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    Nisan 4, 5772, 3/27/2012

    isan 4, 5772, 3/27/2012

    British Foreign Office-Pulling Laws Out of a Magic Hat

    Im posting this letter (with permission), written by attorney Howard Grief to the British Ambassador

    to Israel for having given the typical British claim that Israel is occupying Arab land, without having

    any valid law to back up their claim.

    Needless to say, the Ambassador allegedly gave the same broken record response, which has no

    connection to proving Israel is occupying any land other than being the sovereign rulers of the land

    belonging to the Jewish National Home.

    Howard founded our organization, the Office for Israeli Constitutional Law and is probably the worlds

    greatest expert on Jewish rights to the Land of Israel under International Law.Mr. Grief has researched the subject for more than a quarter of a century and is the Author ofThe

    Legal Foundations and Borders of Israel Under International Law (Jerusalem: Mazo Publishers,

    2008).

    Part I is Howards letter to the Ambassador and a separate letter to a representative of the BritishForeign Office. I know it is a bit long, but the information is important. The second part weill be

    posted next time:

    H.M. Ambassador Matthew Gould

    British Embassy,192 Hayarkon Street,

    63405 Tel-Aviv.

    Dear Ambassador Gould,

    You may recall that, at a meeting that took place this year on March 8, 2011 at the Jewish Agency

    Building in Jerusalem, sponsored by the group Europeans for Israel and chaired by Leah Zinder, I

    asked you the following question:

    Upon what document of international law does Foreign Secretary William Hague rely

    when he asserts thatJewish settlementsin Judea and Samaria are illegal underinternational law?

    The stock answer you gave me, which I was fully expecting, was that Jewishsettlements were a

    violation of Article 49, paragraph 6 of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, which states that theOccupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it

    occupies. The only problem with your answer is that Judea and Samaria are not, nor were they ever

    in a legal sense Israel occupied territories, but rather are and have always been integral parts of theJewish National Home that was internationally recognized explicitly in 1920, 1922 and in 1924, and

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    therefore Article 49 is inapplicable to the situation.

    In the moderators desire to move on to other questioners, I was not given the chance to rebut your

    incorrect explanation and moreover, I was surprised that no one in the audience you addressed saw fit

    to challenge you on youranswer.

    After your address, I spoke to you briefly and gave you a copy of my book, The Legal Foundation andBorders of Israel under International Law, with the hope that you might take the time to read it and

    perhaps disabuse yourself of the false notion that Israel is an Occupying Power of the various regions

    of the Jewish National Home.

    I have written extensively on the question of what constitutes occupied territories under internationallaw, and you are free to consult these writings if you care to download my articles from the internet.

    Recently, I have dealt with this same question again in a letter I wrote to Mr. David Lee of London

    (Kingston-upon-Thames), Surrey, England to rebut the oft-stated remarks by Foreign Secretary William

    Hague that Israel illegally occupies Arab lands. A copy of this letter, dated November 1, 2011, isherewith enclosed so that you may better appreciate the legal and historical truth that Judea and

    Samaria are not Arab territories that are under occupation in violation of international law.

    I also enclose my article on the meaning of Article 80 of the United Nations Charter which impactsdirectly on the question of the legality of Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria, and renders themperfectly legal under international law.

    Finally, I enclose a letter I wrote on the subject of Israels legal rights to Judea and Samaria (and Gaza),

    which I sent to Mr. Ilkka Uusitalo of the European External Action Service whose jurisdiction includes

    the Middle East.

    Mr. Ambassador, just as I advised Mr. Barry Griffiths who is on the staff of the British Foreign Office, Irecommend that you look deeper into the subject before stating that Judea and Samaria are occupied

    territories. You owe it to yourself as a Jewish representative of Her Majestys Government in Israel to

    be aware of the true historical and legal facts. Of course, the Foreign Secretary is authorized todetermine policy, but one would expect it to be in concert with valid international law, and not based on

    prevarication and falsification that echoes Arab pretensions.

