The Question of Legality for Israeli control of Judea and Shomron

Following the June 1967 War, a number of legal arguments were advanced to support Israeli claims to the remaining territory of the Palestine Mandate, from the “Green Line” 1949 “Armistice Line” to the Jordan River.
This area of Mandated Territory had been “illegally conquered and occupied” by Trans-Jordan (Jordan) from 1948 -1967. The Jordanians never did offer the Arab residents the chance to establish an independent Palestinian entity. Instead they attempted to annex the area.

According to the Fourth Geneva Convention: “...under customary international law as reflected (...) in Article 42 of the Regulations Respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land annexed to the Fourth Hague Convention of 18 October 1907 (hereinafter “the Hague Regulations of 1907”

 "...territory is considered occupied when it is actually placed under the authority of the hostile army, and the occupation extends only to the territory where such authority has been established and can be exercised.”

According to the League of Nations resolution for the establishment of the Mandate for Palestine, the area of Judea and Shomron the “West Bank”, were recognized as a cestui sue trust for the Jewish Homeland in April, 1922 in the Treaty of Sèvres (Section VII, Art 94-97) by 52 countries at the San Remo Conference which granted the Palestine Mandate to Britain.

The League of Nations officially granted Britain the "Stewardship" or Mandate for the Territory euphemistically named by Sir Mark Sykes after the geographical term "Palestine",on July 24, 1922. 

This "act" was further ratified later in the Treaty of Lausanne July 24th 1923.

Other facts to be noted are:

• There were Jewish communities that existed in Judea and Shomron the “West Bank” and Gaza Strip prior to 1919 and these had been recognized as legitimate by the Mandate for Palestine,which was adopted by the League of Nations.
• The communities of; Hartuv and Kfar Etzion had only been re-established after 1967 after exhaustive investigations making sure none were built on private land.
• Israel also argues that some of the communities in the area of Gush Etzion are built on land purchased by a Jewish land holding company in 1925.
• There were pre existing Jewish communities in Hebron and the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem and Silwan before the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. Many of these "West Bank"Jewish communities were destroyed and residents massacred. or as the Arabs and detractors love to claim the Jewish residents were "ETNICALLY CLEANSED"

"Indigenous peoples have the right to the lands, territories and resources which they have traditionally owned, occupied or otherwise used or acquired (Art. 26.1) and that the exercise of these rights shall be free from discrimination of any kind (Art. 2)."

— UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), adopted by the UN General Assembly on September 13, 2007." Michael Calvo

Therefore, it seems reasonable to refer to the lands of these pre-state Jewish communities as liberated as they were "liberated" from the illegal occupation of Jordan and were returned to the possession of the owners, the Jewish People. 

Regarding Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, the Israeli government has NEVER forcibly transferred its population into the territories. The return of Jews to Judea and Samaria (aka West Bank) is voluntary and does not displace local inhabitants.

There are no clauses in the Fourth Geneva Convention that can be used to prohibit the voluntary return of individuals to towns and villages from which they or their ancestors had been previously ejected by forcible means.

Therefore, in these cases, the application of the Geneva Convention is an entirely different issue. It should also be emphasized that:

Much of the land, that was (and still is) being used to build new residential areas, villages and towns, in Judaea and Shomron - what detractors label "settlements"-, are "public lands" and have never had been under the legitimate ownership of any owner beforehand.

Justice Stephen M. Schwebel, who spent 19 years as a judge of the International Court of Justice at The Hague including three years as President. explained;

"...modifications of the 1949 armistice lines among those States within former Palestinian territory are lawful (if not necessarily desirable), whether those modifications are, in Secretary Rogers's words, "insubstantial alterations required for mutual security" or more substantial alterations - such as recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the whole of Jerusalem.."

and in a footnote he added

"It should be added that the armistice agreements of 1949 expressly preserved the territorial claims of all parties and did not purport to establish definitive boundaries between them". Therefore the 1949 Armistice lines are not fixed, as purported by the Palestinians and their supporters. 

The territories, situated between the “Green Line” 1949 “Armistice Line” and the former eastern boundary of Palestine under the Mandate, which were clarified in the British White Paper as being Mandated Palestine Territory- "west of the Jordan" which was intended by the League of Nations and the Balfour Declaration to be converted into a Jewish National Home and was thus excluded from the Arabs was "conquered" and occupied by Trans-Jordan (Jordan) from 1948 -1967.

During this “Occupation” Jordan did not offer to allow the establishment of an independent Palestinian entity, Instead they attempted to annex the area.

Therefore it can be argued Israel in all intents and purposes “liberated” this area in a defensive war in 1967.

