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Dear editor:
Ed Kass (“Opinion: Needed Now. Ometz Lev” 9/3/26 BJN) is either ignorant of or willfully blind to the fact that all “Jewish settlements” in Judea and Samaria are totally consistent with Article 80 of the United Nations Charter, the controlling international law concerning Israel.
Article 80 incorporates by reference the 1922 League of Nations Mandate for Palestine and the 1920 San Remo Agreement.
As an international treaty, Article 80 supercedes any resolution of the Security Council or General Assembly that conflicts with it.
Finally Article 80 declares that all of what is Israel including Judea, Samaria and Gaza, are the 3500 year old indigenous RECONSTITUTED homeland of the Jewish people and the land is sovereign Jewish territory.
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”, “A False Start in the Middle East,” 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. Canadians for Israel’s Legal Rights” (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).
Spewing calumnies that contravene Article 80 in order to prejudice the Jewish people of Israel does not change international law and are ultimately Zionophobic.
Richard Sherman
Margate, Florida
Member of the Institute for the Critical Study of Antizionism
