‘Israel’s Inalienable Rights’

Source

By Charles Glass ∙ Takimag.com via NormanFinkelstein.com ∙ January 19, 2009

Self-evident Truths: For Barack Obama on the Eve of His Inauguration as President of the United States.

• Israel has the inalienable right to pursue terrorists in the Gaza Strip and everywhere else they are hiding.
• Israel has the inalienable right to attack houses, mosques, churches, United Nations shelters, schools and hospitals to kill terrorists.
• Israel has the inalienable right to expropriate the land of Palestinian farmers for Israeli Jewish settlers.
• Israel has the inalienable right to arrest, torture and brutalise Palestinians who resist the expropriation of their land.
• Israel has the inalienable right to restrict the movement of Palestinians from one place to another in order to protect the settlements it has built on land expropriated, by inalienable right, from Palestinians.
• Israel has the inalienable right to demolish the houses of Palestinians, provided: the land on which the houses stand are needed for Israeli settlement; the owners of the houses are related to terrorist suspects; or Israeli military commanders determine that demolition is necessary.
• Israel has the right to erect concrete walls within the occupied territories to put more land on the Israeli side of the line for future use by Israeli settlers.
• Israel has the inalienable right to establish road networks that non-Israeli residents of the occupied territories are forbidden to use.
• Israel has the right to instruct the President of the United States how the Secretary of State must vote at the United Nations, which criminals must be granted presidential pardons and how he should treat other nations of the Middle East.
• Israel has the inalienable right to a minimum of $1,500 per Israeli Jewish citizen every year from the American Treasury.
• Israel has the inalienable right to the most sophisticated and lethal American weaponry.
• Israel has the right to deploy any and all American weapons on terrorists, whether in violation of international law or agreements with the United States not to deploy phosphorous and cluster bombs against civilian populations.
• Israel has the inalienable right to defy United Nations resolutions and World Court rulings. (A corollary of this right means that United Nations resolutions do not apply to Israel.)
• Israel has the inalienable right to accuse those who disagree with its occupation “anti-Semites,” unless the dissenters are Jewish, in which case Israel has the inalienable right to declare them “self-hating.”
• Israel has the inalienable right to demand the dismissal of American academics, journalists and politicians who voice opinions that question any of Israel’s inalienable rights.
• Israel has the inalienable right to invoke the memory of the victims of Nazi persecution to exempt itself from blame for any of its actions.
• Israel has the inalienable right to determine what rights the Palestinians have.

Thus,

• The Palestinians have no right to resist military occupation, confiscation of land, seizure of their water supply, collective punishment, arbitrary taxation, torture, public beatings, school closures and the destruction of crops and orchards.
• The Palestinians have no right to disobey Israeli soldiers’ orders or to appeal for outside assistance.
• The Palestinians have no right to non-violent civil disobedience, to armed struggle or to international representation to present their case.
• The Palestinians have no right to withhold taxes that pay for the Israeli occupation.
• The Palestinians have no rights, except those granted to them by the Israeli authorities, whose inalienable rights may not be contested.