Historian and journalist, Gershom Gorenberg, had once stated that outside of the pro-“settlement” community in Israel,this position was considered odd. He had stated that, while the Israeli government has used them for public relations purposes abroad, it takes entirely different positions when arguing real legal cases before the Israeli Supreme Court.

Listen to former Israeli ambassador to Canada, legal adviser and deputy director-general of Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Alan Baker who participated in the negotiation and drafting of the Oslo Accords with the Falestinians, as well as agreements and peace treaties with Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon. Is the Director of the Institute for Contemporary Affairs at the Jerusalem Center and the head of the Global Law Forum spoke about; Israel Is Not an “Occupier”

Other great Attorneys who have come to the same conclusion are:
Howard Grief who wrote the book "The Legal Foundation and Borders of Israel under International Law" which is a forceful and erudite pleading for the respecting of the letter and spirit of the he San Remo Resolution and the Mandate adopted at the San Remo Peace Conference on April 24, 1920.

According to Grief the international law that came into existence in the wake of World War I gave de jure sovereignty to the Jewish People over the entire Land of Israel and Palestine as defined in the preamble of the Mandate For Palestine. This law, now largely forgotten or neglected, is still relevant today in regard to the status and borders of the Land of Israel.

"The moment of birth of Jewish legal rights and title of sovereignty thus took place at the same time Palestine was created a mandated state, since it was created for no other reason than to reconstitute the ancient Jewish state of Judea in fulfillment of the Balfour Declaration and the general provisions of Article 22 of the League Covenant."

This meant that "Palestine" from the start was legally a Jewish state in theory that was to be guided towards independence by a Mandatory or Trustee, also acting as Tutor, and who would take the necessary political, administrative and economic measures to establish the Jewish National Home. 

The chief means for accomplishing this was by encouraging large-scale Jewish immigration to Palestine, which would eventually result in making Palestine an independent Jewish state, not only legally but also in the demographic and cultural senses.

The details for the planned independent Jewish state were set forth in three basic documents, which may be termed the founding documents of mandated Palestine and the modern Jewish state of Israel that arose from it. 

1) These were the San Remo Resolution of April 25, 1920, 

2) The Mandate for Palestine conferred on Britain by the Principal Allied Powers and confirmed by the League of Nations on July 24, 1922,

3) and the Franco-British Boundary Convention of December 23, 1920. 

These founding documents were supplemented by the Anglo-American Convention of December 3, 1924" Dr. Jaques Gautier who investigated this subject for over 20 years and concluded that not only is Israel in accordance with International law but that the International community is in direct violation of it's own Agreements and Charters they have themselves formulated.

And Professor Eugene Kontorovich who teaches at Northwestern University School of Law. listen to him discuss the issue in this video; The Legal Case for Israel. 

In 2005 Prime Minister Ariel Sharon wanted to dismantle all Israeli settlements in the Gaza Strip and four in the northern West Bank in a regretfully mistaken attempt to stimulate peace between Israel and the Palestinians.

The Sharon Government's decision to remove the “settlers” from the “settlements” was challenged in the Israeli Supreme Court by the Jewish “settlers”. 

At that time the Israeli Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Sharon Government and won the case by noting;

"the settlements were in territory whose legal status was that of 'belligerent territory' or territory under "Military occupation" that: "Judea and Samaria" [West Bank] and the Gaza area were lands seized during warfare, and are not part of Israel." In the court proceedings, the Israel Government argued that the settlers should have known that the settlements were only temporary.

They “settlers” had argued that use of the term"'belligerent territory" in relation to Israel's control of the areas has no basis in international law or history, and that it prejudges the outcome of negotiations.

The term “occupied territory,” which appears in the Fourth Geneva Convention, originated as a result of the Nazi occupation of Europe. Though it has become common parlance to describe the "West Bank" and Gaza as “occupied territories,” there is no legal basis for using the term “occupied territories,” in connection to the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Professor Julius Stone, a leading authority on the Law of Nations, categorically rejected the use of the term “occupied territory” to describe the territories controlled by Israel on the following counts:

(1) Article 49 relates to the invasion of sovereign states and is inapplicable because the West Bank did not and never did belong to any other state other that the Ottoman Empire. (The previous High Contracting Power)

2) ARTICLE 49 The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies. Article 8(2)(b)(viii) of the International Criminal Court Rome Statute defines "[t]he transfer, directly or indirectly, by the Occupying Power of parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies" as a war crime. (*) This should be read only in the context of the World War II forcible migrations. It is only intended to cover forcible transfers and to protect the local population from displacement and not voluntary movement.

Settlement of Jews in the West Bank is voluntary and does not displace local inhabitants.

Moreover, Stone asserted that" “no serious dilution (much less extinction) of native populations” [exists]; rather “a dramatic improvement in the economic situation of the [local Palestinian] inhabitants since 1967 [has occurred].”

