Comments on: Supreme Court’s latest decisions inch towards West Bank annexation

By: Greg Pollock

Greg Pollock — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 06:04:50 +0000

Aaron,
This is probably a dead thread, but I chanced back so will reply:
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It’s not that I worry about restricting non-Jewish immigration; it’s that the right of Jewish ingress is unalterable via the Declaration. Whatever I think of, say, the huge Russian influx is irrelevant. The right of ingress is foundational.
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I frame the actual question at hand as the right to make a family. Importing a spouce is not the same as marrying a criminal. A wife may have her life shattered because her husband is convicted of a crime; but they are both autonomous agents under the criminal code. Her husband has forfited his right to a family of the moment through his criminal act. If the sole reason for forbiding a spouce to enter Israel is her/his ethnicity, the Declaration forbids such; race and ethnicity may not be used to deny equal application of law. So that which ensures Jewish ingress stops the hand of the State in this matter, and I expect this ruling to be overturned way down later.
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On an equally important note, I believe your Declaration your best refuge to increasingly unstable legal and political acts within Israel. I think you have a sense that the Knesset is unstable. So I, not a Jew, advocate the Declaration as the obvious place where people of differing views can stand, together, at least of a while.

By: aristeides

aristeides — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 16:13:52 +0000

Aaron, the logic of your position requires you to accept racism as a good. Don’t you find this rather perverse?

By: directrob

directrob — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 12:19:09 +0000

“… disagreement over morality actually involves a disagreement over facts …”
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This is clearly case of a different moral compass, not a case of different facts.

By: Aaron

Aaron — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 09:53:25 +0000

Greg, there’s a lot we agree on. I agree that the Declaration of Independence is an important part of Israel’s constitution. I agree that if the intent of the law were to restrict the citizen’s actions based on the citizen’s ethnicity, it would be unconstitutional. We both apparently agree that Israel has a legitimate interest in restricting non-Jewish immigration (questions of marriage aside).
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As is often the case, the apparent disagreement over morality actually involves a disagreement over facts. You say the citizen is “the intended, direct hit.” I take the legislators’ and judges’ descriptions of the law’s purpose at face value when they say otherwise. Partly, that’s because I support the law because of its overt justification, not because of some covert intent against Arab citizens, so I can believe that others are motivated by that overt reason as well. Though maybe if you believed that the citizen *was* “collateral damage,” like the wife of a criminal sentenced to prison, you would still oppose the law. So our disagreement probably isn’t *all* about facts. In any case, I do respect the position you’re arguing.

By: Greg Pollock

Greg Pollock — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 05:28:30 +0000

Once citizenship is granted to non-Jews in a substantial way, as was done with its Arab residents, the logic of demographic conflict is forever curtailed–unless that citizenship is revoked. The past Knesset decision to grant citizenship trumps corporate Jewish Israel, by its own hand. The harm is indeed directly against the citizen petitioning the State for entry of his/her spouce. Certainly no one who honors Judaism can deny that the making of a family is a fundamental form of human happiness. The citizen is not collaeral damage, but rather the intended, direct hit.
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It doesn’t really matter, as I just post on this site, but I want to make my position on Zionism and Israel clear. Israel is a State within the United Nations. It has a founding document created with the UN, and that document is a meta-constitution, framing certain parameters of a full constitution; this meta-constitution is, as far as I know, unique in constitutional thought, a creative product of Israel at its inception. Israel has power; it is as real as the sun. Zionism is irrelevant for me, for the Declaration of Independence enshrines free ingress of all Jews (save for issues of criminality, I guess), and that can never be taken away. What happens within Israel, after ingress, is similary framed by the Declaration. Its promise of full equality in social and political rights nullifies any State action on direct demographic competition among citizens as envisioned by the majority of the High Court panel. Crucially, the Declaration forbids use of race to skew that equality. I firmly believe that this High Court decision will some day be declared unconstitutional; and I assert yet one more time that Israel is not totally bereft of a written consitution.
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The occupation is analytically distinct, if not so in life. If you cannot advance toward the promise of equality among your citizens, I think the occupation permanent.
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“The alien living with you must be treated as one of your native-born. Love him as yourself, for you were aliens in Egypt. I am the LORD your God.” Leviticus 19:34 (with other verses of similar content elsewhere) The totality of the Torah is inconsistent. Choose which parts to live by.
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This fight is not between Arabs and Jews. It is between Jews and Jews; Arabs and Arabs. And this is the view I will defend in my remaining time.

