One Jack Frank Sigman, author of a book called Israel Committed Genocide! Really?, has published a series of five posts on LinkedIn claiming to “Deconstruct” some of my writings in my free e-book The Israel-Palestine Conflict: A Collection of Essays. His posts are, however, rather an instructive example of how Zionists maintain their worldview through willful ignorance and self-delusion, convincing themselves of their own tired propaganda by ignoring reality.

The first tactic Jack employs to sustain his ignorance is to engage in ad hominem argumentation. His entire first post consists of nothing substantive. (I’m providing the links to his posts so you can see for yourself I’m accurately representing him here, but note that doesn’t provide any links to my writings or the page on my site where readers can get my free e-book in order for his readers to verify his claims about what I’ve written.) He identifies zero factual or logical errors in anything I wrote in the e-book. Instead, the sole purpose is to prejudice the reader against me and my writings. He calls my publication Foreign Policy Journal a “tabloid”, describes as “dubious” a journalism award I’ve received (the Project Censored Award), and calls my communications degree “worthless” before turning to my actual writings on the Palestine conflict, which he describe as “rants” that consist of “Fake History and Delusional Journalism”. My free e-book is “a collection of simplified pseudo-history, peppered with … propaganda”.

Whew! What a mouthful. But since Jack offers no substantive criticism of anything I’ve ever written in his first post, there’s nothing for me to respond to. It’s enough to simply observe how he’s engaging in the logical fallacy of attacking my person and attempting to undermine my credibility without bothering to identify any factual or logical errors in my writings.

Jack Sigman’s Racist Rejectionism

In his second post, Jack accuses me of “lying”. How so? My “use of the word ‘Palestine’ is a political lie in that there is no state known as Palestine”.

And yet the United Nations recognizes Palestine as a state, and the vast majority of governments on this planet recognize Palestine as a state!

Of course, Jack simply ignores this reality because he rejects the Palestinians’ right to self-determination.

Now, Jack might hold the opinion that Palestine doesn’t meet the criteria for statehood. Indeed, legally defined borders is one of those criteria, under the Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States—but then, by an equal measure, Israel fails to meet the criteria of a state!

So it is not surprising that he presents no argument as to why Palestine doesn’t meet the criteria. And, of course, stating his opinion, which is contrary to the view of most of the planet (more than 130 countries), is not even remotely the same as identifying a factual error on my part (i.e., a “lie”).

Jack next sets his sights on the first essay in my free e-book, “The Simplicity of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict”. Here, he challenges my statement that during the First World War, “the British had promised the Arab nations their independence in return for their cooperation in helping to defeat the Ottoman Turks.”

Jack denies that any such promise was made. His fallacy is to confuse willful ignorance with an argument.

But let’s just suppose for a moment that Jack is right, that the British never promised independence to the Arabs of Palestine. Well, so what? Is he implying that since the British did not promise the Arabs of Palestine independence, therefore they had no right to self-determination? Is he arguing that this right is not inherent to all, but a privilege granted by Europeans to lesser humans?

Whether or not such a promise was made, the point is that the Arab Palestinians had a right to self-determination, and that right was rejected by the British. Jack is simply adopting that same racist rejectionism.

However, what I wrote is true. The British did, to garner Arab support for the war, promise the Palestinians their independence. All Jack does is to regurgitate Britain’s own absurd denials that it acted duplicitously, on the grounds that they had never intended to permit independence to the people of Palestine.

Well, it is true they always intended to break their promise, but this does not change the fact that the promise was made.

As noted in Britain’s Palestine Royal Commission Report, better known as the Peel Commission of 1937, “In June, 1915, British policy as to the future of Arabia Proper was made clear by the issue of a proclamation in Egypt, the Sudan, and Arabia, announcing that at the conclusion of peace the independence of the Arabian Peninsula would be assured.”

The Sharif of Mecca, Hussein ibn Ali al-Hashimi, responded to this by welcoming Britain’s promise of “the independence of the Arab countries”. But Britain had not intended this. Rather, it had territorial designs on the region, and so the British disclosed to the Sharif its intent to retain control over “the portions of Syria lying to the west of the districts of Damascus, Homs, Hama and Aleppo”—which is the area where the country of Lebanon lies today, north of the region known as Palestine.