"Irony would...be pushed to the absurdity of claiming that Article 49(6), designed to prevent repetition of Nazi-type genocidal policies of rendering Nazi metropolitan territories judenrein, has now come to mean that...the West Bank...must be made judenrein and must be so maintained, if necessary by the use of force by the government of Israel against its own inhabitants. Common sense as well as correct historical and functional context excludes so tyrannical a reading of Article 49(6.)"

The Israeli legal argument for control over Judea and Shomron was dismissed by the International Court of Justice. 

The Court cited the Geneva Convention's travaux préparatoires, which recommended that the conventions be applicable to any armed conflict "whether [it] is or is not recognized as a state of war by the parties" and "in cases of occupation of territories in the absence of any state of war" as confirmation that the drafters of the article had no intention of restricting the scope of its application

A 1971 interpretation of the United Nations Security Council Resolution 242 by Israeli Attorney-General, Meir Shamgar

states; “…that the Convention did not pertain to the territories captured by Israel since they had not previously been recognized as part of a sovereign state and could not be considered "the territory of a High Contracting Party".

According to this argument, the last legal sovereign over the territories was that of the League of Nations who had decreed a Mandate for Palestine, which stipulated the right of the Jewish people to settle in the whole of the Mandated territory.
According to Article 6 of the Mandate:

"The Administration of Palestine, while ensuring that the rights and position of other sections of the population are not prejudiced, shall facilitate Jewish immigration under suitable conditions and shall encourage, in co-operation with the Jewish agency referred to in Article 4, close settlement by Jews on the land, including State lands and waste lands not required for public purposes." 

Accordingly, Article Six, makes it clear that Jewish settlements are not only permissible, but actually encouraged. Therefore, Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) are perfectly legal.

Here is Article 4:

"An appropriate Jewish agency shall be recognized as a public body for the purpose of advising and co-operating with the Administration of Palestine in such economic, social and other matters as may affect the establishment of the Jewish national home and the interests of the Jewish population in Palestine, and, subject always to the control of the Administration to assist and take part in the development of the country."

"The Zionist organization, so long as its organization and constitution are in the opinion of the Mandatory appropriate, shall be recognized as such agency. It shall take steps in consultation with His Britannic Majesty's Government to secure the co-operation of all Jews who are willing to assist in the establishment of the Jewish national home."

Article 25 allowed the League Council to temporarily postpone the Jewish right to settle in what is now Jordan, if conditions were not amenable.

"In the territories lying between the Jordan and the eastern boundary of Palestine as ultimately determined, the Mandatory shall be entitled, with the consent of the Council of the League of Nations, to postpone or withhold application of such provisions of this mandate as he may consider inapplicable to the existing local conditions, and to make such provision for the administration of the territories as he may consider suitable to those conditions, provided that no action shall be taken which is inconsistent with the provisions of Articles 15, 16 and 18."

The Jewish people still have residual historical and legal rights in the West Bank emanating from the British Mandate that were never cancelled, but rather were preserved by the U.N. Charter, under Article 80 — the famous “Palestine Clause” that was drafted, in part, to guarantee continuity with respect to Jewish rights from the League of Nations.

Article 80 of the U.N. Charter preserved this Jewish right to settlement by specifying;

"Except as may be agreed upon in individual trusteeship agreements...nothing in the [United Nations] Charter shall be construed ... to alter in any manner the rights whatsoever of any states or peoples or the terms of existing international instruments."

Meir Shamgar further stated:

"There is no rule of international law according to which the Fourth Convention applies in each and every armed conflict whatever the status of the parties.... The whole idea of the restriction of military government powers is based on the assumption that there has been a sovereign who was ousted and that he was a legitimate sovereign
or the last "High Contracting Party."

As we all know the last legally defined High Contracting Party or “Sovereign Power” that controlled the area was the League Of Nations who had a Mandate for a Jewish Homeland in the area that ended in UNR181 from November of 1947.

Therefore the Turkish Empire, was "a sovereign who was ousted and that he was a legitimate sovereign" or the last "High Contracting Party".

With the establishment of the Palestinian Authority in 1994, in accordance with the Oslo Accords, there is no longer an Israeli military government over the Palestinian population.
Indeed, the famous 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention on occupied territories stipulates that an Occupying Power is bound to its terms “to the extent that such a Power exercises the function of government in such territory (Article 6).”

In accordance with the Oslo Accords some functions of government were retained by the IDF, other functions were exercised by the Palestinians, and there were also shared powers. Though the Palestinians do not have an independent state, they technically can not be considered to be under “occupation” when at the same time they were being ruled by the Palestinian Authority;  Mahmoud Abbas.