    Yours sincerely,

    Howard Grief

    ___________________________________________________________________________________Jerusalem

    4 Marheshvan 5772

    November 1, 2011

    Mr. David Lee

    Dear David,

    Thanks for forwarding me the letter you received from Mr. Barry Griffiths of the Near East Group,

    who responded to your earlier letter to the British Foreign Secretary William Hague about the lattersidiotic remark that Israel is illegally occupying Arab lands, upon which false assumption Mr.

    Griffiths bases his entire letter to you. The Griffiths letter is replete with misleading statements and

    nonsensical interpretations of the actual meaning of UN resolutions on the Question of Palestine and

    the Land of Israel. I can only deal here with some of the points he raised in his letter that, however,unfortunately represents official long-standing British thinking.

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    Griffiths asserts that the Mandate for Palestine, which he incorrectly terms the Palestinian Mandate,

    was awardedby the League of Nations to Britain. This statement reveals that Griffiths never read the

    minutes of the San Remo Peace Conference for April 24 and April 25, 1920, nor the final text of the

    San Remo Resolution of April 25, 1920, that resulted from that Conference, otherwise he would knowthat the League of Nations did not do what he says it did. It was the Supreme Council of the Principal

    Allied Powers that conferred or entrusted the Mandate for Palestine to Great Britain in order to create

    the political, administrative and economic conditions in the country to secure the establishment of theJewish National Home and future independent Jewish State, as set out in Article 2 of the Mandate. The

    League, which had just come into existence only three months earlier upon the ratification of the Treaty

    of Versailles on January 10, 1920 and had barely begun to operate, had no role whatsoever in eitherconferring the Mandate upon Britain or in selecting Britain as the Mandatory Power. Before he

    attributes unfounded powers to that body, Mr. Griffiths can verify this important point by simply

    reading the Preamble to the Mandate for Palestine, particularly Recitals One and Four. He would alsodo well to read Lord Balfours statement on the subject of Mandates and the exact role played by the

    League in regard to them:

    The Mandates are neither made by the League nor can they in substance be altered by

    the League a Mandate is imposed by the Allied and Associated Powers themselves

    in the interests of what they conceived to be the general welfare of mankind; and theyhave asked the League of Nations to assist them in seeing that this policy should be

    carried into effect. But the League of Nations is not the author of the policy but its

    instrument (Charles H. Levermore, Third Book of the League of Nations, p. 137; citedon p. 47 of the bookBritish Rule in Palestine by Bernard Joseph, published by Public

    Affairs Press, Washington DC, 1948).

    Griffiths makes the astounding statement that the Balfour Declaration ceased to have legal effectwhen the UK discharged its Mandate. Britain never executed the Mandate for Palestine in accordance

    with the original purpose noted above. In truth, the Balfour Declaration, as a British policy statement in

    1917 that Prime Minister David Lloyd George described as a bargain or contract between WorldJewry and Britain, was converted into a document of binding and irreversible international law by theadoption of the San Remo Resolution by the Supreme Council of the Principal Allied Powers on April

    25, 1920, that subsequently became Articles 94 to 97 inclusively plus Article 132 of the Treaty of

    Svres. This Resolution, insofar as Palestine was concerned, was then incorporated into the first threerecitals of the Preamble of the Mandate for Palestine, subsequently approved by all 52 members of the

    League in 1922 and separately by the United States. The San Remo Resolution is the founding

    document not only for the State of Israel under international law, but also for that of Iraq and Syria. Asstated in my previous letter to you, it continues in legal force today, mutatis mutandis, contrary to what

    Griffiths asserts, and no action taken by the United Nations today or by Britain itself can nullify this

    binding act of international law upon which the State of Israel draws its legal existence. If it were

    otherwise, the states of Israel, Syria and Iraq would have no legal right to exist under international law,and the Ottoman Empire would not have been disbanded. For Mr. Griffiths information, the San Remo

