International Standards

Interesting, isn't it, that the world insists that Israel surrender lands it captured from Jordan and Egypt which represented Jewish settlements in ancient times when Judea was the homeland of Jews in the Middle East, when a collection of invading Arab armies time and again attacked the State of Israel to destroy it and return the land it occupies to Muslim possession. Jews were re-united in 1967 with their holiest of sacred Judaic places, the Temple Mount, when Israel achieved victory over the combined Arab armies that set out to annihilate Israel and its Jewish population.

Now, the Palestinians who had depended on their Arab brethren to liberate the land from Israel and return it to their possession (although previously neither Jordan nor Egypt nor any other Arab country was interested in seeing Palestinians the masters in their own house) insist that East Jerusalem must be the capital of a Palestinian state. And that Israel must vacate the land that it won by defending itself against a planned conquest. In no other place on Earth has this occurred; land taken by defence or offence always remained with the victor.

Jerusalem Day celebrations in the Old City, 17 May 2015

Israel, however, is held to a far different standard than any other country on Earth. Jewish homelessness has never stricken too many hearts in the international community but for a brief period post World War II when the mass annihilation of six million Jews through careful planning and execution by Nazi Germany left the global community temporarily aghast. Recovery was swift enough and sympathy turned from the Jewish Holocaust to the plight of Palestinians, Arabs whom no other Arab country would deign to accept as migrant-citizens, even as those same Arab countries expelled a like number of Jews who had lived for millennia among them.

Here, then is another example of a country of powerful assets, reputation, size and antecedents having control of another country's geography. The island of Cuba which had been under the American thumb during the reign of Fulgencio Batista still is not shed of an American presence, despite Batista's successors, the Castro regimes expressing the determination to recover its sovereign territory.

The Northeast Gate at the Guantanamo Bay U.S. Naval Base. (Bob Strong/Reuters)

Guantanamo Bay in Cuba takes up 117 square kilometres, has over a thousand buildings and two airfields. It is a self-contained American military facility. On the base is a grocery store, a movie theatre, a church and a golf course. The Cuban-American treaty dates back to 1903 initially when the terms of the lease agreement placed an annual rental fee at two thousand U.S. gold coins. The current fee is set at $4,085 annually dating from 1934.

The U.S. interpretation of the 1934 Lease Agreement is one of perpetuity, for use as a naval station. It is a station with geographic strategic importance to the United States with value as a naval training facility. The United States has far less legitimacy in its attachment of this territory that the Cuban people and their government wish to recover than has Israel which had to defend itself from the deadly onslaught of enemies that would not be placated other than by its defeat.

Map of Cuba showing location of Guantánamo Bay on the southeastern coast