The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) has condemned a call issued to the international community by Palestinian Authority ‘foreign minister’ Riyad Maliki to ban Jews who live in Judea/Samaria from visiting their countries. This call is simply anti-Semitic, stigmatizes and singles out for ostracism and discrimination Israeli Jews, and only Israeli Jews, because they live in the historical and religious Jewish heartland of Judea/Samaria.

In an address to the 31st session of the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) in Geneva, the P.A.’s Maliki said, “Israel’s continued settlement activity over the Green Line undermines international law and is a ‘crime of war’ … I call on all the countries to boycott settlements and to boycott the products of settlements and to warn of the possibility of imposing economic and commercial sanctions on the occupying power in accordance with the guidelines on businesses and human rights.” 

Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations, Danny Danon, condemned Maliki’s words at the UNHCR, calling his words “pure anti-Semitism,” comparable to the “labeling of Jews during the darkest periods in the history of humanity. The countries of the world must denounce the Palestinian Authority foreign minister and send a clear and sharp message against anti-Semitism”(Tovah Lazaroff & Herb Keinon, ‘Maliki to UNHRC: Ban settlers from your countries,’ Jerusalem Post, March 1, 2016).

 ZOA National President Morton A. Klein said, “Riyad Maliki’s words are simply a piece of anti-Semitic agitation, designed to stimulate discriminatory action against Israeli Jews, because they are Israeli Jews, for living in Judea/Samaria. Jews have a perfect right to live in Judea/Samaria and their residence there poses no obstacle to a peace settlement, were Palestinian Arabs amenable to one, which they are not.”

A June 2015 Palestine Center for Public Opinion survey found that 49% of Palestinians support “reclaiming all of historic Palestine from the river to the sea,” rather than a peaceful Palestinian state alongside Israel as the “main Palestinian national goal,” as opposed to only 29% who do not support claiming all of Israel as theirs. Indeed, 81% of West Bankers and 88% of Gazans say that all of historic Palestine “is Palestinian land and Jews have no rights to the land.”

“Judea/Samaria is territory lawfully designated for the Jewish homeland and Jewish settlement, not occupied territory. In international law, occupied territory refers to recognized sovereign territory of a state that has been taken over by another. This clearly does not apply to Judea/Samaria, which was designated for Jewish Settlement and the Jewish homeland under binding international agreements in 1920. After Jordan illegally captured and occupied the territory in 1948, Israel recaptured Judea/Samaria from Jordan in a legitimate war of self-defense. Upon Israel’s recapture of this area, Judea/Samaria was restored to its legal status of territory designated for the Jewish homeland and Jewish settlement.

“As the ZOA has repeatedly pointed out, Judea and Samaria are part of the territory earmarked for Jewish settlement in the 1920 San Remo Conference which drafted the League of Nations Charter. This decision, enshrined in the British Mandate for Palestine that shortly followed, has never been superseded by an internationally binding agreement and Jewish rights to residence in the territory remain unimpaired.

“Whatever one’s views on the contours of a final peace settlement may be, all should be able to agree that stigmatizing Jews in this manner is anti-Semitism, wrong and unacceptable.

“The ZOA calls on President Obama to condemn Riyad Maliki’s disgusting display of anti-Semitism.”