Hmm, your inconsequential opinion.
Now what decisively counters such violent and criminal ignorance is the presence of violated law that has been ratified by the state of Israel.
My belief is that to continue the facts on the ground for Israeli annexation of territory that is not Israeli, like clock-work, every few years Israel pounces upon any excuse to initiate yet another land war. Hamas cannot be routed by military action. Gaza has been invaded in the past, to again have Hamas rebuild, yet despite its latest strengthened position, the past year proved to be among the quietest periods of rocket launches into Israel.
Hamas even joined into the recent, but precarious, unity government with Fatah. That was Israel's provocation to find cause for violent action and disruption. It wasn't the deaths of 3 Israeli's in the West Bank that prompted this war -- it was rejuvenated diplomacy between Hamas and Fatah. Since the 2 decade old Israeli assistance in its founding to oppose Fatah, Hamas is Israel's great deception and Machiavellian ploy. Israel's greatest fear is a relative moral standing against its opposition, and a such a diplomatic effort for Palestinian governance leaves Israel as the lone and prime perpetrator of high international crimes. Palestinian diplomacy and unstoppable moves towards even greater international recognition that go beyond the Palestinian Authority already having been recognised as a state government of the West Bank (9 states against the world do not nullify such reality), and then onto involvement into the International Criminal Court (ICC). For strategic goals of expansion, Israel needs a violent and ever present nemesis to redirect focus from Israeli crimes to the east.
Though not party to the ICC, such an international judicial body can directly act if a member state, such as he Palestinian Authority will be -- as I predict it to be within 2 years -- and appeals against any extra-territorial aggressor perpetrating crimes in its territory. Israel fears becoming a pariah, one on par and as widely vocally vilified as its former associate, the former Apartheid regime of South Africa. As Israeli expansion and high crimes continue, this will occur. Time is running out, and Israel will continue its illegal land grabs and distractionary wars.
As an insurgent entity such, Hamas cannot be militarily defeated, as known by Israel and well demonstrated by Hamas continually returning in strength after Israeli invasions of Gaza. There is the other Israeli rational for this war -- keep Hamas' cause alive to further Israeli territorial gain in the West Bank.
That all said, Zorkorist, to absolutely counter your view of modern justification of expansion by military might, here's what I've written in the past concerning Israeli violation of law when annexing territory beyond it's state jurisdiction:
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Rather than any plausible settlement with its occupied native populations, the state of Israel has a strategic desire to maintain the status quo with a divided and weakened Palestinian presence all to acquiesce its continued criminal expansion and ethnic cleansing.
Currently, under occupation, Palestinians face extreme economically competitive disadvantages. It is intentionally not a level playing field as a weak and divided Palestine more easily enables Israel to imply a guise of extreme and even illegal security measures to further illegally annex territory for colonisation.
These are high international crimes, and reasonably, quite antagonising to the native populations.
Israel, for that dreadful policy of lebensraum, is in control of the viability of Palestinians, but chooses to maintain oppression all for state strategic purposes. Potential Palestinian success and sovereignty is the number one obstacle to the implementation of a greater and more expansive state of Israel.
The Palestinian Authority (now a recognised state government, though just of the West Bank), rather than the militant wing or even political wings of Hamas, is conducting a unilaterally peaceful, diplomatic, and a just way forward with the avocation of civil disobedience in their occupied land against the aggressors, in combination with a route to achieve a semblance of state sovereignty and a gained UN seat to lobby for criminal charges and further condemnation against Israel expansionist actions. These Israeli action along with the brutal ghettoization of Gaza, provide a Machiavellian mechanism of both dividing any possibility of a Palestinian unity government, plus a ready bogeyman to distract and demonise for Israel’s propaganda PR blitzes of its good against evil.
Yes, Israel did de-colonise from the Gaza strip, in favour of supplemented colonisation with expanded annexation in through the West Bank. A regular PR line of Israel is to keep repeating that withdrawal of Gaza without heed to its growing high crimes to the east. Gaza has long been densely populated, unlike the diverted focus to far more sparse West Bank regions for expropriation, annexation, and colonisation. With Israeli ghettoization and now fairly regularly destructive military invasions, to Israel’s long term strategic advantage for state territorial expansion to the east, Gaza has been willfully fostered into a powderkeg and demagogue.
