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Rooms to Rent by Israelis? Washington Post Recycles the "Palestinian Narrative"

(CAMERA) Eric Rozenman - The Washington Post's page one feature "For travelers to Israeli settlements, rooms with a view - and controversy" (Feb. 2, 2016) reports that Airbnb, the popular online site that matches travelers with renters, connects tourists to Israel not only with apartment owners in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv but also rooms to let in the West Bank. In the report, the Palestinian Authority alleges "offering vacation rental properties in Jewish homes in the occupied West Bank, through U.S.-based sites such as Airbnb, Booking.com and TripAdvisor, violates international law." Which ones? The Post doesn't say. As CAMERA's Ricki Hollander has written, "[T]he late Professor Julius Stone - considered one of the premier legal theorists - maintained that the effort to designate Israeli settlements as illegal was a 'subversion...of basic international law principles.'...In Israel and Palestine: An Assault on the Law of Nations, which dealt with the legal aspects of the Arab-Israeli conflict...Stone set forth the central principles of international law upon which Israel's right to settle the West Bank is based and discussed the inapplicability of Article 49(6) of the Fourth Geneva Convention to the case of Israeli settlement." Eugene Rostow, U.S. Undersecretary of State and a co-author Security Council Resolution 242, which outlines requirements for Arab-Israeli peace and calls for negotiations to reach it, concluded: "The Jewish right of settlement in the area is equivalent in every way to the right of the existing Palestinian population to live there." Supporting Israeli claims is the basic applicable international law in this case, the League of Nations Palestine Mandate. Article 6 calls for "close Jewish settlement" on the land west of the Jordan River. The League's mandate continues under the UN Charter. But without this context, which The Post never provides, Israel's insistence that the West Bank is disputed territory seems eccentric at best. The paper refers to "the occupation" but does not remind readers that there's nothing illegal about the occupation. Israel conquered the West Bank from Jordan, not any separate Palestinian Arab entity, in successful self-defense in 1967 and retained it similarly in 1973. That makes Israel the obligatory military occupational authority, responsible for minimum standards of law and order, health, etc. of the inhabitants pending a final, negotiated settlement. As Rostow put it, "Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338...rest on two principles, Israel may administer the territory until its Arab neighbors make peace; and when peace is made, Israel should withdraw to 'secure and recognized borders,' which need not be the same as the Armistice Demarcation Lines of 1949."
2016-02-05 00:00:00
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