The Arabs of Palestine therefore understood this to mean that they, too, would gain their independence as an outcome of an Allied victory in the war. Although they did not rise up en masse against their Turkish rulers, volunteers from Palestine were among the first to join the Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire.

Meanwhile, Britain and France secretly and duplicitously conspired to divide the territorial spoils of war between them, with Britain eyeing a long-term occupation of Palestine under what is known as the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916.

Yet to reassure the Arabs, on November 7, 1918, Britain and France issued a joint declaration stating:

The object aimed at by France and Great Britain in prosecuting in the East the war let loose by German ambition is the complete and definite emancipation of the peoples so long oppressed by the Turks, and the establishment of National Governments and administrations deriving their authority from the initiatives and free choice of the indigenous populations.

In order to carry out these intentions France and Great Britain are at one in encouraging and assisting the establishment of indigenous Governments and administrations in Syria and Mesopotamia, now liberated by the Allies, and in territories the liberation of which they are engaged in securing, and in recognizing these as soon as they are established. Far from wishing to impose on the populations of these regions any particular institutions, they are only concerned to secure by their support and by adequate assistance the regular working of Governments and administrations freely chosen by the population themselves.

As the Peel Commission observes, “The Arabs of Palestine put their trust in the Proclamation … that it was the solemn purpose of the Allies to further the cause of Arab self-determination and to establish Arab national governments.”

So we can see that when Jack denies that the British promised the Arabs their independence, he is simply demonstrating his own ignorance of the facts, as well as his racist rejection of Palestinians’ rights.

(You can learn more of the details about Britain’s promises of independence to the Arabs, along with source references, in my essay, “What Was the Balfour Declaration, and Why Is It Significant?”)

Who Owned Most of the Land in Palestine?

Next, Jack writes, “Another supposed fact offered by Hammond is that 85% of the land was owned by the Arabs. There does not appear to be any supporting evidence of this ownership.”

Here, he could have made a legitimate criticism, as indeed I had erred in stating that 85% of the land was “owned” by Arabs. Rather, 85% of the land was in the possession of Arabs, according to my source. I had failed to draw the distinction between possession and ownership, an error I later corrected in my essay “The Myth of the UN Creation of Israel” (this was corrected on May 8, 2017, with a note acknowledging the error, and the correction is included in the updated version of my free e-book).

But rather than making that legitimate criticism, what is fascinating is how Jack claims I offer no supporting evidence for the “85%” figure, given the fact that my e-book contains that very essay of mine, which is fully referenced. Jack spends a paragraph guessing what my source might have been (“the only reference to a possibility of 85% ownership is…”, “Another possible source is…”), when all he had to do was to look up my actual source: the report of the UN Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP), which is the body that came up with the infamous “partition plan”.

As stated in the UNSCOP report, Arabs were “in possession of approximately 85 percent of the land”. (The endnote reference number for this in the essay is endnote 7. The original link is now dead, but the report is currently available at the UNISPAL website here.)

Since Jack’s only argument here was that I didn’t provide a source in the e-book for the 85% figure, when in fact I did, no further comment is necessary. I encourage you to read the essay, and particularly note the statistics for land ownership showing Arabs owned more land than Jews in every district, including Jaffa, which included the main Jewish population center of Tel Aviv. I expand more on this also in the first chapter of my book Obstacle to Peace: The US Role in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.

(And if Jack wants another source, he can turn to Britain’s 1946 Survey of Palestine, page 566, where he can view the table showing Jews owned 1,514,247 dunums—only 5.8%—and “Arabs & other non-Jews” owned 24,670,455 dunums—93.7%—of the total land area of 26,320,505 dunums.)

Jack Argues It Was “Fair” to Deny Arabs Their Rights

Jack next asserts, “Hammond insists on repeating the lie that the land was partitioned so that the minority, the Jews, received the majority of the land”.

