The freeze is illegal by Israeli law and International law

Israpundit By Ted Belman

In my article Can Israel be both democratic and Jewish. I wrote that one value must trump the other.

“When these values are opposed to each other, one must trump the other. So the first question is which one trumps the other. If the legislation does so provide then that’s the end of it until new legislation says otherwise. In the absence of any such provision, the Courts would favour democracy because for them that is the most important value. The Knesset must so determine if it wants the highest value to be a Jewish state even if it violates democratic norms.”

Daniel Tauber, president of the American Legal Forum, in Israel’s Right to Build Settlements says “..the ban on settlement construction may itself violate Israeli law and its protections for human rights.”

The country’s first law, the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel, is also its first law dealing with human rights. The declaration states that Israel will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants, will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets, will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex. In the landmark case Kol Ha’am v. the minister of the interior, the Supreme Court held that the declaration was more than just a law - it was a law whose principles would be used in interpreting all other laws. This empowered the court to more strictly scrutinize and more easily strike administrative actions which violated human rights.

In 1992, the Knesset further entrenched legal protections for human rights, approving two semi-constitutional basic laws which stated that the basic rights of human beings are founded on the recognition of the worth of the human being, of the sanctity of his life and of the fact that he is free, and they shall be respected in the spirit of the principles in the Declaration on the Establishment of the State of Israel.

One of them, Basic Law: Freedom of Occupation, protects the right of “every citizen… to engage in any occupation, profession or line of work.” The other, Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty, states that “the life, body and dignity of a human being must not be injured by virtue of the fact that he is a human being,” that “a human being’s property must not be harmed” and that “every person is entitled to the protection of his life, limb and dignity.”

BY 1995, on the basis of the new basic laws, the Supreme Court controversially held in Mizrahi Bank v. Migdal Village that it could review and strike laws approved by the Knesset. Right or wrong, that decision allowed Gush Katif residents and their supporters to seek judicial cancellation of the disengagement on the basis of the basic laws in the case of Gaza Shore Regional Council v. the Knesset. There, the court agreed that the disengagement “infringes the human dignity of evacuated Israelis… protected in… the basic law.”

The court further held that the disengagement violated the evacuees’ property rights and their right to engage in their chosen occupations under Basic Law: Freedom of Occupation.

So how come, it upheld the disengagement. Evidently there is an exception to the above quoted laws, namely,

“a law befitting the values of the State of Israel, enacted for a proper purpose, and to an extent no greater than is required.”

This is a very important exception. It raises the issue of what are “the values” and what is “a proper purpose”. It opens the door to the Court deciding that protecting the Jewish nature of the state is a proper purpose. Were the Court to so decide, it would in no way detract from Israel being a democracy. In fact, a hall mark of democracy is the rule of law.

Tauber had other fish to fry. He ignored the exception and focused on the rule.

YET, DESPITE authorizing the expulsion of a particular class from an entire region, the court still affirmed that settlers have protected rights to their property, to choose their place of residence and make a home, family, community and life. This includes the right to physically accomplish those things - the right to build. The freeze violates that right exactly as the court described it. Unlike the disengagement, however, it was not approved in law and does not meet the above-mentioned exception.

But he doesn’t stop there.

In addition, there is the Declaration of the Establishment of the State, whose “spirit” the basic laws are supposed to protect. The declaration speaks of the “natural right” of the Jewish people to “Eretz Yisrael” and approvingly how “Jews strove… to reestablish themselves in their ancient homeland,” “made deserts bloom,” “built villages and towns, and created a thriving community.” That community extended beyond the Green Line into the heart of the “ancient homeland.”

Is this not another argument that “Jewish” should trump “democratic”. Not exactly, because,

“..the declaration also calls for equal protection and development of the country for all inhabitants, regardless of religion and race. As a restriction on Jewish settlement, the freeze utterly contradicts both the democratic and Zionistic values of the declaration.”

In effect he is saying that the Court has a duty to protect the Zionistic value of Jewish settlement of the land and an additional duty to not discriminate against Jews by preventing only them from building.

The Government attempted to avoid the “exception” by not passing “a law” to freeze Jewish construction. This, in itself, is illegal. Furthermore the Government isn’t at liberty to violate the Declaration of Independence by preventing Jewish settlement of Haaretz. (the land).

Tauber started his legal argument with the Declaration of Independence. I go back further. Not only is the freeze illegal pursuant to Israel law, it is illegal pursuant to international law.

Article 6 of The Palestine Mandate of 1922

” Administration of Palestine, while ensuring that the rights and position of other sections of the population are not prejudiced, shall facilitate Jewish immigration under suitable conditions and shall encourage, in cooperation with the Jewish agency…, close settlement by Jews on the land, including State lands and waste lands not required for public purposes.”

