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Israeli NGO slams UN for ‘prompting’ Palestinian terrorism

Mattot Arim says the international body must stop using anti-Israel “illegality rhetoric” that terrorists employ to justify the slaughter of civilians.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

In the aftermath of the Jerusalem terrorist attacks this past weekend, an Israeli NGO slammed the UN Monday for fueling Palestinian terrorism by continually parroting the Palestinian line that murdering civilians is justified because of Israel’s supposedly illegitimate hold on Judea and Samaria.

In a letter to Tor Wennesland, UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, Israeli NGO Mattot Arim demanded that “the incessant illegality rhetoric, with which United Nations functionaries habitually bombard Israel, be discontinued as a matter of policy.”

Pointing out that internationally recognized terrorist organizations such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad and their supporters habitually claim that their slaughter of noncombatant men, women and children is a “natural response” to the “crimes of the occupation” (i.e., Israel), the NGO said it was “a matter of utmost severity” that the UN unthinkingly echoes their language.

This is especially so, said the self-described “peace for peace” organization, since there are many respected legal scholars who have stated and written that Israel’s settlement of the territories it liberated in its defensive 1967 Six-Day War is absolutely legal.

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This includes Prof. Eugene Rostow, a former dean of Yale Law School, who clarified in 1989 that “legally, the West Bank [Judea and Samaria] and the Gaza Strip are unallocated parts of the Palestine Mandate,” which was “set up… as a trust for the Jewish people, in recognition of their historic connection with the land, on condition that the civic and religious rights of the Muslims and Christians living in the territory be respected.”

Moreover, he wrote, the right of Jewish settlement in these areas – including Jerusalem – “has never been terminated,” and is “a right protected by Article 80 of the United Nations Charter” itself.

“As an argument of law,” he added, the competing Arab position “cannot be reconciled with the charter of the United Nations.”

The UN, Mattot Arim wrote, must recognize that “international law entitles Israel” to rely as a sovereign state “on impeccable legal authority that settlements are legal,” even if there are other legal opinions on the subject.

“It is simply untrue to allege that a sovereign nation must toe a single legal line in the sand in this matter,” the group wrote.

It is also an “immediate moral imperative” to “discontinue this form of Israel bashing,” since the UN’s constant illegality rhetoric “is prompting terrorist operatives to justify slaughtering civilians, even children.”

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In addition, Mattot Arim stated, “It is perfectly obvious that building homes is not tantamount to mass murder or any immoral crime.”