Slowly but surely we must be approaching an end game with all this. At this point in history, all the cards are
now firmly in Israel’s hands to deal with in some such way that may or may not
bring it all to an end.
Certainly the stage is set for a unilateral annexation of the West Bank
itself. Were it not for the Palestinian
population itself, it would already be an done deal. There is actually no further reason not to
absorb this remaining land.
As I have posted, the best solution for the Palestinians is to create
three highly dense core cities in Gaza, the West Bank and Southern Lebanon linked
by a modern transportation corridor and port facilities both in Gaza and So.
Leb. The city in the west Bank could
become an inland port to access the Arab
world handily. These same citizens of
these city states would be given the right to work and own title in the State of
Israel itself allowing ample economic opportunity that would include
agriculture.
This formula could be even impressed unilaterally and resolved into three
mayors for political issues. All would
have the benefit of a common currency and free trade. The advent of prosperity will shut them all
up.
Challenging the Long-Held Notion That Israeli
Settlements Are ‘Illegal’
Feb. 24, 2014 3:17pm Sharona Schwartz
It’s an almost
undisputed consensus in diplomatic circles and
much of the media that
Israeli settlements are “illegal” or “illegitimate.” In news organizations like
Al Jazeera, the adjective and noun “illegal settlement”
are practically inseparable.
Australia’s foreign
minister, therefore, caused quite a stir last month when she suggested that settlements may not be illegal under
international law and that people should stop calling them illegal until their
status is determined by Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations.
“I would like to see which international law
has declared them illegal,” Foreign Minister Julie Bishop told the Times of
Israel.
Her remark stirred
outrage from Palestinians and their supporters. Chief Palestinian negotiator
Saeb Erakat accused Bishop of trying to “reinvent international law,” writing
in the Sydney Morning Herald that
it “does not allow acquiring land through the use of force.” [ oh
really – land ownership is determined by the government in place or even its
effective agent and that is always enforced through application of force –
arclein ]
But, as Bishop asked, is international law
clear-cut?
U.S. Secretary of
State John Kerry has referred to settlements as “illegitimate” — as did his predecessor Hillary
Clinton — and unhelpful to the peace process. Similar
assessments have been voiced by administrations prior to President Barack
Obama’s and have not been limited to Democrats.
“Every administration
in recent memory has said that the settlements are illegitimate,” State
Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said in
November. “So it’s been a pretty consistent position for quite some time now.”[ it still does not make it right especially
as the USA has no presence and can only express an opinion or talking point. Perhaps they would wish to reopen ownership
interests on the Eastern Seaboard? – arclein ]
Palestinian negotiator Erakat, who called
settlements “colonies” and settlement building activity a “war crime,” based
the core of his argument on the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention, which, he wrote,
“prohibits Israel, as an occupying power, from directly or indirectly
transferring its citizens into occupied Palestinian territory.”
The Geneva document reads: “[t]he Occupying
Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into
the territory it occupies.”
Israel’s parliament
held a hearing to discuss the legality issue which is a key talking point used
by supporters of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign against Israel
and pro-Palestinian students spearheading the so-called “Israel Apartheid Week”
which kicked off on U.S. campuses
Monday.
“If you repeat a lie
often enough, it becomes the truth,” Harel Arnon of the pro-settlement Legal
Grounds Coalition told lawmakers. “One
of the biggest lies, which is feeding the wild incitement campaign that Israel
has been dealing with over the last few years, is that Israel is unlawfully
occupying Judea and Samaria, and that the presence of the settlements and of
Israelis in Judea and Samaria is a violation of international law.”
William Jacobson,
professor at Cornell Law School and author of the blog Legal
Insurrection, told The Blaze in an email that there are “serious and
substantial arguments that Israel does not illegally occupy the West Bank, as
well as that Israel has not illegally transferred population into that
territory.”
In a 2010 column for
the American Interest, Nicholas Rostow, then-counsel and vice chancellor
for legal affairs at the State University of New York and today director of the
Center for Strategic Research at National Defense University’s Institute for
National Strategic Studies, described five of the arguments made
by those who disagree that the Geneva Convention prohibits Jewish Israelis from
living legally in the West Bank and east Jerusalem.
In their view, the Geneva Convention is
inapplicable because under Article 2, the Convention applies only to territory
that is occupied by “a High Contracting Party.” Because no country has a
legally recognized claim to the “occupied territories,” the argument goes, the
West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem do not belong to any contracting party.
Rostow wrote: “In making this argument,
advocates of legality stress that the international community did not recognize
Jordan’s annexation of the West Bank and that now Jordan has withdrawn its
claim.”
Jordan formally annexed the West Bank and east
Jerusalem in 1950. Rostow explained that only Britain and Pakistan recognized
the annexation of the West Bank, but that Britain would not recognize the
annexation of Jerusalem. The Arab states did not recognize Jordan’s annexation
of both the West Bank and Jerusalem, decisions that contribute to today’s
questions about ultimate ownership of the land.
A second argument for legality of settlements
is that “even if the Geneva Convention does apply, it was not directed at the
kind of activity undertaken by Israel,” Rostow wrote.
Morris Abram, a member of the U.S. staff at
the Nuremberg Tribunal who contributed to the writing of the Fourth Geneva
Convention, once said that Article 49 of the Geneva Convention was aimed at the
Nazis’ forced transfer of large populations to concentration camps and was not
designed to apply to Israeli settlements.
