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International Law and the Disputed Territories

[Spectator-UK] Melanie Phillips - British Foreign Secretary David Miliband has urged enforcement of an EU boycott of produce from Israeli settlements in the West Bank, settlements he has called "illegal." I asked the Foreign Office for the legal basis of its opinion that the settlements were illegal. It replied that it was the Geneva Convention, which forbade the movement of a population into occupied territory. I asked whether it was basing this on a ruling by any particular body or whether this was merely its own reading of the Geneva Convention. Oh, everyone accepts this is what the Geneva Convention means, came the breezy reply. This is in fact a total misrepresentation of international law. The Geneva Convention cannot apply to the West Bank, nor to East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip for that matter, because these have never been recognized as sovereign territory. As part of Mandatory Palestine, they never belonged to any sovereign state but were occupied and administered illegally by Jordan and Egypt between 1948 and 1967 after the Arab war of aggression against Israel in 1948. The Geneva Convention was designed to prohibit inhumane practices such as by the Nazis and the Soviets before and during the Second World War in forcibly transferring or deporting people into or out of occupied territories. But the Israeli settlers in the West Bank went there voluntarily. The only force Israel has used is in getting them out of Gaza. So clearly the Geneva Convention does not apply in any sense to the West Bank settlements. Israel is "occupying" the West Bank (which on a day-to-day basis is not "occupied" but ruled by the Palestinians) entirely within its rights under international law, which recognizes the right of a country that has been attacked to occupy and retain land that continues to be used for belligerent purposes against it. Which is why the UN's famous Resolution 242 was deliberately drafted to refer to Israel withdrawing from "territories" rather than all the territories - and then only when the Arabs end their war against Israel. Most important of all is something that is almost totally overlooked. Jews lived in many parts of the West Bank for centuries and were ethnically cleansed from it in the last century by Arab pogroms in places like Hebron. It was in recognition of this, the historic and inalienable connection of the Jews to this land, that the original Mandate for Palestine instructed Britain to facilitate "close settlement" by the Jews in the whole of Mandate Palestine. As the late Eugene Rostow, the former U.S. Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs who played a leading role in drafting Resolution 242, repeatedly said, far from being illegally settled in the disputed territories, the Jews have every right to be there under international law.
2008-11-21 01:00:00
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