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Israel, the EU, and International Law
(National Review) David Wurmser - It is hard to take Europe's insistence on the 1967 lines as sacrosanct too seriously. EU members collectively still refuse to move their embassies to the western parts of Jerusalem, which have been part of Israel since 1948. It is a very strange formulation when land on the western side of the 1967 line - that is, land indisputably belonging to Israel for 72 years - is considered negotiable, but every inch on the other side is off the table. It is a double standard, applied to Jews but not to Palestinians. Fifty years of propagandistic debate over Israel must not be allowed to obscure the facts. The legal disposition of all the territories defined by the League of Nations' Mandate for Palestine of 1921 is still grounded in that Mandate. The preamble to the Mandate "recognizes" that the Jewish people have an inherent right to the territory defined by the Mandate, as opposed to being "granted" that right by the international body. It essentially says that the international community cannot therefore grant to a people that which is already theirs. That makes Israel one of only a very few nations anchored in an inherited right (which can be revoked by no one), rather than a granted right (which the giver of the right can take back). Article 5 of the Mandate asserts the principle that the Jewish people, as the deed-holders of the land, possess the sole legal right to make any modifications to the territorial definitions (including borders) of that land. The 1949 Rhodes Agreement, which delineated the 1967 lines, said: "The Armistice Demarcation Line is not to be construed in any sense as a political or territorial boundary." Thus, under international law, the 1967 lines cannot be considered a border and for the EU to regard the 1967 lines as some sort of legal absolute in fact has no legal foundation. The writer, a former senior intelligence officer and adviser to the U.S. National Security Council, is a fellow at the Center for Security Policy.