Israeli action outside of its state borders fail a moral stiff test. It is not hyperbole to correctly and accurately align historical pogroms and contemporary legal language against Israeli extra-jurisdictional crimes. A charged language is apt as the accurate parallels with history are damning indictments of Israeli state action:
· As Germany of the past, Israel has a state policy of lebensraum. Ironically, rather than Germanise lands beyond its border, Israel is applying its military to Zionise extra-territorial lands and displace its undesirable residents. "We are short of land, we are short of air, let us breathe in this country." Distasteful echoes of the past ring true today.
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Suddenly we are short of space here in Israel, which has become full to capacity and needs lebensraum. Every cultured person knows that this is a despicable German concept, banned from use because of the associations it brings up. Still, people are starting to use it, if not outright then with a clear implication: We are short of land, we are short of air, let us breathe in this country.
When we embarked on the Six-Day War did we want to remove a threat or did we want to gain control in order to spread out? That's what happens after 44 years of mire and moral corruption,
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which distort things and make us forget the original objective and replace it with an entirely different one. We were fortunate when we occupied the West Bank because had we not done so, where would we have come to live? And who knows how high housing prices would have risen? The divine promise is now being revealed in all its ability to prophesy about real estate.
The founding fathers, as opposed to the Diadochi who fought for control after Alexander the Great's death, represented a different approach, for the most part. Between "A little goes a long way," and "Don't bite off more than you can chew," they chose to bite; they even agreed to the 1947 UN partition plan for lack of choice. They believed that all the objectives of rational Ben Gurion-style Zionism could be fulfilled even in "Lesser Israel," which is more complete and more at peace with itself. And it has no need for lebensraum, may God preserve us.
· Israel has long implemented policies akin to apartheid with militarily enforced separate areas and separate laws in the West Bank. Palestinians are subverted in favour of Israeli while only those Israeli colonists, rather than their subjugated Palestinian neighbours, are granted a political say upon state policy by Israel.
Balanced, condemnation upon Israel is not warranted out of its simple existence nor the presence of Jews, but of that state's extra-territorial policies and actions. So, also please avoid a the expected trivial misrepresentation for no peace being achievable simply due to hate for Jews or that myself, a Jew, gets-off "Jew-baiting" by presenting comparisons to a convicted Germany...
Those in rabid and absolute defence of Israel will again likely cry with hyperbole over such applicable language, then I call for a new tact. Try avoiding the familiar arguments into ad nauseum and ‘Jew-hating’ or ‘anti-Semitic’ tarring against internet messengers, and to constructively put an end to the likes of applicably vile language against Israel. You can accomplish this via turning to a rationale course of action by pressuring Israel to cease its condemnable actions.
That promoting and applauding in favour of Zionist expansionist (not that a title of Zionism should equate to evil, rather unilateral territorial expansion is a crime) is antagonistic and ought to be reasonable concluded as such to every honest witness. Do such high crimes warrant crimes of humanity attacks upon Israeli civilians, as per more personal terrorism and indiscriminate rocket attacks? No. Yet those actions represent a minority of belligerents and most certainly do not give a pass to the continued and disproportionately greater instigating crimes by Israel.
In the context of Israeli occupation, subjugation, and colonising of the West Bank of Palestine, categorising what is to be unjust is fairly easy:
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Charter of the United Nations: Article I:
2. To develop friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples, and to take other appropriate measures to strengthen universal peace;
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United Nations Declaration of Human Rights
· without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty.
· Article 9
o No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.
· Article 13
o (1) Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state.
o (2) Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.
· Article 15
o (1) Everyone has the right to a nationality.
o (2) No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality.
· Article 17
o (2) No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.
Though the above are mostly ideals, some points have been ratified into international law, particularly those ratified and signed by the state of Israel.
An above point there of all having a right to nationality, was directly born out of the aftermath of WWII with mass-refugees and the struggle of sovereign state borders through to that of the founding of the state of Israel as home for some stateless Jews. A lesson of that conflict was an enabler to high crimes against humanity was to deny a people their identity or nationality. When considering Palestinians, an occurrence that is now commonly practiced in simple forums as this, to even high international forum such as the UN General Assembly. People have a sovereign right to identity, and to deny such an identity is an enabler to deny and confiscate property, through to the demeaning treatment and expulsion of such an identified group, all for the strategic territorial goals of supremacist ethnic cleansing.
The self-determination of Palestinians is directly offensive to Israeli state policy, as it further complicates and deters the expansionist colonisation of the state of Israeli into jurisdiction beyond its borders, tough occupied by the IDF.
