An international law expert says Israel should kick the UN out of the Jewish state if the ICC recognizes the non-existent state of ‘Palestine.’
By Yakir Benzion, United With Israel
Israel should take severe retaliatory action against the United Nations if the chief prosecutor at International Criminal Court in The Hague decides to prosecute Israel for alleged war crimes against the non-existent “state of Palestine,” a top legal expert said Wednesday.
Maurice Hirsch is an international law expert who spent two decades in the IDF’s Military Advocate General’s Corps, much of it prosecuting terrorists, before retiring with the rank of of Lieutenant Colonel.
In comments published on the Mosaic website, Hirsch says Fatou Bensouda, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), made serious legal errors when she ruled that the Palestinians are the equivalent of an “extant state,” even though they are only an observer at the UN.
Bensouda made the so-called ruling after the Palestinians turned to the ICC demanding the court try Israel for allegedly committing crimes against humanity in what Bensouda called the “State of Palestine.”
“In order to invent a state that does not exist, and has never existed, Bensouda needed to complete a complex puzzle,” Hirsch said.
“On the one hand, she had to negate or ignore critical documents that designated for Israel all the areas she now claims to be part of the ‘state of Palestine.’ These documents include the Balfour Declaration, the decisions made by the allied forces in San Remo following World War I, and the League of Nations mandate for Palestine. All these documents reaffirmed the historic connection of the Jewish people to the area from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea and granted that area to the Jewish people for its future state.”
Hirsch said that on the other hand Bensouda had to ignore the Arab rejection of the 1947 UN Partition Plan and “turn the 1948-9 armistice lines – which the Arab leaders demanded never be seen as borders – into borders.”
Hirsch, who is the director of Legal Strategies at Palestinian Media Watch, added that Bensouda also had to negate the provisions in the Oslo Accords, signed by the Palestinians, that explicitly state the Palestinian Authority does not have state status.
“These acrobatics were possible because the proceedings against Israel are not founded in either fact or law, but are entirely politically motivated,” Hirsch said.
Hirsch says the Netanyahu government should discourage the ICC from making such a decision by holding the UN responsible, because the ICC is a UN sponsored body.
“Israel should carry out a political preemptive strike by informing the United Nations that should the ICC decide to invent “Palestine,” all UN staff in Israel will be declared personae non gratae,” Hirsch said, adding the UN compound in Jerusalem’s Armon Hanatziv neighborhood would be vacated.
He emphasized that the UN special coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, Nickolay Mladenov, should be included in those ejected after Mladenov recently called for “Palestinian unity” – the Palestinian Authority and the Hamas terror group – against Israel.