    Resolution means that allof Palestine is Jewish land, not Arab land, and that any partition of this land

    is perforce illegal and null and void. For his further edification, I would advise him to read Chapter Oneof my book, The Legal Foundation and Borders of Israel under International Law, that discusses in

    detail the juridical significance and import of the San Remo Peace Conference and the San Remo

    Resolution on Palestine, as well as Chapter Four on the Meaning of the Balfour Declaration. He maythen learn to his dismay about the existence of Jewish legal rights to allof Palestine and furthermore

    that such information and knowledge is stored and found in the British diplomatic archives to which he

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    presumably has access. As a Foreign Office staffer, he certainly has a duty to be cognizant of what the

    British archives reveal on the Question of Palestine as it emerged in the early period before Britain

    adopted a different direction beginning with the ascension of Winston Churchill to the Colonial Office

    on February 14, 1921 and the convening of the Cairo Conference in mid-March 1921.

    Griffiths then cites UN Security Council Resolution 242 regarding the inadmissibility of the

    acquisition of territory by war, a sound principle of law which, however, does not apply at all to

    Israels liberation or repossession in June, 1967 of territory that constitutes the Jewish National Home.What Griffiths fails to understand is that Israel never acquired title to Judea, Samaria and Gaza by war,and it is therefore under no obligation to withdraw from those regions that the Allied Powers accorded

    to or recognized as belonging to the Jewish People. As the devolee or assignee of the Jewish People,

    the State of Israel has inherited all the legal rights derived from the San Remo Resolution and theMandate for Palestine that were vested in the Jewish People by the unanimous decision of the Supreme

    Council of the Principal Allied Powers. As a direct result of this decision, Palestine, to use Griffiths

    term, was awarded to World Jewry represented by the Zionist Organization to establish their NationalHome there with the full agreement of Britain, while the great bulk of former Ottoman territory in the

    Middle East (over 90%) was set aside for the Arabs for their own national self-determination. In the

    Six-Day War of June 1967, Israel was only recovering territories that were originally designated or

    intended for the Jewish State by the Principal Allied Powers. The same situation obtained when Francerecovered Alsace-Lorraine in 1918 from Germany that had annexed the French territory in 1871 as a

    result of the Franco-Prussian War in which France was soundly defeated. Would Griffiths have called

    Alsace-Lorraine French-occupied Germany, as he does for Israels recovery of Jewish land in theSix-Day War, and would he say that it was inadmissible for France to re-acquire its former territory

    by war?

    Griffiths stands on very shaky ground when he claims that Judea and Samaria (misspelled by him as

    Sumaria) are held by Israel in belligerent occupation, to which the Fourth Geneva Conventionapplies. It is only because Griffiths and the British Foreign Office he represents are so completely

    ignorant of the significance of the San Remo Resolution and the provisions of the Mandate for

    Palestine that he can with a straight face say that the territories liberated or repossessed by Israel in

    1967 are under belligerent occupation. If Griffiths were right, that would mean that such territories, i.e.,Judea, Samaria and Gaza, had never been part of Mandated Palestine and the Jewish National Home.

    He is also misleading regarding the position of the Israeli Supreme Court in this matter, which is more

    complex than what he thinks. The Court has never decided on the merits or accepted as a provenargument that Judea and Samaria are occupied territories under international law, but merely adopted

    the position of the Government of Israel, that it adjudicate all cases before it as if Judea and Samaria

    were governed by the laws of war embodied in the Hague Regulations and Fourth Geneva Convention,without ruling on the actual legal status of these territories. In adopting this egregious policy based on

    the erroneous legal advice of then Military Advocate-General Meir Shamgar, the Government of Israel

    violated its own constitutional law and caused foreign states to believe that this indeed was the legal

    status of those regions, even though, ironically enough, Shamgar himself, later President of theSupreme Court, issued a disclaimer stating that he did not consider these military administered

    territories to be necessarily occupied territories. Despite his disclaimer, he did refer to them in that

    incorrect sense in an article he wrote and then published in a book he himself edited (see MilitaryGovernment in the Territories Administered by Israel 1967-1980: The Legal Aspects, Hemed Press

    [Jerusalem], Reprint Edition, 1988, pp. 13; 28; 31).