In their propaganda war pro-Palestinian groups, and their allies on the far left, have embraced the use of the term “occupation” as part of their rhetorical arsenal, along with the terms advocated in Arafat's infamous 1974 speech that diabolically labeled Israel as a “colonialist, apartheid state.” They have succeeded in waging political warfare against Israel by manipulating the truth and facts.

The heinous charge of “occupation” has evolved into one of the most potent weapons in the delegitimization campaign against Israel. Therefore the decision to use the term “occupation” as a means of harsh criticism appears to emanate as much from political considerations as it does from any legal analysis.

According to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), adopted by the UN General Assembly on September 13, 2007, the Jews are the indigenous people of the lands referred to as Judea, Samaria.

Furthermore, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights declared that "there is an international customary law norm which affirms the rights of indigenous peoples to their traditional lands".

The Balfour Declaration of 1917, the Treaty of Lausanne (1923), British Mandate for Palestine (1922), San Remo Resolution (1920), and Treaty of Sevres (1920) created international law, and recognized and re-established the historical indigenous rights of the Jews to their land. The signatories of these treaties and the Mandate (Britain, France, Turkey, Japan, Italy, etc.), are bound by them.

UN General Assembly Resolutions stating that the settlement of Jews in Judea Samaria is contrary to international law are no more than recommendations and have never led to amendments of existing binding treaties since ONLY resolutions taken under Chapter VII of the UN Charter are binding on all UN member states.

The last word: The 3rd Chamber of the Court of Appeal of Versailles

All of the above is overshadowed by the 2013 decision by the 3rd Chamber of the Court of Appeal of Versailles. The French Court ruling over a previous decision found that Israel’s presence in Judea and Samaria is unequivocally legal under international law, dismissing a suit brought by the Palestinian Authority (PA) against Jerusalem’s light rail built by French companies Alstom and Veolia

To rule on the suit, the Court of Appeals had to determine the legal rights of Palestinians and Israelis in the region.
Their conclusion was that the Palestinians have no right – in the international legal sense – to the region, unlike Israel, who is legitimately entitled to all land beyond the 1949 ceasefire lines to the Jordan River 1967 Ceasefire line and now 1995 Jordanian- Israeli negotiated peace border.

The Court explained that the PA misinterpreted the texts and they do not apply to Israel presence in Judea and Samaria.

All the international instruments put forward by the PLO were acts signed between states, and the obligations or prohibitions contained therein are relevant to states. Neither the PA nor the PLO are states, and therefore, none of these legal documents apply to them.

Likewise, the Court showed that these texts are binding only on those who signed them, namely the contracting parties. Neither the PLO nor the PA have ever signed these texts.
The Court, quite irritated by the arguments presented by the PA, boldly asserted that the law cannot be based solely on the PLO’s assessment of a political or social situation.

The Court of Appeal therefore sentenced the PLO and Association France Palestine Solidarité (AFPS), who was co-appellant, to pay 30,000 euros ($32,000) to Alstom, 30,000 euros to Alstom Transport and 30,000 euros to Veolia Transport.

Neither the PLO nor the Palestinian Authority nor the AFPS appealed to the Supreme Court, and therefore the judgment became final.

This was the first time that a NON ISRAELI Court has legally destroyed all Palestinian legal claim that Israel’s occupation is illegal.

From the Preamble of the Mandate For Palestine:

The Council of the League of Nations:

Whereas the Principal Allied Powers have agreed, for the purpose of giving effect to the provisions of Article 22 of theCovenant of the League of Nations, to entrust to a Mandatory selected by the said Powers the administration of the territory of Palestine, which formerly belonged to the Turkish Empire, "  

"Whereas the Principal Allied Powers have also agreed that the Mandatory should be responsible for putting into effect the declaration originally made on November 2nd, 1917, by the Government of His Britannic Majesty, and adopted by the said Powers, in favor of the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, ...Whereas recognition has thereby been given to the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and to the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country..."

The Conclusion is always the same: the Jewish people have been betrayed many times over by the Nations of the world who do not abide by their own agreements that they have themselves formulated.

The Khazarian Lie Of the Nachbah Losers

A very intelligent and bright young Jewish woman, Leora, posted on Facebook: "One of the biggest arguments that I hear from the BDS is that "you're not a real Jew, since you're Ashkenazi." (And, thus not Semitic.)"

The Palestinians and their Trolls have consistently attempted to distort and pervert historical truth ever since Arafat's 1975 UN speech. They do this in order to discredit the claim of the Jewish people to Eretz-Yisrael and to "Negate" the Jewish Homeland basis in the Balfour declaration and the League of Nations Mandate. The "If " Jews are "white" and Middle Easterners are "not white", then obviously Jews are not from the Middle East and therefore Jews are not “really” the true descendants of the original Jews but are "Khazaian" Usurpers and therefore are not indigenous to the Middle East. Thereby defining the modern state of Israel as an illegitimate settler colony forced upon the poor natives by Imperialist forces.This specific horrendous fallacy has become known as the "Khazarian lie".

