The poisoned fruit of GA resolution 2708

After becoming the 1137th pundit to declare (against all evidence) that Turkey is an ally of the United States, David Ignatius reverts to blaming Israel first in The U.S. needs to keep nudging Israel on a Gaza fix:

The Obama team recognizes that Israel will act in its interests, but it wants Jerusalem to consider U.S. interests, as well. The administration has communicated at a senior level its fear that the Israelis sometimes “care about their equities, but not about ours.”

This cautionary message — that Israel must act as a more reliable and responsible partner — may be the most important one conveyed this week.

The absurdity of this line of “reasoning” is that when Israel withdrew from Gaza, it was supposed to become a mini-Dubai (as Thomas Friedman put it the other day), instead Israel got a mini-terror state that threatened its southern population. Then Israel watched as the world stood by and refused to allowed Hezbollah, Syria and Iran violate Security Council Resolution 1701 with impunity allowing Hezbollah to stockpile three times the number of missiles at had before the 2006 war with Israel. Given that Israel sees that it can’t rely on others for its security, it’s not unreasonable for Israel to rely on itself.

And Ignatius shouldn’t worry his little head about this. Figthing Hamas – a proxy of Iran – serves America’s interests too.

Leon Wieseltier also gets things wrong (via memeorandum)

It is also the inevitable consequence of Benjamin Netanyahu’s cunning pronouncement last year that Israel is now endangered by “the Iran threat, the missile threat, and the threat I call the Goldstone threat.” The equivalence was morally misleading, and therefore dangerous. Ideological warfare is not military warfare. I have studied the entirety of the Goldstone Report, and whereas I do not doubt (and wrote in this magazine in the days before Goldstone) that Operation Cast Lead caused the unjustifiable death of non-combatants, I also do not doubt that the Goldstone Report, which was nastily indifferent to Israel’s security predicament and to the ethical challenges of Israeli self-defense, was an instrument in a broad campaign of delegitimation against Israel—and yet the threat of delegitimation is not like the threat of destruction. It is different in kind. A commando operation is not an appropriate response to an idea. “This was no Love Boat,” Netanyahu said yesterday. “It was a hate boat.” He is right, but so what? The threat of delegitimation is not a military problem and it does not have a military solution. And the attempt to give it a military solution has now had the awful consequence of making the threat still greater. The assault on the Mavi Marmara was a stupid gift to the delegitimators.

Wieseltier likes to project an image that he’s smarter than everyone else. But here he’s just being obtuse.

Charles Krauthammer, an astute observer of the situation, writes why delegitimization of Israel is a threat to its existence, concluding Those Troublesome Jews with:

What’s left? Nothing. The whole point of this relentless international campaign is to deprive Israel of any legitimate form of self-defense. Why, just last week, the Obama administration joined the jackals, and reversed four decades of U.S. practice, by signing onto a consensus document that singles out Israel’s possession of nuclear weapons — thus de-legitimizing Israel’s very last line of defense: deterrence.

The world is tired of these troublesome Jews, 6 million — that number again — hard by the Mediterranean, refusing every invitation to national suicide. For which they are relentlessly demonized, ghettoized and constrained from defending themselves, even as the more committed anti-Zionists — Iranian in particular — openly prepare a more final solution.

The campaign to undermine Israel’s legitimacy has been going on for some time. The late Jeane Kirkpatrick noted in 1989 in How the PLO was legitimized:

NOT long after Khrushchev articulated these distinctions, the United Nations General Assembly formally adopted them. Where the Charter permitted force by member states only to defend themselves against attack, GA Resolution 2708 XX (1970) created a new category of “legitimate” force which could be used against member states. This new right was confirmed in subsequent resolutions approving the struggle of “liberation” groups against “colonialism” by “all necessary means at their disposal.” Step by step the new doctrine was codified in the General Assembly. In 1970, with U.S. and Western support, the General Assembly adopted the “Declaration on Principles of International Law Concerning Friendly Nations” which further expanded the rights of “peoples” and restricted those of states by providing, inter alia, that “all peoples have the right freely to determine without external influences their political status and pursue their economic, social, and cultural development, and every state has the duty to respect this right in accordance with the provisions of the Charter.”
Moreover: “Every state has the duty to refrain from any forcible action which deprives peopIe … of their right to self-determination and freedom and independence. In their actions against resistance to such forcible action in pursuit of the exercise of self-determination, such peoples are entitled to seek and receive support, in accordance with the purposes and principles of the Charter” (emphasis added).
With this declaration, the General Assembly, more clearly and unambiguously than ever, took the position not only that “peoples” had rights superior to those of member states, but that states resisting the rights of “peoples” could themselves become a “threat to peace.” The General Assembly thus subordinated the principle of the “sovereign inviolability” of states to the struggle of “peoples” against “colonialism” and put important new restrictions on the right of states to selfdefense.

In 1969 it was the Soviets attempting to delegitimize Israel along with their Arab allies. Now, the Soviet Union is gone but the seeds it planted is bearing poisoned fruits.

Crossposted on Yourish.