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*A Vote For Palestinian Statehood Is A Vote For Unification Of The Children Of Abraham & Return To The Land Flowing With Milk & Honey
( International Comment of International Society For Civil Liberties & The Rule Of Law, Nigeria )

By Intersociety

Palestinian/Arab-Israeli Conflict: A Vote For Palestinian Statehood Is A Vote For Unification Of The Children Of Abraham & Return To The Land Flowing With Milk & Honey

(Onitsha- Nigeria, 5th November, 2011)-The Leadership of Intersociety, today, welcomes the historic admission of the Palestinian Authority into the prestigious United Nations Educational, Scientific & Cultural Organization-UNESCO. The historic admission, which took place on Monday, 31st October, 2011, saw the PA admitted as a full member of the over 170-member world body, which is a creation of the Economic & Social Council-ECOSOC organ of the UNO. The PA became a full member with 107 votes, while 14 voted against and 52 abstained. As expected, USA, Canada and Germany voted against the PA’s membership, while Britain and Italy abstained, and the USA threatened, in protest, to cut down her 60M to 80M USD annual grant to the prestigious body. The USA under President Ronald Reagan withdrew her membership from UNESCO in the 80s under similar circumstances, while President Bush Jnr. got her re-admitted 20 years later. The UNESCO is also the world leading environmentalist and propagator of Economic, Social & Cultural Rights; a member of the world’s triplet rights consortium (civil & political rights, economic, social & cultural rights and environmental rights).

With the world clearly departing from animalistic social philosophy of the past, which saw her engaging herself in 14, 500 wars in the past 5000 years, with only 300 years of peace within the period, and with 1945 to 1985, a period of 40 years, accounting for 165 wars alone with the total human deaths of over 22million; and with African Continent accounting for 34 wars and 14million out of the world’s 21million to 24million refugees as at 1994, the statehood for the Palestinian People under strict and defined security conditions as per her relationship with the State of Israel, is long overdue. The battle for the ownership and control of the “Holy Land” by the descendants or children of Abraham via Isaac, begat by Sarah and Ishmael, begat by Hagar had been a tortuous one and age-long. This had resulted to several ancient and modern bloody wars including five “Adult Crusades” and one “Children Crusade”.

The recorded history of the bloody conflicts over the “Holy Land” started in A.D. 70 when the Roman Army led by Titus destroyed Jerusalem and when they had broken the last Jewish resistance in A.D.135, they renamed the region Judea Palestine after the earlier inhabitants-the Philistines. This great Land was taken over by militants Muslims in A.D.636. It was then that Omar Ibn al-Khattab ordered the construction the “Mosque of Omar (Ibn al-Khattab)”-called the “Dome of Rock”, presently regarded as the Muslims’ third holiest shrine in the world after Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia. In A.D. 1098, the Crusaders from Europe raised by His Holiness, Pope Urban 11, who first struck in A.D.1095, freed the Holy Land from Muslim-Arabs and ruled it until A.D.1192 when Jerusalem again fell to Arab conquerors. In A.D. 1517, the great Ottoman Turks overran Palestine, Egypt and the rest of North Africa and the Middle East, ruling them for next 400 years ending in 1917, when the British forces led by Gen. Allenby attacked the Turks during the World War 1.

With the aid of the Lawrence of Arabia, the British conquered all of Palestine and accepted a mandate from the League of Nations to administer the region for 30 years pending final disposition of the Holy Land to local authorities. In 1921, the two-thirds of the Palestine region were given to the Arabs for a Palestine homeland. Abdullah al-Hussein, son of a Bedouin prince of the Hejaz region of Arabia was proclaimed the Emir and in 1946, he became the first king of the Kingdom of Transjordan. During Israel’s war of independence in 1948, the British-trained Arab forces from the Legion of Jordan conquered the West Bank area including East Jerusalem. In order to include this conquered territory into the Kingdom of Jordan, the name was changed to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. It was ruled by King Hussein, grandson of King Abdullah until his forces were driven off by the Israelis in the Six Day War of 1967. The area west of the Jordan River now is referred to as the “occupied territory of the West Bank”, which had remained the hotbed of the age-long conflicts between the PA/Arab and the State of Israel.

