Joe Biden defends refusal to call for ceasefire
[Julian Borger, Guardian Media 16 November]
Joe Biden has presented an unapologetic defence of his refusal to call for a ceasefire in Gaza, arguing that Hamas presented a continuing threat to Israel and that Israeli forces were seeking to avoid civilian casualties. It would be timely for President Joe to consider the many reasons Hamas has for this determination and intransigence:
Firstly. Woodrow Wilson’s 1919 King Crane Commission and that commission’s enumeration: “a national home for the Jewish people” is not equivalent to making Palestine into a Jewish State; nor can the erection of such a Jewish State be accomplished without the gravest trespass upon the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.
Secondly. The fact that the League of Nations 1922 Mandate for Palestine took this stern warning into account and accordingly extensively-reassured ‘all community of and within Palestine’, that it’s equal right was-to-be both enshrined and protected – in the envisioned Independent Palestine Territory.
Thirdly. The fact that apartheid, extensive government-facilitated discriminatory practice and much other unlawful practice pertain today across the whole extent of this sad-and-sorry land.