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Definition of Aggression, United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3314 (XXIX).
Article 5:
3. No territorial acquisition or special advantage resulting from aggression is or shall be recognized as lawful.
Article 7
Nothing in this Definition, and in particular article 3, could in any way prejudice the right to self-determination, freedom and independence, as derived from the Charter, of peoples forcibly deprived of that right and referred to in the Declaration on Principles of International Law concerning Friendly Relations and Cooperation among States in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations, particularly peoples under colonial and racist regimes or other forms of alien domination: nor the right of these peoples to struggle to that end and to seek and receive support, in accordance with the principles of the Charter and in conformity with the above-mentioned Declaration.
Reaffirming such post-WWII international law, here are some of the historically sanctioned and recorded legal international views, that also include that of your USA:
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United Nations Resolution 242 (November 1967) - The situation in the Middle East:
..
Emphasizingthe inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war and the need to work for a just and lasting peace in which every State in the area can live in security,
1. Affirms that the fulfilment of Charter principles requires the establishment of a just and lasting peace in the Middle East which should include the application of both the following principles:
(i) Withdrawal of Israel armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict;
(ii) Termination of all claims or states of belligerency and respect for and acknowledgment of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force;
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United Nations Resolution 3236 (November 1974) - Question of Palestine:
Recognizing that the Palestinian people is entitled to self-determination in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations,
Expressing its grave concern that the Palestinian people has been prevented from enjoying its inalienable rights, in particular its right to self-determination,
Guided by the purposes and principles of the Charter,
Recalling its relevant resolutions which affirm the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination,
1. Reaffirms the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people in Palestine, including:
1. (a) The right to self-determination without external interference;
2. (b) The right to national independence and sovereignty;
Internationally, on a state-per-state basis, Israel is absolutely isolated upon a view of legal annexation and colonisation of extra-jurisdictional territory. Driving partisanship, Prime Minister Harper of Canada has been both praised and critiqued for his unwavering support for Israel, yet even the government that he leads is unequivocal upon the illegality of Israeli aggression:
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Foreign Affairs
Status of Jerusalem
Canada considers the status of Jerusalem can be resolved only as part of a general settlement of the Palestinian-Israeli dispute. Canada does not recognize Israel's unilateral annexation of East Jerusalem.
Occupied Territories and Settlements
Canada does not recognize permanent Israeli control over territories occupied in 1967 (the Golan Heights, the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip). The Fourth Geneva Convention applies in the occupied territories and establishes Israel's obligations as an occupying power, in particular with respect to the humane treatment of the inhabitants of the occupied territories. As referred to in UN Security Council Resolutions 446 and 465, Israeli settlements in the occupied territories are a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention. The settlements also constitute a serious obstacle to achieving a comprehensive, just and lasting peace.
Canada believes that both Israel and the Palestinian Authority must fully respect international human rights and humanitarian law which is key to ensuring the protection of civilians, and can contribute to the creation of a climate conducive to achieving a just, lasting and comprehensive peace settlement.
The Barrier
Canada recognizes Israel's right to protect its citizens from terrorist attacks, including through the restriction of access to its territory, and by building a barrier on its own territory for security purposes. However, Canada opposes Israel's construction of the barrier inside the West Bank and East Jerusalem which are occupied territories. This construction is contrary to international law under the Fourth Geneva Convention. Canada not only opposes Israel's construction of a barrier extending into the occupied territories, but also expropriations and the demolition of houses and economic infrastructure carried out for this purpose.
Israeli occupation, subjugation, and colonisation of Palestinian land is immoral, criminal, and as specified -- unjust. As far as states go, Israel is alone upon challenging this. If you choose to side with Israel in such opposition, then your perception of justice is quite incorrect.
With full support of legal citations through the legal and public diplomatic positions of the state of Israel’s closest allies, I have firmly displayed the illegality of Israeli actions. Further, with firm conviction and rational, I view the isolation and regular military invasions of Gaza (even Lebanon) serve the Israeli policy position of fostering/provoking extremism and surreptitiously prolonging any chance of achievable peace settlements, all to divide a nation of Palestine, deny the unity of such an already recognised state, and thereby permit the backhanded continuance of high crimes of aggression in the form of annexation and expropriation of territory beyond the state borders of Israel, all for the greater supremacist expansion and growth of a greater Israel.
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