In 1917, the British, who had conquered all of Palestine from the Turks, signed in London the Balfour Declaration favouring the establishment of a national homeland in Palestine for Jewish people and when her mandate expired in 1948, Israel became a nation again for the first time in 2,500 years. And the next day, May 15, 1948, army contingents from Egypt, Arabia, Syria, Lebanon, Transjordan and Iraq attacked the infant Israeli nation so as to crush Israel and chase her out of the “Palestinian land”. The bloody military expedition failed and Egypt signed an armistice agreement on February 24, 1949. Lebanon signed it on March 23, 1949; Transjordan on April 3, 1949; and Syria on July 20, 1949, while Iraq refused to sign. On March 4, 1949, Israel was accepted by the Security Council of the UN and on May 12, 1949, the General Assembly of the UN approved Israel as the 59th member of the United Nations.

There had been five bloody crusades and one Children Crusade carried out by “Christian Crusaders” from Europe against the “Arab-Muslim Warriors” over the ownership and occupation of the “Holy Land”. Of these great crusades, Christian Crusaders clearly won the first crusade and lost the rest owing to long distance, war weariness, etc. The first crusade took place between A.D.1095 and A.D. 1097 during which the great Jerusalem was taken from Muslims, resulting in the creation of the Crusaders-run Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, which lasted until A.D. 1187. The second crusade took place between A.D.1147 and A.D.1149, meant to help Christians in the region recover the town of Edessa and other lands in the hands of the Turks, which failed woefully. The third crusade took place between A.D.1189 and A.D.1192, organized after Saladin; the Sultan of Egypt re-captured the Jerusalem. The crusade failed to retake the Jerusalem. The fourth crusade took place between A.D.1202 and A.D. 1204, during which Constantinople was captured because it did not recognize the Papal authority. Then, there was the Children Crusade of A.D. 1212, during which thousands of Christian children were sent to the Holy Land where they were captured by Muslims, killed, sold into slavery or made to die of hunger and disease. The last crusade took place between A.D.1217 and A.D. 1221, aimed at capturing Egypt but failed.

In modern times, the State of Israel had fought four conventional wars with her Arab neighbours including Egypt, that is to say the 1948 war of independence; 1956 war over Aswan Dam dispute; 1967 Six-Day War; and the Yom Kippur War of 1973. There had been hundreds of unconventional warfare between the State of Israel and her neighbours particularly the Palestinian Liberation Movements since 1970s resulting in incalculable fatalities on both sides. To consolidate their efforts of laying claims to the Holy Land, the Israelis and the Palestinians formed several radical movements such as World Jewish Congress, Palestinian Liberation Organization, HAMAS, etc with provisions in their charters calling for the destruction of the State of Israel and the Palestinian State if proclaimed. While the WJC headquartered in the West, the radical Palestinian movements operated from some radical Middle East capitals. The PLO was headquartered in the Tunisian capital of Tunis.

Today, after the “wars without borders” or intra-state wars, replaced the cold war and inter-state wars in the 1990s; it is widely believed in the informed security circles that these wars-without-borders afflicting many corners of the world, directly or indirectly originated from the Arab-Israeli conflicts over the disputed Holy Land. Added to this is the “forceful conquest” philosophy among radical Muslims, originally invented as a jihad strategy by the Othman Turks, to the effect that once the West particularly the USA is crushed, the State of Israel and Christianity would become history and all the Christian nations with some 1.5Billion Christian citizens globally would be forcefully converted to Muslim just the same way the Zoroastrian Persians (Iranians), Levant( middle east) and Anatolians (Turkey) were forcefully converted through “barbaric religious conversionary savages” of the medieval periods.

