Invention of "Palestinian People" coincident with Soviet pushing right of self-determination for each "People"

Submitted by Wallace Edward Brand (United States), Jan 3, 2015 at 22:49

This supplements my earlier comment. At the same time the Soviet dezinformatsiya were positing the Arabs resident in Palestine as a "people", in the preamble of the PLO Charter, the Soviet diplomats at the UN were pushing conventions at the UN to elevate the status of a people under "natural law" [a law enforceable only among philosophers] to one having the status of International Law. It can be argued that this elevation first came about in 1946 in the UN Charter but it came about far more clearly in the 60s in two conventions agreed to in the '60s but not effective until the 70s. One of these was the ICCPR, the "International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights", the other was the "International Covenant on Economic and Political Rights" See SSRN.com/abstract=23853004 Brand, "Claim of the Jewish and Arab Peoples Under International Law to the Right of Political Self-Determination in Palestine". Part II

These Conventions clearly elevated the rights of any "people" to the right of self-determination under international law. If the Arabs living in Palestine were a "people", they would under international law deserve the collective political rights of self-determination and arguably the right to secede from any Jewish State whether or not promulgated in the San Remo Resolution. However that is a falacious argument too. What is clear from the Convention is that a people now have the right to self-determination. What is less clear is that the right of a people to self-determination holds true only where there is no existing sovereign state or the people are in a wholly separated colony.. Where there is a tension between the right of any genuine "people" and the right of a state to territorial integrity, the state's right is paramount. Ever since the new world order after the Peace of Westphalia, states' boundaries have been inviolable. So the right of a people to self-determination has been enforced only in the case of wholly separated colonies where the boundaries could remain undisturbed and the whole colony is afforded self-determination. The right under International Law applies only to decolonization, not to secession.

The invention of the Arabs in Palestine as the "Palestinian People" first appeared in the preamble in the 1964 first draft of the PLO Charter, drafted in Moscow. This was a time when according to Eugene Rostow and Major General Ion Pacepa, Soviet Russia was exploiting the Arab hatred of the Balfour Policy, the San Remo Agreement and the existence of Israel to help it in its quest for Middle East domination in its desire for hegemony over Western Europe. The Soviets saw Israel and the US as a barrier to that dominance of the Middle East and its oil. It had the added advantage of reframing the conflict from an Arab Goliath to a Palestinian David and the Jews from David to Goliath. The Palestinian People is an invented people. The inventor was the Soviet dezinformatsiya, not the Arabs but they have accepted it and are now pushing it except for one member of the PLO executive board, Zahir Muhsein, who revealed that it is a political ploy in 1977 in an interview with a Dutch newspaper Trouw.

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