In fact, I argue no such thing. Quite the contrary, I point out that Palestine was never partitioned. The UN partition plan was never implemented, as I explain in my aforementioned essay about this myth. (This is a rather difficult point to miss for anyone who’s actually read my e-book!)

But let’s just assume Jack means that the partition plan proposed allotting most of the land for the “Jewish state”. Is this a lie? Of course not! This charge is actually quite hilarious because in his very next sentence, he acknowledges that the amount of land proposed for the Jewish state was “56%” (55.5%, as I put the figure in my essay).

So Jack acknowledges that it is true that most of the land was, under the plan, to go to the Jews for their state, even though the Jews owned less than 7% of the land in Palestine, whereas Arabs owned more land than Jews in every single district; and even though when the Bedouin population was included, Arabs constituted a majority even within the proposed Jewish state.

Jack expresses his opinion that this was “quite fair and reasonable”, which is just another illustration of his racist rejection of the rights of the Arab majority, including their right to self-determination and their property rights.

Have Arabs and Jews Always Been in Conflict?

In his third post, and for the rest of his effort, Jack tries to take on my article, “Top Ten Myths about the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict”, which is among the writings included in my free e-book. Jack writes, “Hammond states that it is a myth that Jews and Arabs lived in the region in a state of constant conflict.” He says this is a “strawman myth invented by anti-Semites”, which is a rather puzzling assertion since he then goes on to argue that Jews and Arabs lived in a state of constant conflict!

In fact, he asserts that the situation in Palestine prior to the rise of the Zionist movement “was much like the social relationship between Blacks and Whites in the American southern states prior to the 1950s.”

This is mindless, ahistorical nonsense. In fact, Palestine had long been a place of refuge for Jews compared to the rampant anti-Semitism in Europe. This was recognized by the British themselves, who encouraged Jewish emigration to Palestine after World War II on the grounds that the Arabs would welcome Jews whereas the European countries did not! See again my essay on the significance Balfour Declaration.

As I explain in that essay, in April 1920, Arabs rioted in Jerusalem and killed five Jews and injured hundreds more. A British commission of inquiry identified the cause of this violence not as some inherent anti-Semitism, but rather Arabs’ growing frustration that Britain had reneged on its promise of independence and was denying them their right to self-determination.

In May 1921, there was another Arab riot in which 47 Jews were killed and 146 others wounded. Another British commission determined:

[T]here is no inherent anti-Semitism in the country, racial or religious. We are credibly assured by educated Arabs that they would welcome the arrival of well-to-do and able Jews who could help to develop the country to the advantage of all sections of the community. Zionists, for their part, dwell freely on the theme that the realization of the policy of the “National Home” will benefit Arabs as well as Jews; but we feel bound to express the opinion, arrived at in the course of the inquiry, that the Zionist Commission, which is the representative of the Zionist Organisation in Palestine, has failed to carry conviction to the Arabs on this point.

That was a significant understatement. In fact, the Zionist leadership was quite open about their rejection of the Arabs’ rights. As the American King-Crane Commission of 1919 noted, the Zionists “looked forward to a practically complete dispossession of the present non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine”.

The acting Chairman of the Zionist Commission told the British commission of inquiry into the riot that “there can only be one National Home in Palestine, and that a Jewish one, and no equality in the partnership between Jews and Arabs, but a Jewish predominance as soon as the numbers of that race are sufficiently increased.” (In addition to my Balfour Declaration essay, see my essay “Benny Morris’s Untenable Denial of the Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine”, both fully referenced.)

Then in 1929, Arabs massacred Jews in Hebron, and once again the British established a commission of inquiry to determine the root cause of the violence, which concluded:

In less than ten years three serious attacks have been made by Arabs on Jews. For eighty years before the first of these attacks there is no recorded instance of any similar incidents. It is obvious then that the relations between the two races during the past decade must have differed in some material respect from those which previously obtained. Of this we found ample evidence. The reports of the Military Court and of the local Commission which, in 1920 and in 1921 respectively, enquired into the disturbances of those years, drew attention to the change in the attitude of the Arab population towards the Jews in Palestine. This was borne out by the evidence tendered during our enquiry when representatives of all parties told us that before the War the Jews and Arabs lived side by side if not in amity, at least with tolerance, a quality which to-day is almost unknown in Palestine.

