Drive them out from where they drove you out

Dual British-Israeli citizens, Rina, Maia and Leah Dee were Israeli civilians who were shot to death in their car as they drove to Tiberias to be with friends and family over the April 2023 Passover holiday in Israel.

Their father, Lee Dee, a former community rabbi from London, was in another car some distance ahead of where the murders took place and so escaped the carnage which took the lives of his wife and two daughters.

The perpetrator(s) were lauded by Hams, the PA and the PIJ as heroes who had taken the fight to the Jews and were resistance fighters doing their bit to free Palestine from European colonists such as the Dee family.

For Mahmoud Abbas’ PA in Judea, and Iran proxies Hamas and PIJ in Gaza, the fact that the Dee family lived in Efrat classed them as colonizing settlers living in territory illegally acquired in war (1967). Thus, these Jews had no right to live in Judea and were legitimate targets of the “heroes of the resistance”.

It was painful to watch Lee Dee mourning the death of his wife and daughters. After Israeli doctors failed to save the life of Leah Dee in hospital, Lee Dee did not say:

“Drive them out from where they drove you out.”

Instead, his family agreed to donate some of Leah’s organs so that there may continue to be life for others from a brutal death at the hands of Arab terrorists.

“Drive them out from where they drove you out” is from the Koran, Chapter2, verse 191.

Irrespective of the debate whether the Koran, completed 75 years after Mohammad’s death contains anything Mohammad is actually reputed to have been told by the angels, “Drive them out from where they drove you out” is the cornerstone of the Muslim interpretation which states that once land becomes Islamic by conquest or colonisation (as in Judea and swathes of the non-contiguous Hejazi Middle East), it stays Islamic forever and that Muslims must drive out any non-Muslim government that takes power in a land once ruled under Islamic law.

Thus, a man-made interpretation of something allegedly revealed to an Arab trader living in what is now Saudi Arabia, became the cornerstone of a “square” belief and policy that organisations such as the UN and other governmental and non-governmental organisations futilely try to bash into the “round” hole of a resolution to the 100 year Arab-Israeli conflict: the impossibility of ‘land for peace’ under Islam.

This “cornerstone” of Islamic interpretation is known as the waqf, an “endowment in perpetuity”.

In June 1967, after the Six Day War, Israel made a wrong decision for all the right reasons.

Israel agreed that the defeated Jordanians and Amman would administer Israel’s Temple Mount, territory the Jordanians illegally colonised in 1948, a land grab act that was not recognised by even the Arab League.

The Israeli hope under Moshe Dayan was that the Arabs would reciprocate this act of good faith by the Israelis of the principle of magnanimity in victory.

For 75 years so far, that has not happened, and is less likely to happen as positions on both sides have hardened in the interim.

While it is true that Israel did return land to Egypt in 1979 in return for, essentially, a cold peace, and signed a peace treaty with Jordan, external bad faith actors used the principle of the man-made Muslim waqf to further their goal of the removal of a legal and sovereign re-constituted Jewish polity from the Middle East.

In essence, then, continued Arab Muslim violence against Israel is a religious war per the interpretation of the Koran, Chapter 2, verse 191.

Of course, such an interpretation by Islamists has little to do with relevant UN rulings and even less to do with the oft-repeated Muslim catch-cry of the “illegality” of Israeli “occupation” in Judea.

After the Six Day War in 1967, the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) signed off on Resolution 242 to set the parameters for the achievement of peace among the Arab states in the area.

In it, the UNSC allowed Israel to remain in occupation of the acquired land until she had agreements with all the Arab states in the area for “secure and recognized boundaries.” But even then, she need not withdraw from all territories. Thus, Israel’s “occupation” cannot be considered as illegal because, as yet, there are no agreements of any description with Syria or Lebanon nor with the Judean Arabs under the rule of the Palestinian Authority nor even with Hamas in Gaza.

The backstory to this is that in November 1967, Egypt requested an urgent UNSC meeting wanting Israel to return territory it had taken in a war the Egyptians had initiated by the closing of the Tiran Strait to Israeli shipping (an internationally accepted effective declaration of war) and the removal of UN peace keepers in Sinai in preparation for the war they subsequently lost.

UNSC Resolution 242 was the unanimously accepted outcome of that meeting not under a Chapter VII resolution which deals with “aggression”, but under a Chapter VI resolution of the UN Charter: dealing with the “pacific resolution of disputes”.

This meant that all efforts by the Arab bloc in the UN General Assembly, (where the Arab bloc enjoyed an automatic majority against Israel) to brand Israel as an “aggressor” for the June 1967 Six Day War, failed at the UNSC.

Thus, UNSC 242 signified legally that:

1. It apply to every state in the area.
2. The establishment of secure and recognized boundaries were a necessity (this in response to all the representatives of the Arab states who declared that Israel and its Arab neighbours were only separated by armistice lines (1948; 1967) and that definitive political boundaries between them had not been established).
3. That the Resolution applied only to existing states. There was no “Palestinian state” and the word “Palestinian” did not even appear in the Resolution…..
4. Resolution 242 did not call on Israel to withdraw to the lines of June 4, 1967 despite the best efforts of the Russians and the French to include that rider prior to the accepted unanimously UNSC Resolution 242.
5. The ruling on the “the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war”, was deliberately placed in the legally non-binding preamble to Res 242 and NOT in the binding operative paragraphs below it per a determination carried over from the era of the League of Nations to that of the United Nations.
6. The preamble above was a UNSC reference to known international legal principles on the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war, and NOT lawful territorial change in response to an aggressor along three of Israel’s fronts at the time: Egypt, Jordan and Syria.
7. Resolution 242 was not self-enforcing per its encoding as a Chapter VI resolution explained above.
8. Israel was not expected to unilaterally withdraw from territories to fulfill its terms. What 242 expected and required were direct negotiations between Israel and its Arab neighbours.
9. Resolution 242 does not anywhere condemn Israel’s occupation of territories defined as “illegal” because 242 requires that various elements of the resolution must be implemented in parallel with no LEGAL Israeli obligation to withdraw prior to the achievement of a comprehensive, negotiated
10. The concept of the word “Palestinian, or the concept of a “Palestinian” “right of return” was never encoded in either Resolution 242 (1967) or Resolution 338 (1973) because BOTH resolutions required that the Arab states and Israel must make a negotiated peace, prior to any putative Israeli withdrawal from some but not all of the territory it occupied in the course of the 1967 war.

The legally binding UNSC Resolutions thus left it to the parties concerned, Israel and the Arab world, to agree on the terms of peace.

But, the status, as outlined above, of a Muslim “endowment in perpetuity” or waqf as it is known, is diametrically opposed to both the spirit and letter of international law as codified by the same UN that the Arab world constantly appeals to “condemn” Israel’s “illegal occupation” by demanding censure of Israel under twentieth century Western law while refusing to negotiate on their interpretation of 7^th century Islamic law.

Arguably, this could be termed Islamic exceptionalism or supremacism by any other name.

“Drive them out from where they drove you out” – unintended irony perhaps from adherents of a religion which occupied and colonized indigenous Jewish life in the Southern Levant, swathes of the Middle East, Africa and parts of  Eastern Europe.

This is not a sentiment for these times meaning that the concept of the Islamic waqf is now only shorthand for continued Muslim violence in the Israeli context.

One cannot bring back three innocent women travelling to meet family when they were killed by Arab terrorists.

But one cannot also forego principles of the oft-times onion skin thin veneer of international law in the face of a middle age ideology seemingly dedicated to ripping even that semblance of protection from law abiding people who simply want to get on with their lives.