Alan Landau takes the words right out of my mouth in his letter to the editor of the South China Morning Post on 3 January. I'd been planning a letter of my own pretty much along the same lines, but had not got around to it.
Good on Mr Landau!
Good on Mr Landau!
Yonden Lhatoo rhetorically asks in his column (“Israel’s perplexing hold over America allows it to treat global opinion with contempt”, December 29), what it is about Israel that entitles it to treat the collective will of the world with contempt and defy the UN.
The answer is that Israel continues to be unfairly singled out by the world and the UN in the most biased fashion.
While the Security Council reprimands Israel, two permanent members of that council, China and Russia, are themselves occupying powers. China occupies Tibet and Russia occupies, just most recently, Crimea.
These are just two of the most brazen examples of UN members that occupy territory.
There are literally 200 disputed territories in the world, including Cyprus, which Turkey partially occupies, and Western Sahara, which Morocco occupies. Yet, the UN singularly decries Israel’s so-called occupation of “Palestinian territories”.
Are these territories in fact “occupied”? The facts are clear. Israel took these lands in a defensive war in 1967 from Jordan, not from the Palestinians. The UN offered the Palestinians a country in 1947, but the Palestinians rejected it. Palestinian land was not taken, because there was not then, nor has there ever been, a sovereign country called Palestine.
Even conceding these lands as “occupied”, it has been Israel, time and time again, that has offered peaceful resolutions to the conflict, including painful territorial concessions. In 2000, Israel offered more than 90 per cent of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Yasser Arafat simply rejected the offer.
In 2008, Israel offered nearly 100 per cent of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, including east Jerusalem, but the Palestinians again rejected it. In 2005, Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza. The Palestinian response was to launch more than 10,000 rockets and missiles into Israel over the course of the last 10 years.
Israel deems the UN biased. The UN Human Rights Council is another prime example. Since its founding in 2006, it has condemned Israel more than 60 times, while condemning every country in the entire world collectively only a dozen times. No rational person could possibly believe that Israel is a greater violator of human rights than North Korea and Syria, but the UN seems to think so.
Lhatoo suggests that the US Congress is “Israel-occupied territory”, but it is not the US Congress that is occupied by Israel, it is the UN that is occupied by the Palestinians.
Alan Landau, Mid-Levels