Regretfully this blatant and outrageous lie to label today's Jews / Zionists as settlers "colonizers"  if you will, as "Usurpers to the land" and to mark Israel as a "Pariah among nations", has become very prevalent among those whom I label HOIZs or the Haters of Israel and Zionism. This bizarre lie goes hand in hand with the Palestinian propaganda initiative I labeled the "Negation of Israel plan" begun under Yasser Arafat. 

This initiative was explained and laid out to Yasser Arafat by leading anarchists and Marxist communists in the 1970's; Võ Nguyên Giáp, a General in the Vietnam People's Army and Muhammad Yazid, who had been minister of information in two Algerian wartime ‎governments.

This "PR" ploy became the basis for the Palestinians agenda to negate the UNR181 Partition of the Mandate in 1947.

“Stop talking about annihilating Israel and instead turn your terror war into a struggle for ‎human rights. Then you will have the American people eating out of your hand.”
Võ Nguyên Giáp

“Wipe out the argument that Israel is a small state whose existence is threatened by the Arab ‎states, or the reduction of the Palestinian problem to a question of refugees; instead, present ‎the Palestinian struggle as a struggle for liberation like the others. Wipe out the impression ‎‎…that in the struggle between the Palestinians and the Zionists, the Zionist is the underdog. ‎Now it is the Arab who is oppressed and victimized in his existence because he is not only ‎facing the Zionists but also world imperialism.”‎ Muhammad Yazid

‎This strategy of the "Palestinians" to "delegitimize Israel as an unwanted Apartheid racist, colonist entity" has had a remarkable success in inverting much of the world's perception of the Middle East; transforming tiny Israel, from its natural role of "David" against the massive Arab population and lands, to one of "Goliath" against the (poor) "stateless," "oppressed," and "occupied"  Palestinians. These three terms have become the keywords in the anti-Israel delegitimization plan. The purpose of the keywords is to elicit a demand from the nations of the world for the dissolution of the State of Israel by a cancellation of the Partition.

The Palestinians failed abysmally by rejecting the peaceful division of the Mandate offered to them in 1947. Instead the Palestinian people, whose leadership was divided and self motivated, opted to allow the Arab League to invade and conquer the area. They were told to leave and that once the Jews were exterminated "driven into the sea" they could not only return to their homes they could reap the plunder of the Jewish possessions. However the Arab armies failed. This Arab failure and ever lasting embarrassment has been immortalized in the "Nachbah," which has haunted the Arabs of the Mandated Area ever since.

Nearly every anti-Semitic and neo-Nazi website today denounces Zionists and Israelis as “Khazars.” This Khazar myth has been spread by Neo-Nazis and Islamofascists to invent a racialist argument against Jews being entitled to self-determination, independence, or a homeland in the Land of Israel. It is their belief that Jews are nothing more than converted Khazars, or so goes the argument of the anti-Semitic racialists. They use this lie to spread the falsehood and distortion of history that today's Jews are foreign interlopers (usurpers) in the Levant and have no right to statehood there. 

We can see that this is a consistent thread taken from the "Palestine Ministry of Propaganda and Fantasies" manual for Palestinian Trolls in all of the "Talkback" comments on the Internet and YouTube videos to brainwash and "bamboozle" the naive and uneducated.

Web chat “Talkbacks”; in which Jews, not just Israeli Jews, defending Israel are dismissed outright as “Khazarian usurpers”, are just too numerous to count.
These "Talkback Trolls" pervert historical fact and truth as they have attempted to claim that they are the true descendants of peoples who predated the Hebrews – a few years ago it was the Canaanites -or as in their latest Lie they claim to be descendants of the Philistines!(sic) They attempt to do this by quoting passages from the Bible where by the term Philistines is mentioned to show that "Palestine" existed as a country and they are the "true inhabitants"-"natives" if you may.
Their total ignorance of historical fact and the meaning of the term "P'lishtim- (Hebrew for invaders)" meant to indicate that the Philistines were part of the Minoan-later the ‎Mycenaean civilization from the island of Crete in Greece and not- Moslem Arabs!! Therefore in ‎Hebrew the word "Palestinians" lit means = INVADERS)‎

The fact that Jews came from Judea means nothing as does all the archaeological finds showing that Jews were inhabitants of the land. To them and their supporters the Jews / Israelis of today are “usurpers” and not “true Jews”. One of the most glaring absurdities of their claim is the fact that nearly 60% of ALL of today’s Israelis are descendants of Jews of Arab lands and NOT from Europe!

