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Why Israel Is Entitled in Law to the "West Bank"

(Substack) Melanie Phillips - During a discussion on Times Radio, a number of people were astonished to hear me state that Israel is not in "occupation" of "Palestinian land" and that the Jews alone are entitled in law to this territory. These facts are never referred to in mainstream discourse. Yet Israel is entitled to this land - all of it - many times over in law, as well as according to history, truth and morality. There has never been any such thing in law as Palestinian land. There never was a state of Palestine. When the Romans conquered the Jewish kingdom of Judea, destroyed the Jewish Temple and drove the Jews of Judea into exile, they renamed it Palaestina in an attempt to erase its Jewish identity. When the Ottoman empire fell after the First World War, the international community that carved up the Middle East kept the name Palestine to describe the territory which was now to be recreated as the homeland of the Jewish people. This was cemented at the 1920 San Remo Conference and given the force of international treaty law by the League of Nations in the 1922 Mandate for Palestine. After Britain sliced some 70% off this land to create (Trans) Jordan in an act of arbitrary realpolitik, Palestine consisted of what is now Israel, the "West Bank" and Gaza. Only the Jews were given the legal right to settle these lands. That right has never been abrogated. From 1949 to 1967, Jordan held the "West Bank" as a military occupier. In the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel freed that territory from illegal Jordanian occupation, and allowed the legal claim of the Jewish people to that territory finally to be acted upon. At the time of the Mandate, Palestine was only sparsely occupied. As the Jews returned to the land, Arabs attracted by the prospect of growing prosperity poured in from neighboring states. They considered themselves to be Arabs. Between 1922 and 1948, when people referred to the Palestinians they were referring to the Jews. The writer is a columnist for The Times-UK.
2023-12-08 00:00:00
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