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Israel's Legal Case in the West Bank

(Israel Hayom) Nadav Shragai - While Judea and Samaria - the West Bank - is the cradle of Jewish civilization and peoplehood, the world has adopted the Palestinian narrative as it relates to the legal status of the territories. Nevertheless, for months now a counterattack has been waged over "the historical, legal truth" by hundreds of jurists from Israel and abroad. These jurists note that the State of Israel did indeed conquer the West Bank in 1967 as the result of a war of self-defense, but from a legal standpoint these territories are not occupied since the foreign power that held these territories between 1948 and 1967 - Jordan - did so illegally. Therefore, from the standpoint of international law, the legal status of these territories is in dispute. Col. (res.) Daniel Reisner, an expert in international law and the former head of the international law department in the Military Advocate General's Corps, wrote: "Since the territories of Judea and Samaria were never a legitimate part of any Arab state, including the Kingdom of Jordan, it is impossible to determine that Israel is an occupier in Judea and Samaria in the accepted legal definition. What's more is that the Jewish people have a historic, legal, and physical link to Judea and Samaria." "If Israeli control over Rachel's Tomb in Bethlehem in 1967 was illegal because of the illegality of taking over a territory by force, then the Jordanian occupation of that same complex in 1948 suffers from exactly the same problem." Alan Baker, a former legal advisor in the Foreign Ministry who also served as ambassador to Canada, said, "The right thing to do was to operate out of a sense of advancing our rights, the rights of the Jewish people as an indigenous nation in its land. The Jews are the oldest nation here....There is something called 'rights,' and we need to speak up about it." "It is inconceivable that the entire world will repeat the mantra about Judea and Samaria being occupied territory when from a factual standpoint there is no legal basis for this."
2013-12-16 00:00:00
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