The Mandate has never been abrogated, nor can it be, even by the United Nations.

The the freeze is also illegal by international law.

The E.U.’s “East Jerusalem” Christmas Gift

By Moshe Phillips, AFSI

Christmas came early for Israel’s enemies this holiday season. On December 1 a “draft statement” from the European Union calling for the immediate restart of negotiations leading to a “viable state of Palestine…with East Jerusalem as its capital” made worldwide news.

And this is very curious because, after all, “East Jerusalem” does not actually exist. At least not yet. Let’s remember that “East Jerusalem” is what the Bible means when it refers to Jerusalem.

Words, and especially names, have meaning. Especially in the Middle East. The European Union obviously chose to use the words of Israel’s enemies deliberately.

So, just what is “East Jerusalem” and why is adding the word “East” to describe part of Judaism’s holiest city and Israel’s capital of any serious magnitude?

East and West in Israel are not simple geographic terms as they are in the U.S. Northeast Philadelphia, the Upper East Side in Manhattan and East L.A. are used to denote neighborhoods and sections of a city. In Israel, where Judea and Samaria have been labeled as the West Bank, things are different. The term West Bank was created by Arab propagandists to de-emphasize the area’s inherent Jewishness and to disassociate the land from the State of Israel. East Jerusalem was similarly invented.

What is “East Jerusalem”?

In the Christian Bible every single instance when a specific location in Jerusalem is mentioned it refers to an area that the E.U. would now see given to the Palestinians. The term “East Jerusalem” cannot be found in a Christian Bible. And that is because “East Jerusalem” is about as real as Santa Claus.

The expression “the Lights of Chanukah” refers to the Menorah in the ancient Holy Temple in Jerusalem. The EU sees the Temple Mount (the site of the Holy Temple in Biblical times) as included as part of this mythical creation of “East Jerusalem” in its unholy Palestinian state. There is no “East Jerusalem” in Judaism.

According to Wikipedia: “East Jerusalem refers to the part of Jerusalem captured by Jordan in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, and subsequently by Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War. It includes Jerusalem’s Old City and some of the holiest sites of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, such as the Temple Mount, Western Wall, Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.”

So, “East Jerusalem” is Jerusalem’s Old City and its surrounding neighborhoods. The original and oldest parts of Jerusalem are in this “East Jerusalem”.

There has never been in history an independent municipal entity known as “East Jerusalem”. And, for the record, there has never been an independent national entity known as Palestine…But, that is another story.

When anti-Israel extremists created the term “East Jerusalem” it was for one reason. They wanted to rip Israel’s capital apart in order to defeat Israel. This effort tragically gained full force with the Oslo Accords. This was fully explained in the B’tzedek Online Journal on December 30, 1996 in an editorial titled The War Has Just Begun:

“The Oslo Accords are indeed the fulfillment of the PLO “salami” strategy. That is to say, Israel shall be destroyed not through overt military action of Arab nations, but through the whittling away of Israeli resolve and slow but determined territorial expansion of a Palestinian state. Slice by slice Israel will be carved away by the knife of terrorism and world opinion, both deftly handled by the Israeli created Palestinian entity.”

The very name Jerusalem means city of peace, city of completeness and city of perfection. This was something that Bible believing Americans of all faiths in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were taught. See Hitchcock’s Bible Names Dictionary (1869) and Easton’s Bible Dictionary (1897) for more on the fascinating derivation of the name Jerusalem.

A Jerusalem that is not complete is just not Jerusalem.

The United States can do much to confront the EU on Jerusalem. The late Senator Jesse Helms wrote in 1996 that “Israel is the only nation in the world denied the right to choose its own capital. This second class citizenship among nations must end”.

Now is the time for friends of Israel to apply more pressure on the Obama Administration to move America’s Embassy. The U.S. government has failed to relocate the American Embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv for over ten years. The Jerusalem Embassy Act was passed by the U.S. Congress on October 23, 1995 and the law reads that “Jerusalem should be recognized as the capital of the State of Israel; and the United States Embassy in Israel should be established in Jerusalem no later than May 31, 1999″.

“For Zion’s sake I am not silent, and for Jerusalem’s sake I do not rest,” reads Isaiah 62:1. For Jerusalem’s sake contact your Congressman today and demand that the Jerusalem Embassy Act be honored.

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Moshe Phillips is a member of the Executive Committee of the Philadelphia Chapter of Americans for a Safe Israel – AFSI. The chapter’s website is at:

www.phillyafsi.com and Moshe’s blog can be found at http://phillyafsi.blogtownhall.com.