By Chris Akiri
On Tuesday, December 7, 2017, the
U.S. President, Donald J. Trump, declared Jerusalem
as the capital of Israel ,
promising to relocate the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem . Following this declaration, there
was mass hysteria in the Arab world, condemning the declaration as a dead set
against the peace mediation process in the Israeli-Palestinian imbroglio and
against International Law. I dare say that a sizeable crop of the
anti-declaration protesters inveighs against the U.S.
recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel from the
angle of vision of religion and cheap, emotional sentiments.
From a remote period of antiquity,
except on those excruciating periods when it was conquered and occupied by more
powerful enemies, the City of Jerusalem, located in the Judean Hills of Israel
and appears 719 times in Bible verses, has been the capital of the United
Monarchy of Israel over which ruled countless Hebrew monarchs, including, but
not limited to, David and Solomon (1 Kings 1:37, 2 Samuel 8:11-21 and 1Kings
8:21).
If any other group, including the
original inhabitants of the City, the Jebusites (not Arabs), refused or omitted
to lay claim to their city, such a group would be said to have slept on its
rights and overtaken by the equitable doctrine of laches and acquiescence or
prescription, for where were the Jebusites, the Perizzites, the Amorites, etc.,
when David and Solomon, for example, reigned over Israel, with its capital in
Jerusalem, for 33 and 40 years on end, respectively? The hackneyed Latin maxim,
vigilantibus et non dormientibus jura
subveniunt (the laws aid those who are vigilant, not those who sleep upon
their rights) has been held to be valid from time immemorial.*US President Donald Trump and Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu |
Article 2 (4) of the Charter of the United Nations forbids the use of force in
the internal relations of States. Against that background, let us consider the
following facts: Israel
was created by the General Assembly Resolution 181 in 1947 and, on May 14,
1948, became the sovereign State of Israel. Thirty-three Member States
of the UN voted in favour of the Resolution; 13 against, 10 abstained and one
was absent. No sooner did Israel
become an independent sovereign State than all the Arab States launched
ferocious attacks against the young State, in defiance of Resolution 181 of the
UN. So, who is setting UN Resolutions at naught, if we must reason from cause
to effect? The wonted discrimination against Israel in the UN, now hallowed by
custom, explains why Michael Reisman contends that “Article 2 (4) was part and parcel of a complex collective security
process”, emphasizing that the obvious collapse of the process had
undermined the original understanding behind the sub-section. Correct!
Or how do you explain the fact
that, although Israel has been referred to as the “Occupying Power” 530
times in General Assembly Resolutions, there has been no single reference to
Indonesia, in East Timor, or to Turkey, in Northern Cyprus, to Russia, in areas
of Georgia or in Ukraine’s Crimea, to Morocco, in Western Sahara, to Vietnam,
in Cambodia or to Armenia, in areas of Azerbaijan as an “Occupying Power”?
Anti-Semitism? Or giving credit to the Urhobo aphorism that the earthworm navigates
its way through the softest part of the soil?
Since May 14, 1948, all Arab States
and Iran have consistently
vowed to remove Israel
from the world map. In view of this, Israel
has decided to hold on to certain Palestinian areas, including the West Bank,
Gaza Strip and Golan Heights (captured in the Six-Day war in 1967) as buffer
states to prevent a direct incursion of Palestinian and other aggressor States
into the Israeli State . And Israel is an “Occupying Power”?
Two of the great religions in the
world, Christianity and Islam, have their holy places to which their adherents
make annual pilgrimages— Christians to Jerusalem, in Israel, and Muslims to
Mecca and Medina, in Saudi Arabia. Besides this fact, Jerusalem has suffered untold hardships. In
its long and chequered history, Jerusalem , in Israel , has
been attacked 52 times, captured and re-captured 44 times, besieged 23 times
and destroyed twice. In April, 637 AD, the same year the Arabs started their
conquest and occupation of North Africa, what later became “The Maghreb”,
Caliph Umar travelled from Saudi Arabia
to Jerusalem to receive the submission of Jerusalem to his army of
conquest. The Arab conquest of that year solidified their control over Palestine , a control that
was not to be threatened until the First Crusade in the late 11th century.
According to the Chronological
Reference Points (Middle East Insight) of January-February, 1999), Jerusalem was conquered by the Canaanites (Jebusites) in
1200 BCE; in 1000 BCE, King David conquered Jerusalem . In 960 BCE David’s son, Solomon,
built the First Jewish Temple in Jerusalem .
The first Arab conquest and occupation of Jerusalem spanned the period AD
637-1099, during which period the Dome of the Rock was built (AD 691) on the
sites of the demolished Temples built by Solomon and other Jews.
The Byzantines (AD 324-614), who built the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in AD
335; the Persians (AD 614-629) and the Byzantine Christians (AD 629-638) were
successive conquerors of Jerusalem .
Other conquerors of Jerusalem
included the Umayyads, the Romans, the Abbasids, the Crusaders, the Ayyubids,
the Mamluks and the Ottomans. The City was placed under British Mandate in 1917
after Britain
drove away the Ottoman Turks during the First World War (1914-1918). The British
hung on to the City till 1948, when the Balfour Declaration was considered and
adopted by the UN.
Quite clearly, the common and
unseemly threads that run through the kaleidoscopic history of Israel ’s Jerusalem
are conquests and reconquests, including the displacement, banishment, exile,
dispersion and decimation of the Jewish nation as well as the expropriation of
their property.
By reason of the historical facts
above and of the gnawing question as to “What
is Israel without an undivided Jerusalem?” the 104th Congress of the United
States of America passed the Jerusalem Embassy Act, now a public law of the US,
on October 23, 1995, “to initiate and
fund the relocation of the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, not later
than May, 1999.”
President Donald Trump’s decision is traceable to that extant Act, which
his successive lily-livered predecessors had shied away from. Yet, the U.S. already has a capacious Consulate building
in Jerusalem , which Ambassador David Friedman
could conveniently move into; the Israeli Knesset (Legislature), the Israeli
President’s and Prime Minister’s official residences are in Jerusalem . Before Trump’s declaration,
therefore, Jerusalem had been the administrative
headquarters or constructive capital of Israel ! So, when, the other day,
the General Assembly of the UN passed yet another anti-Israel Resolution by a
vote of 128 to 9, with 35 abstentions and 21 absences, demanding that President
Trump rescind his declaration regarding Jerusalem ,
that biased, anti-Semitic body was warning America against executing its own
laws!
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