So we can see that, once again, Jack simply confuses willful ignorance with an argument, and his own self-delusion with the documentary historical record.

Did the UN Create Israel?

Jack next expresses his discontent with my observation that it is a myth that the UN created Israel. As I explain in that essay, the infamous “partition plan” resolution, UN General Assembly Resolution 181, neither partitioned Palestine nor conferred any legal authority to the Zionists for their unilateral declaration of Israel’s existence on May 14, 1948.

Jack doesn’t bother to actually challenge this factual observation. Instead, he claims that “the Arabs of BMP [British Mandate Palestine] thought it authorization”—which is untrue. Rather, the Arabs as well as anyone rightly recognized that the UN had no authority to partition Palestine against the will of the majority of its inhabitants. The Arab Higher Committee for this reason refused to participate with UNSCOP, and the Arabs walked out in protest during the vote on Resolution 181.

That the UN had no such authority was also observed by the US representative, Warren Austin, in discussion over the partition plan in the UN Security Council.

Setting aside his attempt to obfuscate the point, it is enough to observe that Jack doesn’t actually challenge the accuracy of my observation that Resolution 181 neither partitioned Palestine nor conferred any legal authority to the Zionists for their unilateral declaration. This is natural, since he can’t.

Who Started the 1947-1949 War?

Instead of addressing that point, Jack deflects, asserting that, in response to Resolution 181, the Arabs “started the Palestinian Civil War”. He offers no details of when, where, or how they started this war. But we do know the standard Zionist claim is that the Arabs started the war with an attack on a bus in which five Jews were killed on November 30, 1947, the day after Resolution 181 was adopted in the General Assembly. Israeli historian Benny Morris asserts that “These were the first dead of the 1948 War.” But as I point out in my essay on Morris’s untenable denial of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine:

Yet Morris also acknowledges that these attacks were almost certainly “not ordered or organized by” the Arab Palestinian leadership. And “the majority view” in the intelligence wing of the Haganah—the Zionists’ paramilitary organization that later became the Israel Defense Forces (IDF)—“was that the attackers were driven primarily by a desire to avenge” a raid by the Jewish terrorist group Lehi, also known as the Stern Gang, on an Arab family ten days prior. Lehi “had selected five males of the Shubaki family and executed them in a nearby orange grove” as an act of revenge for the apparently mistaken belief that the Shubakis had informed the British authorities about a Lehi training session that prompted a British raid on the group in which five Jewish youths were killed.

So why wasn’t the murder of five Arabs by the Jewish terrorist organization the initiating act of hostility marking the start of the 1948 war, in Morris’s account?

We could ask the same question of Jack.

It’s worth pointing out additionally that by the time the neighboring Arab states managed to muster a military response after the Zionists’ unilateral declaration of statehood on May 14, 1948, over a quarter of a million Arabs had already been ethnically cleansed from their homes in Palestine by the Zionist forces.

Was the UN Partition Plan an “Opportunity” for the Arabs?

Jack next takes issue once again with my observation that the UN partition plan was absurdly inequitable. Having already expressed his opinion that rejecting the property rights and the right to self-determination of the majority Arab population was “fair”, Jack asserts that it is no myth that “the Arabs passed on the opportunity to have their ‘Palestinian state’ when they rejected the partition”.

What he doesn’t do is present an actual argument to explain why my observation is wrong that the partition proposal was no “opportunity”, but was rather premised on the same rejection of their right to self-determination that underlay British policy during the Mandate. He simply ignores this observation of mine, clinging to his racist assumption that this rejection of Arab’s rights was “fair”.

He also asserts that “The Arabs of British mandate Palestine made next to no effort to create government institutions so as to prepare themselves for independence.” This is, of course, a lie. There is an element of truth in it, though, which is that the central purpose of the Mandate was to prevent the majority Arab population from being able to establish self-governing institutions. (See my essay on the Balfour Declaration for details and documentation.)