The conflicts over the Holy Land and radical Islamism have propelled the launching of various forms of unconventional warfare including bio-terrorism, tech-terrorism, cyber-terrorism, political terrorism and guerrilla warfare by the protagonist, the antagonist and their supporters. There are many radical groups targeting US, Western and Israeli interests and civilians and their non-citizens as well around the world. Some of them are Al-Qaeda world-wide network, which originated from Afghanistan; the Islamic Taliban(Afghanistan); Al-Gama’s Al-Islamiyya(formed in Egypt in 70s); Hamas( formed in 1987); Hezbollah( linked to Iran and based in Lebanon);Al-Jihad( formed in Egypt in 70s and accused of assassinating Anwar El-Sadat);Abu Nidal-PLO; Abu Sayyat Group (Philippines);Armed Islamic Group (Algeria); Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan; Mujahedeen EKHALQ organization; the Palestinian Islamic Jihad & other radical Palestinian groups; Harakat Ul-Mujahedeen; Aum Supreme Truth; Basque Fatherland & Liberty; Japanese Red Army; Kach and Kahane Chai; Kurdistan Workers Party; and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil(Sri Lanka).

These radical groups are believed to be funded by some radical political leaders in Iran, Libya, Sudan, Syria, Pakistan, OIC and some radical oil Sheiks in the Gulf Cooperation Council region. On the other hand, USA had carried out several unlawful attacks on Libya(1986) and Lebanon(in 70s).The State of Israel, in what she called “self-defense”, had also launched several aerial and commando attacks against Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Jordan, Uganda and Iraq. Just recently, she tested in an undisclosed location, sophisticated ballistic missiles, said to possess the capacity of hitting and destroying the suspected Iranian nuclear weapon facilities as well as similar unfriendly facilities in any radical Arab or Muslim capitals in the Middle East and North Africa.

Palestinian Statehood As A Departure From A Land Flowing With Blood & Tears: During the Christian Crusades and Muslim Uprisings, their hungry fighters were said to have been served on several occasions with boiled human parts, sliced from their POWs. This depicts the animalism of the past. Today, humanism has largely replaced animalism. For the Holy Land to bounce back as the “land flowing with milk and honey”, the State of Palestine should be proclaimed as a matter of extreme urgency through the universally accepted processes. For this great feat to be achieved, suicide bombings must be quietened in the troubled region to resurrect no more. No matter how small an inheritance land is, they say, it must be given to the rightful person that inherits it, even if it is a foot-path. Neither the destruction of the State of Israel nor the suppression of Palestinians is fashionable in this modern time. Therefore, as required by the UN rules, nine votes without a veto from any super power are required for the State of Palestine to be accepted by the UN Security Council, after which the General Assembly would be asked to approve the PA as the 194th member of the UNO. The voting scheduled for this year’s annual session of the UN has been delayed for unclear reasons, which further worsens the porous security of the region. The announcement by the Federal Government of Nigeria of its readiness to vote for the Palestinian statehood is also a welcome development. The voting must also be taken side by side with territorial concessions by the Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

But voting for the Palestinian statehood without critically addressing the security of Israel will be counter-productive. The “two-state” structure for the “children of Abraham” is inevitable and well-conceived, but security challenges facing the State of Israel must be holistically addressed. To this end, the radical Middle East capitals especially Tehran, Islamabad, Damascus, Beirut, Riyadh, Tripoli etc and the antagonistic oil sheiks, radical Islamic financial institutions and radical opposition groups so named as well as Arab League and Organization of Islamic Conference must refrain from attacking or supporting any attacks against the State of Israel, her citizens and interests, in return for the Palestinian statehood, living peacefully and side by side with the State of Israel. Let guns and bullets be silenced forever in the hitherto milky and juicy region and let the AK-47-driven security be transformed into civil, food, economic, environmental, health, technological, political, social and cultural securities. May the land flowing with blood and tears return to the land flowing with milk and honey! And may the Holy Lands of Vatican and Riyadh reign forever with high frequency of religious and cultural tolerance!!!

Written By:

Emeka Umeagbalasi, Chairman, BOT, Intersociety
41, Miss Elems Street, Fegge,Onitsha, Nigeria
Phone: +234(0)8033601078
Email: info@intersociety-ng.org, umeagbalasi@yahoo.com

Photo Above: Emeka Umeagbalasi, Chairman, Board of Trustees, Intersociety, 41, Miss Elems Street, Fegge, Onitsha, Anambra State, Nigeria.

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