Conrad Black: The moral bankruptcy of Carney’s Israel sanctions

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It is dismal and unsurprising that Canada has joined with 11 other western countries in purporting to abandon the importation of anything coming from areas of the West Bank of the Jordan River that have recently been encroached upon by Israeli settlers. It is embarrassing that any of these countries would at this critical point In the Middle East join in such a futile gesture. The announcement was accompanied by a pompous reassertion of the ambition of these 12 countries to assist in a two-state solution to the Palestinian question. (The other states are Denmark, Finland, France, Iceland, Ireland, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.)

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The Palestinians are not a distinct nationality but are essentially the Muslim and Christian Arabs of the former League of Nations Mandate taken from Ottoman territory at the end of the First World War that are not now located within Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Egypt, or the borders of Israel prior to the Six-Day War of 1967 and the Yom Kippur war of 1973. The notion of a Palestinian state was popularized by Arab nationalists led by Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser (1954 to 1970), in order to stir up antagonism to the State of Israel, and to distract the Arab masses from the misgovernment that was being inflicted upon almost all of them by their rulers.

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The fate of the Palestinians has been a tragic one, as the Arab powers declined to assist in relocating them from fetid refugee camps that were simply terrorist breeding grounds. In their desperation, when given the chance, because of President George W. Bush’s blind faith that democratic elections would always elevate a democratic government, they empowered the Hamas terrorists in Gaza and the Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon, and both are dedicated with suicidal determination to the extinction of Israel as a Jewish state. Israel was endorsed by the United Nations as a Jewish state in the recent aftermath of the destruction of most of the European Jews and half of the Jewish population of the world, approximately six million people, along with an approximately equal number of other victims of the Nazi death camps.

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No member state of the United Nations has greater international legitimacy, other than the founding and convening powers: the United States, United Kingdom, France, China, and to the extent that it represents the disintegrated Soviet Union, Russia. Canada and other countries joined when the United Nations was founded or subsequently, but Israel’s creation was supported by the United Nations by joint motion of the United States and the USSR (though because the Arab side rejected partition, the Jewish state did not emerge until after the 1948 war). Its borders remain notoriously disputed but it’s legitimacy as a homeland for the Jews is absolutely unquestionable. The Jews are, in addition, the senior local ethnic and religious group, having been in the land of Israel starting more than 4000 years prior to the birth of the Prophet Mohamed.

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The Palestinians could have had a state at any time in the last 35 years but their leaders, whether in the Palestine Liberation Organization or in Hamas, want a state that includes Israel and the return or immigration to Israel of enough Arab Muslims to be a governing majority with the declared intention of expelling, subjugating, or massacring the Jewish population, (one more time).