Does Israel Have a “Right to Exist”?

Next Jack takes issue with my observation that there is no such thing as the “right” of a state to “exist”; that, rather, the proper framework for discussion is the right of individuals to self-determination, which is a right the Zionists rejected for the Arabs, and continue to reject to this day.

He doesn’t point to any error in my reasoning here—naturally, since there isn’t one. Instead, he rejects my observation that the Zionists had no legal authority for their unilateral declaration of May 14, 1948. But he fails to produce a valid argument to support this assertion. Since I’d already thoroughly and indisputably debunked the claim Resolution 181 provided such authority, Jack doesn’t try to repeat it, but instead lobs out two other arguments.

His first argument is that since the International Court of Justice (ICJ) recognized Kosovo’s declaration of independence as legitimate, therefore so was the Zionists’ declaration of May 14. His fallacy is in trying to draw a parallel between a people declaring independence in their own land and foreign colonizers declaring sovereignty over a land already inhabited and mostly owned by another people. There is no parallel here, of course.

The second argument he presents to support his assertion of legitimacy is that the land that became Israel was “state land” that “transferred from the Ottoman’s [sic] to the state holding sovereignty. The Arabs of the British mandate Palestine did not have sovereignty so state land could not possibly be theirs. Only Israel, after their declaration of independence, had sovereignty.” This is, of course, utter nonsense—simply another illustration of Jack’s racist rejection of the rights of the Palestinians, which is the very same rejectionism espoused by the Zionists and the British in denying self-governance to Palestine so that the Zionists’ colonization project could proceed apace.

Was Israel Threatened with Annihilation in 1967 and 1973?

This brings us to part four of Jack’s purported “Deconstruction” of my writings. Rejecting my observation that it is a myth that Israel was threatened with annihilation in 1967 and again in 1973, he insists upon the myth.

For the immediate context, the 1967 war started on the morning of June 5 with an Israeli surprise attack on Egypt that obliterated its air force while most of its planes were still on the ground. Zionists claim this was a “preemptive” attack of self-defense. I observed that it wasn’t.

In response, Jack writes, “Hammond states, authoritatively(?), that for Israel to be able to justify its surprise attack on the Egyptian Air Force, there had to be ‘an imminent threat of Egyptian aggression’. As Hammond is no authority, his supposition is a joke.”

Setting aside the fact this is a non sequitur fallacy (the conclusion that my assertion is false does not follow from the premise that I am “no authority”, however defined), it’s enough to note that Jack is actually distorting what I said. I did not write that Israel’s attack would have been justified if there had been an imminent threat of Egyptian aggression. Rather, I was observing that, by definition, there had to have been an imminent threat of Egyptian aggression for Israel’s attack to have been, as the Zionists claim, “preemptive”—which is of course logically true.

So the question, then, is: Was there an imminent threat of an Egyptian attack on Israel? Jack makes a feeble attempt to argue in the affirmative by briefly regurgitating the usual Zionist talking points: “The reality is that Egypt created the war when it closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, an act of war. Additionally, Egypt moved troops into the Sinai and ordered UN Peacekeepers out of Sinai and Gaza. Finally, Nasser continued threatening Israel with annihilation. Despite intelligence reports that Israel would win a war with Egypt within two weeks, there is no certainty.”

In fact, Egypt’s closure of the Straits to Israeli shipping, while it may have violated international law, did not constitute an act of armed aggression against the state of Israel. This was recognized by US President Lyndon B. Johnson, who warned Israel against attacking Egypt on the grounds that by doing so, it would be Israel who would be responsible for initiating hostilities. Israel had diplomatic means available to it in order to seek redress for its grievance against Egypt, which argued that the straits were its territorial waters.

One should also keep in mind that Israel had already in 1956 launched a war of aggression against Egypt, having conspired to do so with the British and French.