    To call Judea, Samaria and Gaza the Occupied Palestinian Territories is not only an oxymoron but

    also an abuse of the English language in the service of the imperialistic Arab cause, as well as anoutright denial or attempted erasure of the legal, political and diplomatic history of the Palestine

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    Question. For Griffiths, this history only begins in 1967, which is why he and Foreign Secretary

    William Hague can duplicitously proclaim that Judea, Samaria and Gaza are or have been under

    belligerent occupation ever since that year. There is no doubt that all of the State of Israel constitutes

    Palestinian territory and that no part of former Mandated Palestine including Judea, Samaria andGaza, whether included or not in the borders of the State of Israel can be considered Israeli occupied

    territories. If that were truly the case, such an appellation would make a mockery of the San Remo

    Resolution and Mandate for Palestine since, as already noted, all of Palestine was meant to be includedin the Jewish State. The claim made by the British Foreign Office, especially in the wake of the illegal

    and now-lapsed Oslo Accords, that Judea, Samaria and Gaza belong to a fictitious Palestinian

    Nation that was invented circa 1969 by the Arab League with the assistance of the United Nations isa complete falsification of international law. If Mr. Griffiths and his superiors were more honest or did

    more of their homework, both he and they would come to the same conclusion I have reached that

    Judea, Samaria and Gaza are not and have never been Israeli occupied territories.

    Britain, as the country most responsible for the adoption of the San Remo Resolution as a result ofwhich it received the Mandate for Palestine to create the Jewish State has slipped into amnesia in

    regard to what it was committed to do but never did. Any facetious argument that an independent

    Jewish State was not the intended goal of these basic documents is belied by the evidence in the British

    archives and the statements made by the British and French leaders at the time of their formulation.When Foreign Secretary George Nathaniel Curzon called the San Remo Resolution the Magna Carta of

    the Zionists in a letter addressed to Prime Minister Lloyd George dated October 29, 1920, he spoke the

    absolute truth. In that letter, Curzon was certainly referring to all of the land of Palestine, includingundoubtedly Judea, Samaria and Gaza.

    The British Foreign Office has a duty to review its own diplomatic archives and records during the

    Balfour-Curzon period, to learn how Palestine came into being as the Jewish National Home before it

    acts on the pro-Arab, anti-Zionist conception that Judea, Samaria and Gaza should become the 22ndArab state in the world. Moreover, it should bow its head in contrition for assenting to the artificial

    claims of the so-called Palestinians to appropriate internationally recognized Jewish land for that

    nefarious purpose and for turning its back on the noble cause of Zionism that it once so eagerlysupported when doing so suited the goals of the British Empire. No less a great British statesman as

    David Lloyd George accused his own country, upon hearing of the 1939 White Paper, of committing

    an act of national perfidy vis-a-vis the Jewish People for not keeping its plighted word to the Jews,who, he said, had honourably kept their part of the bargain to help the Allied cause in World War I (see

    my book, The Legal Foundation and Borders of Israel under International Law, pp. 406-408). Mr.

    Griffiths should reflect on Lloyd Georges condemnation of this British perfidy which continuesunabated even today.

    David, you have my permission to send a copy of this letter to Mr. Griffiths and to Foreign Secretary

    Hague, as well as the letter I wrote on the San Remo Resolution to the Prime Minister of Canada, Mr.

    Stephen Harper, and my letter to Ilkka Uusitalo, as you see fit. Let us hope that they will not only read

    these letters, but appreciate their significance.Best regards,

    Howard

    Tags:international law,William Hague,occupation ,Howard Grief,British Foreign

    Office ,Ambassador Matthew Gould

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