By: Aaron

Aaron — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 19:34:42 +0000

On a couple side issues: Don’t appeals to the Geneva Conventions support my point, that this should be viewed as mostly a “normal” occupation as covered by the Conventions, abnormal mainly in its length? I mean, assuming that this is an occupation in the legal sense as well as the common usage of the word “occupation.” The question of settlements, as opposed to the occupation itself, seems irrelevant to the topics in the article here.
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I had second thoughts about my “conflicting goods” point right after I pressed the Submit button. Practically any evil act is an attempt to achieve *some* good, no matter how disordered. What I was trying to get at is that both sides are reasonable here. It’s not good versus evil.

By: Aaron

Aaron — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 19:23:43 +0000

There’s plenty of ethnic discrimination going on behind this law, but it’s not against the Israeli citizen, it’s against the non-citizen spouse. Obviously, that harms the citizen too, but the intent is only to keep out the non-citizen. It’s an example of what the Catholics call “double effect”: the citizen is affected as a consequence, but that was not the intent or motivation. You can say that the citizen doesn’t care whether she was the intentional or unintentional victim, but I think the question of intended and “double” effects makes a difference morally and juridically.

By: Hostage

Hostage — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 07:11:46 +0000

Re:Journalist Amira Hass already noted that as far as Israel is concerned, there are four classes of Palestinians

Well that should also include the Palestinian citizen/refugees and their descendants who have no right to leave and return to their country of origin or nationality, while Jews living anywhere else have boundless discretion to enter the country and take up residence.

By: Greg Pollock

Greg Pollock — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 05:00:09 +0000

Aaron, the issue is one of equal protection as guaranteed by your Declaration of Independence. That document forbids descrimination by race amongst other things. Thus race cannot be used as a category of exclusion baring Israeli citizens from importing their spouce. You can deny all such importations, but not exclude one racial category.
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These words are in your founding document. If you cannot abide by them, then spit your founding out.
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As to one good weighed by another, by your logic you might forbid Israeli Arab citizens from having more than two children because of the demographic danger to the Jewish State which, apparently, they at that point don’t really belong to. As the minority 5 Jutices opposing this decision noted, a demographic threat based on importing one’s spouce is hysterical. The Jewish character of the State is enshrined in the right to free ingress of Jews, which does not apply to other races (so an Arab would have had to be the spouce of an Israeli citizen for entry, but Jews need no such condition at all). The logic you suggest could as well be applied to the explusion of Arab Israeli citizens, which would also contravene the direct decision of your founders in the Declaration. True Israeli patriotism is not with you.

By: Hostage

Hostage — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 04:50:27 +0000

@ Aaron regarding the statement “There has been no “[t]ermination of all claims or states of belligerency and respect for and acknowledgement of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area…,” etc.

That actually requires Israel to drop its belligerent claim of a right to – wait for it – place another people and their territory under belligerent military occupation. The Report of the Sharm el-Sheikh Fact-Finding Committee (aka “The Mitchell Report”) said the Israeli withdrawal from Arab territory acquired by force is a prerequisite to the subsequent termination of all states of belligerency:
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“During the June War of 1967, Israeli armed forces occupied the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip, as well as the Syrian Golan Heights and the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula. UN Security Council Resolution 242, passed in 1968, restated the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war and applied this international principle specifically to the Israeli occupation of Arab territory. Since then, all serious efforts to end the Israeli-Arab conflict have depended on implementation of this resolution requiring the Israeli withdrawal from Arab territory acquired by force and the subsequent termination of all states of belligerency.
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Security Council Resolution 1322, consideration of which forms part of this Committee’s mandate, makes explicit reference to several other Security Council resolutions, all of which emphasize the de jure applicability of the Fourth Geneva Convention (“Convention”) to the Occupied Palestinian Territories, the illegality of Israel’s unilateral annexation of Jerusalem and of the steps Israel has taken to change the city’s character. The international community, including the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, has repeatedly affirmed that the Convention applies de jure to the Occupied Palestinian Territories and the International Court of Justice has noted that the Geneva Conventions are customary international law as well. Israel itself originally recognised the Convention’s de jure applicability but subsequently reversed itself.
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The Committee’s recommendations are in line with the Convention, and appear directly linked to the Convention’s application. Israel’s settlement policy, for example, is “illegal under international law” precisely because of the application of Article 49 of the Convention which prohibits the transfer of an Occupying Power’s civilian population into the territory it occupies.” …
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“CONCLUSION
Israel’s emphasis on security considerations alone, while taken very seriously by the Palestinians, cannot dictate the course of peace talks or attempts to end the current crisis. The PNA has repeatedly expressed its desire to resume security cooperation with Israel within the context of those elements necessary to make such cooperation sustainable. The Committee has correctly identified that security cooperation is not sustainable without meaningful political negotiations and that such negotiations cannot exist while Israel continues to colonise the territory from which it is ostensibly negotiating a withdrawal.”
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http://www.consilium.europa.eu/ueDocs/cms_Data/docs/pressdata/EN/reports/ACF319.pdf