Dear Letter to the Editor:
Tom Moran ignores both history and international law in demanding that arms shipments to Israel be halted. ,(" Enough! Time to Cut Arms to Israel Over Gaza").
After Pearl Harbor in which 2300 individuals were murdered by Imperial Japan, the United States demanded that Imperial Japan unconditionally surrender. When Japan refused, the United States and its allies killed 500,000- 1,000,000 Japanese civilians. ONLY then did Japan unconditionally surrender. When Hamas unconditionally surrenders, all killing of civilians will end.
Second, Israeli settlements are totally legal under international law, specifically Article 80 of the United Nations Charter which incorporates by reference the 1922 League of Nations Mandate and the 1920 San Remo Agreement. As Eugene Rostow, Dean of Yale Law School(1955-1965) and Under Secretary of State in a Democratic administration(1965-1969) wrote:
"Legally the West Bank and Gaza are unallocated parts of the Palestine Mandate...and as far as the claims of the Arabs who live there goes, it must be remembered that, in contrast to other League of Nations mandates, the Palestine Mandate was not established as a trust for the indigenous population of the area, to be terminated when the population was ready for self-government.
It was set up under a different article of the League Covenant as a trust for the Jewish people, in recognition of their historic connection to the land on the condition that the civic and religious rights of the Muslims and Christians be respected.
"Moreover, the right of the Jewish people to settle in the "West Bank" has never been terminated...Jewish settlement in the "West Bank" ...is..the exercise of a right protected by Article 80 of the United Nations Charter and hence necessarily part of the domestic law of the West Bank". Eugene Rostow, Commentary Magazine, October, 1989.
Further, "those Jewish rights that had existed under the Mandate remain in full force and effect, to which the UN is still committed by Article 80 to uphold, or is prohibited from altering.
"As a direct result of Article 80, the UN cannot transfer these rights over any part of Palestine, vested as they are in the Jewish People, to any non-Jewish entity, such as the “Palestinian Authority.” Among the most important of these Jewish rights are those contained in Article 6 of the Mandate which recognized the right of Jews to immigrate freely to the Land of Israel and to establish settlements thereon, rights which are fully protected by Article 80 of the UN Charter." ("Article 80 and the UN Recognition of a 'Palestinian State' ", Howard Grief, The Algemeiner, 9/22/11).
Salomon Benzimra, author of The Jewish People’s Rights to the Land of Israel (2018) has written that Article 80 is “relevant in preventing any action contemplated by the United Nations to alter existing Jewish rights and title to any part of the Land of Israel–Palestine, rights that are legally preserved under Article 80” (Page 70).
Richard Sherman, Florida