[ it obviously did not
apply top the forced movement of peoples after WWII.]
“Proponents of this view argue that the nature
and extent of Israeli settlements in the West Bank do not threaten the native
population and therefore would not violate the Geneva Convention even if it
applied,” Rostow wrote.
Those who argue that settlements are legal
make a third argument, Rostow said: that the Geneva Conventions do not prohibit
Jewish settlements, because Britain’s “Palestine Mandate granted extensive
rights to Jews in Palestine and that, until the final status of a particular
area is resolved, there is no legal basis for barring Jews from settling
there.”
Another argument for legality asserts that
because Jordan, the previous holder of the West Bank and east Jerusalem, had
seized the territory unlawfully “the state subsequently taking the territory in
lawful exercise of self-defense has, against the unlawful prior holder, better
title,” Rostow said. Israel captured both the West Bank and Jerusalem in
defending itself from Jordan and other Arab armies during the 1967 war.
The fifth argument that Rostow detailed rests
on Jews’ historical claim to the land of Israel as described in the Bible, and
the Jews’ continuous historical presence in the land for thousands of years,
though this is not an argument based on modern law.
The “illegal
settlement” mantra is the cornerstone of the push by the Boycott, Divestment
and Sanctions campaign and allied groups like Code Pink in their effort to
convince consumers to boycott products manufactured in the West Bank, east
Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. It has also been the basis of their criticism of
actress Scarlett Johansson who joined the Israeli company SodaStream as a brand
ambassador.
Daniel Mandel,
director of the Zionist Organization of America’s Center for Middle East
Policy,wrote in the
Canberra Times this month that because Jewish settlers have not been
transferred forcibly to communities in the West Bank, but rather wanted to move
there, Article 49 of Geneva does not apply.
“Palestinians are not being deported from the
West Bank to another territory. Nor are Jews being deported from Israel to the
West Bank; they are moving of their own free will,” Mandel wrote.
Mandel supported the Australian foreign
minister’s skepticism regarding the “flat-earth assertion” that settlements are
illegal, writing:
The West Bank, illegally seized by Jordan in
1948, captured by Israel following Jordanian attack in 1967, is unallocated
territory under international law. Only Israeli annexation or an Arab/Israeli
agreement could alter its status – neither of which
have occurred. In short, Article 49 has no bearing on the situation, as it
deals solely with sovereign territories.
The original international decision at the 1920 San Remo
Conference earmarking this territory for Jewish settlement has never been
superseded by an internationally binding agreement. The 1947 UN partition plan,
which sought to create Arab and Jewish states, could have been such an
agreement, but it was rejected by the Arab powers and Palestinian Arabs. Being
a UN General Assembly resolution, the plan had no legal force of its own.
Last year, Jacobson,
the Cornell professor, directed readers to what he described as “one of the best explanations”
of the legal status of the disputed territories, delivered by Northwestern
University law professor Eugene Kontorovich.
“He puts the lie to the currently fashionable
notion that the ‘1967 borders’ have any legal or historical significance, and
demonstrates that Israel does not ‘illegally occupy’ the West Bank. In
fact, it was Jordan which illegally occupied the West Bank prior to 1967,”
Jacobson wrote.
Pro-Israel blogger
Elder of Ziyon who attended Kontorovich’s 2012 lecture wrote of the presentation that
decades of decisions by international players and armistice agreements such as
in 1949 failed to establish legal borders and therefore do not offer
incontrovertible backing to Palestinian claims to ownership of the West Bank
and east Jerusalem.
That point was echoed in Rostow’s survey in
the American Interest: “Since 1949, despite several wars, innumerable U.N.
resolutions, and endless argument about the relative merits of claims to the
lands of the Mandate, the status of the West Bank, Gaza and Jerusalem has never
been resolved finally as a legal matter.”
“If the Arabs had accepted the 1947 Partition
Plan, then the further partition of Palestine into an Arab and Jewish state
would have legal weight. But since they didn’t, the Jewish claim on all of
Palestine remained in force,” Elder of Ziyon wrote, summarizing one of
Kontorovich’s explanations. “Kontorovich said that there is a big question in
international law about whether one can legally acquire territory via conquest
in a defensive war. He looked up five sources written before 1967 on the
question; two said yes, two said no and one didn’t think about it.”
Those supporting the notion that settlements
are legal also cite the 1967 U.N. Security Council Resolution 242 which called
for “withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent
conflict.” They note that the phrase used was “territories occupied” not “the territories occupied,”
leaving open the exact boundaries to which Israel was being called on to
withdraw.
In 2004, the U.N.’s International
Court of Justice gave an advisory opinion that Israeli settlements are illegal.
The website Myths and Facts presented arguments here about
why it believes that decision was misguided.
Emphasizing the power of words, Myths and
Facts described the evolution of U.N. resolution phrasing which gradually
adopted as fact Palestinian ownership of land that as some legal scholars have
suggested, may not be an established fact.
“Examination reveals how over the years U.N.
General Assembly resolutions and the wording of resolutions by sub-committees
moves from ‘territories’ to ‘occupied territories’ to ‘Occupied Territories’
and ‘Arab territories’ to ‘occupied Palestinian territories’ to ‘Occupied
Palestinian Territory’ and ‘occupied Palestinian territory, including
Jerusalem,’” the site wrote.