It is true that Egypt moved troops into the Sinai, but as the CIA observed at the time, they took up “defensive” positions. And both US and Israeli intelligence assessed that Nasser had no intention of launching an attack on Israel.

It is also true that Egypt expelled a UN peacekeeping force—which had been in the country as a result of Israel’s 1956 attack on Egypt. And yet Israel rejected a proposal to reposition the force on its side of the border! By Jack’s own reasoning, this must constitute evidence of Israel’s intention to attack Egypt.

It is also true that Nasser engaged in bellicose rhetoric, but it was understood by both the Israelis and the Americans that this was just that: rhetoric. They understood that Nasser was just trying to save face after having been criticized by his allies, Syria and Jordan, for hiding behind the UN force, such as failing to come to Jordan’s assistance when Israel attacked the village of Samu on November 13, 1966, in order to terrorize the civilian population as an act of collective punishment for the killing of three Israeli soldiers two days earlier by the Palestinian group al-Fatah.

Given Israel’s overwhelming military superiority, Israeli intelligence reasonably judged that Nasser had no intention of attacking Israel because he wasn’t insane.

Evidently attempting to obfuscate that reality, Jack next tosses in the remark, “Indeed, American and European intelligence predicted the demise of Israel in 1947.” We need not look into the accuracy of this claim since it is irrelevant. We are talking about 1967, no 1947, and the fact is that both American and Israeli intelligence assessed in 1967 that Egypt would not attack Israel, and that in the event of a war, Israel would kick the combined Arab states’ asses in as little as one week. President Johnson told the Israeli Foreign Minister, Abba Eban, “All of our intelligence people are unanimous that if the UAR [United Arab Republic, as Egypt was then known] attacks, you will whip hell out of them.” In fact, after Israel started the war with a surprise attack on Egypt on the morning of June 5, it took just six days.

Ignoring all such facts to the contrary and simply reasserting the same myth I’d already debunked, Jack reiterates his belief that in June 1967, “Israel had no real choice other than attack in what was a war of defense”. He ignores how even Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin admitted that, “In June 1967, we again had a choice. The Egyptian army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him.” (Begin went on to also describe Israel’s action as “self-defense”, but of course this was just cognitive dissonance; the attack on Egypt was under international law the crime of aggression.)

Yitzhak Rabin, who would also later become Prime Minister of Israel, admitted in 1968 that “I do not think Nasser wanted war. The two divisions he sent to the Sinai would not have been sufficient to launch an offensive war. He knew it and we knew it.”

I could go on, but it would be superfluous. You can learn more about how Israel started the war in my article “Who Started the Six Day War of June 1967?”, in which I debunk all the same standard Zionist arguments in greater detail.

Turning to 1973, with respect to the “Yom Kippur War”, as it is known in Israel, Jack writes, “Hammond then throws in a red herring about the 1956 Suez war.” What he means is that I observed the historical context that Israel had already once launched a war of aggression against Egypt in 1956 (as again in 1967), as already noted.

Jack’s convoluted argument attempting to justify Israel’s attack on Egypt is that Egypt supported Palestinian guerillas operating out of Jordan, and that “The fedayeen operated mainly from bases in Jordan, so that Jordan would bear the brunt of Israel’s retaliation, which inevitably followed.” We’ve already seen one example of the nature of Israel’s “retaliation”, the terrorizing of the civilian population of Samu in response to the killing of Israeli soldiers by Fatah (note that soldiers are legitimate military targets, whereas civilian populations are not). This Israeli attack was rightly condemned by the international community. Jack himself acknowledges that the UN condemned Israel’s “counterattacks”. This includes Israel’s attack on Egypt in 1956 as well as its attack on Samu.

The reason these actions by Israel were condemned by the international community, of course, was because they violated international law.

Jack never actually makes it to an argument about why I’m wrong about the 1973 war, so I will simply reiterate my observation from the e-book that in this case, Egypt and Syria did not attack Israel, but rather Israeli forces occupying the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula and the Syrian Golan Heights, respectively. The use of armed force against foreign military invaders and occupiers is, of course, legitimate under international law.

Did Resolution 242 Give Blessing to the Acquisition of Territory by War?

