By Aryeh Savir
Following US Secretary of State John Kerry’s assertion at the House Foreign Affairs Committee in Congress last week (Mar. 13) that it is “a mistake” for Israel to require the Palestinians to acknowledge Israel as the Nation State of the Jewish People as part of the peace negotiations, Allan Baker, head of the International Action Division of the Legal Forum for Israel, dispatched a letter to Secretary Kerry stating that his attempt to claim the Palestinians have already recognized Israel as a Jewish state “is both a distortion of the historic record and an unfortunate misreading of the issue.”
Baker, former Israeli Ambassador to Canada and former legal adviser to Israel’s Foreign Ministry, wrote in the letter signed by himself and Head of the Legal Forum Nachi Eyal: “You justified your dismissing this requirement by claiming and reiterating Palestinian propaganda statements, that the “Jewish State issue” had been “sufficiently addressed by UN General Assembly Resolution 181 of 1947, which recommended the establishment of independent Arab and Jewish states in Palestine. You recalled in that respect “more than 30-40 mentions of a ‘Jewish state'” in the 1947 General Assembly resolution, and added that the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat had “confirmed that he agreed it [Israel] would be a Jewish state” in 1988 and in 2004.”
“Your attempt to represent these events, before Congress and to the world at large, as definitive proof that the Palestinian leadership has already recognized Israel as the Jewish state, and hence should not be required to acknowledge this in the present negotiating context, is both a distortion of the historic record and an unfortunate misreading of the issue,” the letter reads.
“To seriously presume that the 1947 UN General Assembly partition resolution – rejected by the Arab states because it had the gall to refer to a Jewish state, – together with an ambiguous, unwilling and artificial reference by Arafat to “Israel in brackets”, given in an utterly different context which itself was deemed insufficient by the then US Administration, could, in any way or form constitute an acceptable alternative to a clear, unequivocal, acknowledgement by the present Palestinian leadership of its acceptance of Israel as the nation state of the Jewish People, is incomprehensible to say the least, and openly deceptive at the most. It belies any understanding on your part as to the importance and centrality of Israel’s requirement in the present negotiating context.”
Baker points out that Israel’s leaders have repeatedly stressed the centrality of this issue since Israel’s April 2003 official response to the Quartet-sponsored “Roadmap.”
Baker concludes by questioning Secretary Kerry’s abilities to properly serve as a mediator in the negotiations: “Mr. Secretary, one might have expected, in light your position and function as convener and mediator in the present Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, that you would refrain from making more public value judgments as to whether Israel’s position is, or is not “a mistake”, writes Baker.
“While clearly you are entitled to maintain your own opinion, you have no right to express this in such one-sided and prejudicial terms, thereby undermining the very integrity of the negotiating table and selectively prejudging a substantive issue,” concluded Baker.
Tazpit News Agency
Kerry-Obama,now that’s a mistake