 Partition Plan clearly recommends that Jerusalem's residents make this decision for themselves. If east Jerusalem is ceded through negotiations to a future Palestinian state, it will for the PA to decide the location of a capital; just as it's Israel's decision where to place her capital city, a fact that the international community also spitefully disregards. At the very least, Israelis might take this sort of nonsense more seriously if the EU also started to move European embassies to west Jerusalem. Until that happens, Israel should ignore the ignorant rantings of EU officials who only make themselves, and international law, look irrelevant.

Update 12/01/2011: I don't have time to go through the EU statement and detail its historical and legalistic errors, but fortunately, Yisrael Medad has done a good job on his blog here.