To explain this mind-numbing development, let’s take a few steps back.  Yes, there was indeed a Kingdom of Turkic peoples living north of the Black Sea in the Dark Ages called the Khazars, and – yes – its ruling family and part of its population did convert to Judaism. 

A myth was created, about the Khazars being an important component of European Jewry, in the 1976 book, The Thirteenth Tribe by Arthur Koestler.  Koestler wrote his book largely in order to create interest and sympathy for Jews and Israel, believing the Khazar story would serve as a basis for respect and fascination with Jewish history.  In reality, there is very little evidence of any type, from genetic markers to family and place names, that there is any significant Khazar “blood” among Western or Ashkenazi Jews.

One of the favorite sources for this fable is Tel Aviv University  Professor Shlomo Sand, an Austrian-born member of the extreme "left wing" whose expertise is French history and  NOT a  geneticist, joined with Arabs and many non-Jews to argue for an end to Israel as a Jewish nation.‎
At the heart of Sand’s book we find the claim that the Jews of Eastern Europe, the ‎‎“Yiddish people” by his definition, do not originate with the Jews who came from the ‎Middle East via Ashkenaz to Poland, but with the Khazars, nomadic tribes that built an ‎empire between the Black and the Caspian seas, converted to Judaism in the eighth ‎century, and scattered to the four winds when their state was destroyed between the ‎tenth and thirteenth centuries.
Sand contests the historical connection between the Jewish people and the land of ‎Israel.‎ He argues that the Jewish people, to use his words, is an “invented” entity or ‎‎“implanted memory” with no connection, in fact, to the land of Israel. In his work Sand was bent on undermining the traditional Jewish narrative, which depicts the Jewish ‎people of today as the descendants of the biblical and Second Temple Jews who lost their ‎land, dispersed over the world, yet retained their bond to the land-of-Israel homeland, to ‎which – as the Scroll of Independence states – they have now returned. Sand and (his Falestian propagandist backers) have blatantly ignored the fact that even if Jews were not exiled from their ‎land, and many of them had not scattered all over the Roman Empire of their own free will. The very loss of Jewish sovereignty in the land of Israel; as signified by the Romans’ change of its ‎name to Palestine out of a desire to erase all trace of Jews from it after the Bar-‎Kokhba Revolt was crushed, went down in Jewish collective memory as profound traumatic experience.  Sand and (his Falestian propagandist backers) deny and ignore the fact that a small Jewish community continued to exist in the land of Israel, particularly in the Galilee until Christianity became predominant in the Roman ‎Empire in the fourth century.‎The denial of ‎such a connection and the narrow definition of Jews as just a “religious community” – ‎a millet, a Turkish term used by the “Canaanites” to define "exilic Jewry" – aims to ‎influence Israeli Jews to change their self-image and open up to a civil concept of ‎identity; this would enable the State of Israel to become a “state of all its citizens,” ‎unrelated to diaspora Jews who are also just local religious communities (e.g. “Judeo-‎Americans,” as he calls them). When that happens, the discrimination practiced in the ‎State of Israel against its Arab citizens (“Palestino-Israelis”) on the basis of the Law of ‎Return will disappear, and they will be given the opportunity to fully integrate into an ‎Israeli state that will shed its undesirable Jewish identity yet enable Arabs to keep their ‎separate identity and unique culture. ‎

He had taken his thesis for his controversial book “The Invention of the Jewish People”‎ from novelist Arthur Koestler’s 1976 book, “The Thirteenth Tribe”.
Sand, claimed that European Jewry are not the children of Abraham but descendants of pagan Eastern ‎Europeans and Eurasians, concentrated mostly in the ancient Kingdom of Khazaria in ‎what is now Ukraine and Western Russia. The Khazarian nobility converted during the ‎early Middle Ages, when European Jewry was forming.‎
Although scholars challenged Sand’s selective manipulation of the ‎facts, specifically regarding the conversion of the Khazars which was actually limited to the tiny ruling class and not to the ‎vast pagan population. ‎
Harry Ostrer’s book "Legacy: A Genetic History of the Jewish People" is an impressive counterpoint to the dubious historical methodology of ‎Sand and his admirers. And, as a co-founder of the Jewish HapMap — the study of ‎haplotypes, or blocks of genetic markers, that are common to Jews around the world and his book is the definitive response to this fabrication.‎

So was the story about the Khazars true?

