William Mehlman
Amidst the almost daily regurgitation of pseudo-intellectual speculation about how much of Israel's heartland should be sufficient to appease the gods of "Oslo," it becomes increasingly important to bear in mind that the entire agreement, from inception to completion, is a monumental legal fraud.
Indeed, on any sliding scale of historical deceits, the deal Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres cut with Yasser Arafat belongs right up there on the Himalayan heights with the 1938 Munich pact that dealt Czechoslovakia to Hitler, and the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop agreement to divide up Poland. Even in this rarified company, the Israel-PLO deal stands in a class by itself. Czechoslovakia and Poland, after all, were never consulted about their betrayal. In the case of Oslo, the victim, Israel, became a participating party to its own truncation.
In a 102-page petition presented to Israel's High
The signing of the Oslo accords involved fourteen colossal violations of the laws of the State of Israel.
At the front of the line stands Olso's unequivocal violation of the well known Section 11-B of the Law and Administration Ordinance and a parallel law entitled Area of Jurisdiction and Powers Ordinance. The latter was devised in September 1948 by Pinchas Rosen, Israel's first Minister of Justice, at the behest of David Ben-Gurion, for the consolidation and unity of the Land of Israel. Section 11-B was added by the Knesset on June 27, 1967, three weeks after the liberation of Judea, Samaria, the Golan Heights, eastern Jerusalem, and the Gaza Region. It is implicit in Section 11-B, as well as being a logical consequence of its very content and purpose, that no governing body in the State of Israel has the legal authority to cede any portion of the Land of Israel falling under its de facto jurisdiction to any foreign entity, which would, of course, include the PLO.
The overriding premise of Section 11-B and
its establishment as a major pillar of constitutional law was
the now rather unfashionable Zionist belief that the
Land of Israel in its entirety and by definition was the
exclusive property of the State of Israel--whether, as was the
case with eastern Jerusalem, de jure sovereignty was
exercised through actual annexation, or whether it
remained unincorporated under de facto sovereignty, as was
the case with Judea, Samaria and the Gaza region. In
seeking to exclude most of Judea, Samaria and Gaza
from ever becoming part of the State of Israel, Oslo was
predicated on a clear, self-defined violation of Israeli law.
Oslo's ramifications, unfortunately, extend well beyond that illegality. As the Grief petition points out, since Section 11-B and the Area of Jurisdiction and Powers Ordinance provide the legal scaffolding supporting the State of Israel's right to possess and govern all of the Land of Israel, Oslo's attempt to nullify that right in respect to Judea, Samaria and Gaza automatically places in legal doubt Israel's right to possess and govern any of the areas beyond the original Palestine Partition borders, including Jerusalem (the entire city), Lod, Ramle, Beersheba, and western Galilee, all of which lay outside the State on the first day of its existence. There is simply no way for the State of Israel to abdicate its right to possess and govern selected portions of the Land of Israel without calling into question its legal authority over the remainder, for as Grief duly notes, "the right is one and indivisible." Israel's enemies have never been reticent about raising that issue. It took Shimon Peres and his Oslo acolytes to furnish them with the legal ammunition with which to pursue it.
Oslo's second claim to infamy rests on its potential nullification of the Law of Return, which grants any Jew anywhere the privilege of obtaining Israeli citizenship for the asking. The most basic of Israel's founding statutes, it was designed to terminate the exilic status under which Jews had lived for nearly 2,000 years. Oslo takes dead aim at the Law of Return from two directions. First, it sets the stage for the creation of a new "Israeli in Exile in the Land of Israel" status for every citizen residing in any portion of Judea, Samaria and the Gaza region scheduled to be handed over to Arafat. Second, it suborns the rights guaranteed under the Law of Return, which were supposed to be exercisable throughout the Land of Israel, by barring Jewish settlement in any part of the land designated for surrender to the so-called Palestinian Authority.
Given the political surrealities extant in Israel, it would have been the height of illusion to imagine the High Court striking down Oslo, no matter how compelling the case against it. In fact, the High Court grudgingly acknowledged the strength of the Grief petition by directing the government to reply to it. But then, offering no justification, the Court opted to ignore the legal issues presented in the 102-page brief by labeling it a "political position" with no legal basis in fact, a patently false and evasive conclusion.
Despite this attempt to bury it, the Grief petition's ultimate value is in the legal foundation it has provided for an Israeli government that will one day inevitably have
(Continued on p.11)
Outpost - 4 - July-August 1998