Headline: In West Bank, New Armed Groups Emerge, and Dormant Ones Stir
Sub-headline: The small but influential Lions’ Den network has attracted young Palestinians disappointed by their leaders and angry at Israeli violence. Veteran fighters are restless, too.
Isn’t the right to resist the occupier codified?
Headline: Palestinians have a legal right to armed struggle
Sub-headline; It’s time for Israel to accept that as an occupied people, Palestinians have a right to resist – in every way possible.
Stanley L Cohen is an attorney and human rights activist who has done extensive work in the Middle East and Africa.
Long ago, it was settled that resistance and even armed struggle against a colonial occupation force is not just recognised under international law but specifically endorsed.
In accordance with international humanitarian law, wars of national liberation have been expressly embraced, through the adoption of Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions of 1949 (pdf), as a protected and essential right of occupied people everywhere.
Finding evolving vitality in humanitarian law, for decades the General Assembly of the United Nations (UNGA) – once described as the collective conscience of the world – has noted the right of peoples to self-determination, independence and human rights.
Indeed, as early as 1974, resolution 3314 of the UNGA prohibited states from “any military occupation, however temporary”.
In relevant part, the resolution not only went on to affirm the right “to self-determination, freedom and independence […] of peoples forcibly deprived of that right,[…] particularly peoples under colonial and racist regimes or other forms of alien domination” but noted the right of the occupied to “struggle … and to seek and receive support” in that effort.
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The Times opinion columnists, Tom Friedman and Bret Stephens, are unapologetic apologists for Zionism: that has reached the point of Fascisms, under Netanyahu and his gang of armed, porcine thugs, aided by a lawless ‘Settler Cadre’.
Rootless cosmopolitan,down at heels intellectual;would be writer.
'Polemic is a discourse of conflict, whose effect depends on a delicate balance between the requirements of truth and the enticements of anger, the duty to argue and the zest to inflame. Its rhetoric allows, even enforces, a certain figurative licence. Like epitaphs in Johnson’s adage, it is not under oath.'
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v15/n20/perry-anderson/diary
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