Finally, we come to part five of Jack’s “Deconstruction” of my writings. Here, he discusses UN Security Council Resolution 242, stating,

Hammond’s sixth “myth” deals with UNSC resolution 242 which calls for Israel to withdraw from territories it captured during the 1967 war. Hammond deliberately lies when he states that Israel is required, by this resolution, to withdraw from all of the territories captured. Hammond infers that only “ridiculous logic” that the word “the,” omitted from the text referring to the territories, indicates that the intent was for a partial withdrawal. In actuality, no logic is required. What is required is the explanation by those who wrote the resolution. They know, as does Hammond, exactly what they meant when they deliberately omitted the word “the” from the clause.

Here, Jack is simply ignoring my observation that his argument is a logical fallacy in order to reiterate the very same fallacy. Of course, he can’t argue with my reasoning (which he doesn’t present to his readers so they can know what, exactly, he is attempting to response to), and so this is the purpose of his statement that “no logic is required”, which is of course nonsensical.

So, to elucidate on his fallacy: Jack is reiterating the standard Zionist argument that the absence of the word “the” before the words “territories occupied” in the clause of the resolution that calls for “Withdrawal of Israel armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict” means that Israel is not required to withdraw from all of the territory it occupied. As I observed in the essay Jack is purporting to debunk, it is patently fallacious and self-defeating to argue that since the resolution did not say “all of the territories”, we must therefore understand it to mean “some of the territories”!

But it is understandable that Jack would suggest we should not apply logic, given how doing so leads to the unavoidable conclusion that his argument is devoid of any.

Jack amusingly calls his Zionist fantasy “the literal interpretation”. Actually, the literal interpretation is that, in accordance with the principle of international law that the acquisition of territory by war is inadmissible, Israel was required to withdraw from the Syrian Golan Heights, the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula, and the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip—the “territories”, plural, that it occupied during he war.

Instead of addressing this point of logic, Jack claims that it was the intent of the Security Council that Israel retain some of the territories it occupied. But this is just a repetition of the same lie I’d already debunked. In an attempt to provide support for this lie, Jack does the usual Zionist thing of quoting statements made by Lord Caradon of Britain and Arthur Goldberg of the US, who were both participants in the formulation of the resolution, in which they claimed that the intent was that Israel should not fully withdraw.

Unfortunately for Jack, all this proves is that Lord Caradon and Arthur Goldberg were liars. The relevant documentary record for determining the will of the Security Council is not statements made in their individual capacity by British and American officials years after, but the actual meeting records leading up to the adoption of the resolution on November 22, 1967. And that documentary record makes unambiguously clear that it was the Council’s intent that Israel fully withdraw.

This is indicated in the perambulatory section of the resolution itself, which observes that under international law, the acquisition of territory by force is impermissible! Any intent by any member states for Israel to retain any occupied territory would have been moot, given the fact Israel was required under this principle of international law to fully withdrawal.

Israel, of course, was arguing at the time that it was not required to do so, but the Security Council rejected Israel’s arguments, including its nonsensical claim about the absence of the article “the”!

The Council was explicit prior to the vote that Resolution 242 required Israel to fully withdraw to the positions it held prior to June 5, 1967 (which is to say, to the 1949 armistice lines, or the “Green Line” as it is otherwise called).

For full references of this clear documentary record, see the section of chapter three of my book Obstacle to Peace dedicated to debunking the lying Zionist propaganda that Resolution 242 did not require a full withdraw. (The discussion of the resolution includes Lord Caradon’s and Arthur Goldberg’s documented accession to the view of the Council that a full withdrawal was required under international law.)

Conclusion

I don’t need to call Jack names, belittle his achievements, or otherwise attack his character, as he obviously feels it necessary to do with me in order to sustain his own worldview. It is enough simply to point out the actual facts as compared to his obfuscation, falsehoods, willful ignorance, and self-delusions. You can draw your own conclusions, then, about his character.

Click here to get my free e-book The Israel-Palestine Conflict: A Collection of Essays.