The sources are very sparse; to the extent that there is any archaeological evidence, it is ‎very little. The whole subject straddles the seam between legend and historical reality. ‎The most esteemed scholar of the Khazar monarchy, by Sand’s own acknowledgment, is ‎Douglas Morton Dunlop (1909–1987) was a renowned British orientalist and scholar of Islamic and Eurasian history whose command of the languages needed to study the ‎Khazars, on whom information is found; in Arabic, Hebrew, Byzantine and Chinese ‎literature. Though the information available is fragmentary and at times contradictory. Dunlop, at the end ‎of his book; "The History of the Jewish Khazars", New York: Schocken Books, 1967, relates to the theory that the Jews of Eastern Europe are the descendants of ‎the Khazars; he states that “This can be dealt with very shortly, because there is little ‎evidence which bears directly upon it, and it unavoidably retains the character of a mere ‎assumption.”  With typical English understatement, he also adds that to speak of East ‎European Jewry, i.e. the Ashkenazim, as the descendants of the Khazars “would be to go ‎much beyond what our imperfect records allow.”

However despite all this proof to the contrary that the Khazar lie was a myth it has hijacked by anti-Zionists, anti-Zionistic Jews,Neo-Nazis and Islamofascists to invent a racialist argument against Jews being entitled to self-determination, independence, or a homeland in the Land of Israel.  If Jews are nothing more than converted Khazars, or so goes the argument of the anti-Semitic racialists, then they are foreign interlopers in the Levant and have no right to statehood there.

As usual the HOIZs ignore written historical facts.

It is a documented and recorded historical fact, described in the books of Josephus and other Roman historians of the first century period some 2,000 years ago, that substantial Jewish communities were already spread across the Greco-Roman and Persian Empires before the  mid-second century BCE.

These Jews of the "Diaspora" maintained links to Jerusalem and they numbered in the tens of thousands by the first half of the first century CE. We see this in the burial business in places in Israel like ancient Tzipori (Sepphoris) where Jews from abroad paid to have their bones interred in the Sepphoris ossuary.

By the end of the first millennium CE, Jewish communities in the Roman Empire were visible along the Rhine valley in Germany and through out Gaul. Jewish communities flourished throughout the old Babylonian and Greek empires as Jews had migrated after the Babylonian exile and before the Roman Empire to the area of the Khazarians .

Jewish merchants known as Radhanites or  Radhanim traveled East from Akko towards the area of today's Southern Russia along the Silk Road to China where they settled there. Jewish merchants settled in many provinces of the Greek and later Roman Empire after the Diaspora. So it’s only reasonable to suppose they interbred with the Asiatics who were already in Khazaria and who according to some converted between 620AD and 740AD according to The Jewish Encyclopedia of 1906. 

"In 679 the Chazars subjugated the Bulgars and extended their sway farther west between the Don and the Dnieper, as faras the head-waters of the Donetz in the province of Lebedia…It was probably about that time that the chaghan (kagan=king) of the Chazars and his grandees, together with a large number of his heathen people, embraced the Jewish religion. According to A. Harkavy (“Meassef Niddaḥim,” i.), the conversion took place in 620; according to others, in 740. King Joeph, in his letter to Ḥasdai ibn Shaprut (about 960), gives the following account of the conversion:
(see Harkavy, “Soobshchenija o Chazarakh,” in “Yevreiskaya Biblioteka,” vii. 153)"

“Some centuries ago King Bulan reigned over the Chazars. To him God appeared in a dream and promised him might and glory. Encouraged by this dream, Bulan went by the road of Darlan to the country of Ardebil, where he gained great victories [over the Arabs]. The Byzantine emperor and the calif of the Ishmaelites sent to him envoys with presents, and sages to convert him to their respective religions.
Bulan invited also wise men of Israel, and proceeded to examine them all. As each of the champions believed his religion to be the best, Bulan separately questioned the Mohammedans and the Christians as to which of the other two religions they considered the better. When both gave preference to that of the Jews, that king perceived that it must be the true religion. He therefore adopted it”
According to Mas’udi (“Les Prairies d’Or,” ii. 8), the king and the Chazars proper were Jews; According to historian Shaul Stampfer, "even though it's a wonderful story", the mass conversion of Khazars to Judaism never took place.

What actually became of the Jewish Khazars is unknown. The Khazar kingdom was largely destroyed by the expanding Russian kingdom in the tenth century, and anything remaining was destroyed in the Mongol invasions. With the successive invasions and the destruction of Khazaria, the members of the Jewish community fled as refugees further northward into Germany and Russia. Some may have integrated themselves into other Jewish communities in the Middle East, Central Asia, and Eastern Europe.

As the centuries went by they interbred with those fair-skinned people too. In reality, there is very little evidence of any type, from genetic markers to family and place names, that there is any significant Khazar “blood” among Western or “Ashkenazi” Jews.

As to the question; "What is the source of the term Ashkenaz?"

