Israel exists within its present territory with full legal title and sovereign legitimacy as a matter of international law.
From 3:26 to 4:47 ( my transcript until the official one becomes available )
As we all know,
a concerted campaign is being waged against the world's one and only Jewish
country, attacking virtually every aspect of its historic, legal, political,
cultural life with the singular aim of undermining the sovereignty, security
and legitimacy of Israel’s existence.
The future
of our nations demands a more forceful assertion of the truth. The truth at the
level that we have not seen spoken about or witnessed, in Israel’s case it specifically
involves confronting a false narrative that is the very beating heart of modern
antisemitism. That beating heart is the lie, the lie that the State of Israel
is an illegal occupier in the Land of Israel
The lie of
occupation. The lie of occupation provides Israel’s enemies a means to explain
away all types of aggression and violence as merely resistance to the occupation.
Just listen to what they have to say at the public rhetoric, given the negative
connotation of the term “occupier”, antisemitic groups around the world use the
word as often as possible in their messaging, as they carry out acts of cultural,
political and economic warfare upon Israel and its supporters.
Occupier! Occupier!
This then leads to the term’s casual repetition by the media and its eventual
use by policymakers as well. This presents real risk. It is clear. It is clear
then that promoting the common misrepresentation of the Jewish State of Israel
as an occupier in the Land of Israel has become the primary antisemitic canard of
the present generation.
The bottom
line. The bottom line is that occupation is a legal term, whose definition does
not apply to the State of Israel under the law.
Nevertheless,
the term is intentionally misused, and it’s important that we know this. It is
intentionally misused in order to shape negative misperceptions of Israel’s
history and its legitimacy while perpetuating a sense of Arab victimhood. In this very same context, occupier is nothing
more than a polite way of calling Israel a thief. It goes hand in hand, hand in
hand with the denial and erasure of Jewish history to international institutions
such as the United Nations.
To
Christians, of course, this means as if the two Jewish Temples never stood on
the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, then Christ and his works are then equally
invalidated.
One of the
things I worked hardest as my time as America’s Secretary of State was to set
that record straight. To clarify all the chaos that had been sown. You should
know that the situation I inherited in the State Department was a policy mess
that had been festering since the time of the Carter administration, based on
ignoring inconvenient legal history.
You know, as
Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, not from my party, put it: “a person is
entitled to his own opinion but not to his own facts”. So I told my team at the
State Department to conduct a strict factual and legal review, and policy analysis
which then formed the basis for our policy stance. In practical terms this
ultimately meant confronting the lie of occupation with the truth. The truth
that Israel exists within its present territory with full legal title and sovereign
legitimacy as a matter of international law.
