Flying under the presumptuous banner, "Insight" (more like the blind leading the blind), Balmer and Lubell employ a combination of unsupported assertions, lies by omission, and testimony from a group found liable for publishing false information, to demonize Jews who choose, as is their right under international law, to live in the territories of Judea and Samaria (the "West Bank") and are now facing the prospect of having their homes demolished:
In fact, the Palestinian Arabs withdrew their claim to the land because they couldn't prove that it belonged to them, but the court responded to a motion by the libeling left-wing group Peace Now to order the Jewish home demolitions anyway.(Reuters) - The Jewish settlement of Migron perches high on a blustery hill in the occupied West Bank. Its inhabitants pay taxes, are hooked up to the electricity grid and get round-the-clock protection from Israeli soldiers.
Over the past decade the government has spent at least 4 million shekels ($1.1 million) on establishing and maintaining the cluster of squat, prefab bungalows, even building a neat tarmac road up the steep incline to the treeless ridge.
Yet despite all that state help, Migron is an illegal outpost, even under Israeli law, and its time is running out.
In an unprecedented ruling in August 2011, Israel's Supreme Court told the government to evacuate Migron by March 31, 2012. The land, the court said, belonged to Palestinians.
Balmer and Lubell get a multitude of historical details deliberately wrong in their story but an erudite commenter has left a comprehensive riposte:
We would only add that, contrary to previous false claims by Reuters correspondents, even Obama has not had the chutzpah to suggest that Jewish settlements are illegal.... exclusive political rights to the land in Judea, Samaria and East Jerusalem was granted to the Jews in trust in 1920 in the San Remo Convention. The British Mandate was in fact a trust agreement as shown by the first two paragraphs of Article 22 of the League of Nations Covenant. The Mandate had adopted the policy of Lord Balfour. That was to give the Jews exclusive political rights to Palestine in trust, to become vested not until the Jews had attained a population majority in all Palestine. Arnold Toynbee and Lewis Namier exlained the reason for this in a memorandum of the British Foreign Office dated September 19, 1917. The chief argument against the award of political rights to the Jews was that in 1917 they only constituted 10% of the population of all Palestine, even though they had had a plurality in Jerusalem since 1845 and a majority since 1863. Article 4 of the Mandate authorized the Zionist organization to advise the staff of the trustee. The Arabs tried to obtain permission to form an advisory panel, but its application was rejected. The Mandate was also an integral part of the 1924 Anglo-American convention, making it the domestic law of the UK and the US as well as International Law. England abandoned its trusteeship and guardianship in 1948. Prior to that time, the Arabs were threatening violence so the General Assembly recommended that Israel give up part of its remaining grant. (transJordan had been eliminated in 1922 for England’s political reason to avoid a quarrel with the French. Ben Gurion was agreeable, in the UNSCOP hearings to give up part of the Jew’s political or national rights to even the remaining part of Palestine, 22%, if the UN would OK enough land so that a workable state could be reconstituted. Since 1920, the Arabs, by violence and threats of violence have been using extortion to obtain the political rights to Palestine granted in that year. In 1939, in a White Paper, as stated by Winston Churchill, Britain reneged on its promise to the Jews by denying them the right of immigration so that they could become a majority population. Nevertheless, after the war of Indepence in 1948, 700,000 Arabs fled, most without ever seeing a Jewish soldier, and that was much immigration from Europe, giving the Jews a majority of population. Now the Jews constitute 80% of the population within the Green Line and if the West Bank were added it would still have a majority. It has agreed with Jordan not to claim Jordainian land, and it unilaterally gave away the Gaza strip to the Gazans, withdrawing all Jewish population from that area. There is no illegality in Jewish settlement in the West Bank as stated by US Presidents after Carter and before Obama.
