|
Trending Topics
|
Source: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/israeli-law-west-bank-judea-samaria
Can Israel Apply Israeli Law in Judea and Samaria?
(Tablet) Prof. Eugene Kontorovich - There is a simple, clear rule in international law to determine the borders of new countries. A new country automatically inherits the borders of the last top-level administrative unit in that area. In other words, the pre-independence boundaries carry over to the new state. "Annexation" has a very precise meaning in international law: the incorporation by one state of the territory of another state. The actions Israeli politicians have contemplated to apply Israeli civil law in areas that have been under nominal military administration would not constitute annexation. First, the area of the "West Bank," a term coined by the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan to refer to the lands it occupied after Israel's 1948 War of Independence, did not belong to any foreign state when it came under Israeli control in 1967, since Jordan was never sovereign in the territory. Second, Israel itself has a sovereign claim to the territory, which it calls "Judea and Samaria" - a term used for more than 2,000 years, not only in the Bible but also by Roman historians, and by secular authorities including the UN up through the middle of the 20th century. Needless to say, a state cannot annex its own territory. When Israel gained independence, its preceding geopolitical entity was Mandatory Palestine, which included the West Bank. Under the application of standard rules of international law, the borders of the new state at independence would be the borders of the mandatory territory it succeeded. When Israel retook this territory in 1967, it was not occupying territory from Jordan, but rather ending Jordanian occupation of a portion of Mandatory Palestine, the territory reserved by the League of Nations for a Jewish homeland under the British Mandate. Today, 700,000 Jewish Israelis live in Judea and Samaria where they are governed by an odd patchwork of military regulations. President Trump's 2020 peace plan contemplated Israel extending its civil law to roughly half of Judea and Samaria, where the Jewish population is concentrated. Neither international law nor Western principles of democracy stand in the way of Israel finally applying its own civil law to its own citizens in those areas. The writer is a professor at the George Mason University Law School and director of its Center on the Middle East and International Law.