By Talmudic times, however, both the Scythians and the Cimmerians had disappeared from the world, swallowed up by other nations. Casting about for the location of Gomer, who was the eldest son of Japheth (and of the Japhetic line), and father of Ashkenaz, Riphath, and Togarmah, according to the "Table of Nations" in the Hebrew Bible, (Genesis 10).
The rabbis of the talmudic period took it on the basis of phonetic resemblance to be Germania, as the Romans referred to the Teutonic areas west of the Rhine whose tribes they were constantly battling. “Gomer is Germamya [sic],” says the tractate of Yoma, while the tractate of Megillah tells us: “There are three hundred crown wearers [that is, petty kings] in Germamya and three-hundred-sixty-five lords in Rome, and every day they go forth and kill one another because they are too busy fighting to have time to unite under a single king.”

This is no doubt the reason that Ashkenaz, the biblical son of Gomer, came to be associated with Germany, too. This association may have been strengthened further by the name Scandza, as Scandinavia, the Germanic-speaking north of Europe, was often referred to in medieval times.

By the middle ages, we find Ashkenaz being widely used for Germany in Jewish sources (when the 11th-century Rashi, RAbbi SHlomo Itzhaki  for example, translates a Hebrew word into German in his commentaries, he gives it to us in “the language of Ashkenaz”), and before long it became the standard term.

Originally, therefore, an "Ashkenazi" in Hebrew was a Jewish inhabitant of Germany. (It doesn’t appear in any Jewish source in the sense of Scythian.) Yet as Jews migrated eastward and northward to Slavic lands from German ones, taking with them “the language of Ashkenaz” (which gradually turned into Eastern European Yiddish), “Ashkenazi” came to denote any Yiddish-speaking Jew, and eventually — as it does today — any descendant of Yiddish-speaking Jews.
Ashkenaz, on the other hand, continued to refer in Hebrew to Germany alone, until it was replaced in the 20th century by Germanya so as to avoid the ambiguity of Ashkenazim meaning both non-Jewish Germans and Jewish speakers of Yiddish. As for Germamya, it is gone from the world, along with the Cimmerians and Scythians.

After the wave of expulsions from Spain and Portugal during the Inquisition during the fifteenth century, Jews began to disperse once more, into Eastern Europe. It is also important to note that from the founding of the Kingdom of Poland, in 1025 through 1569, Poland was considered to be the most tolerant country in Europe known as “Paradisus Iudaeorum” (Latin for "Paradise for the Jews"). During the Spanish Inquisition and expulsion it became a shelter for the persecuted and expelled European Jewish community and it became the home to the world's largest Jewish community of the time. There are some references that show that up to three-quarters of all Jews lived in Poland by the middle of the 16th century.

Now, as a matter of fact, even if the Khazar myth were true, and Ashkenazi Jews were descendant from converted Khazars (and – we repeat – the myth is NOT true!), it still would not make the slightest difference.  Jews never defined themselves in genetic or racial terms.  They always saw themselves as an ethnic group marked off by religion, tradition, and language.  Converts are just as Jewish as are those born to a Jewish mother and just as entitled to participate in Jewish self-determination.  And, as I stated previously to top it all off, most Israeli Jews are not even Ashkenazi Jews.

Meanwhile, the popularity of the Khazar myth among anti-Semites represents a return of modern anti-Jewish anti-Semitic hatred and bigotry to the racialism of the 1930′s rise of the Nazi's and earlier.
It is the "in" thing now on every anti-Semitic and neo-Nazi website to denounce Zionists and Israelis as “Khazars.” Web chat lists in which Jews defending Israel are dismissed as “Khazar usurpers” are too numerous to count.

The racialism in vogue once again holds that Jews would only have legitimate claims to the right of self-determination in their homeland if they were appropriately "Real Jews" and true Semites from a racial point of view.
To them Palestine is part of the Semitic racial "Lebensraum" and those who do not possess the correct pure racial markings have no business being there.  Racial purity is suddenly the new basis for national rights. And the absurdity that this agenda of theirs is straight out of the stated Nazi policy in Adolph Hitler's "Mein Kampf" does not detract from their willingness to harangue Israelis as "ZioNazis"

If we take the racialist argument to its illogical conclusions, Palestinian Arabs have the right to exercise all claims to sovereignty in Israel due to their being true racial Jews, while Zionists are non-Jewish Khazars – racial impostors and usurpers.
But to make things even more hypocritical, Arabs themselves are, of course, a mixture of racial strains, They too are derived  from Arab intermixing with Spanish and Italian Europeans, Caucasian Berbers, Vandals, Goths, and even some Vikings.

So is it any wonder that so many Jews ended up looking like those with whom they live? Just like the blue eyed blonde Moslems who live in Serbia and other areas of the Balklands.

In conclusion this Khazarian story can be added to the long list of ludicrous attempts to negate the Jewish presence and connection to Eretz Yisrael and exemplifies the sickness that resides within those abject losers and their backers of the "Nachba" heritage.