Gaza. Who does it belong to?

By Ted Belman

Did you know that prior to Israel’s Declaration of Independence on May 15, 1948, that Gaza was part of the Palestine Mandate and the Jews were entitled to sovereignty over it?

UNGA resolution 181 divided the mandate land into two states; one for the Arabs and one for the Jews. It was  called the Partition Plan.  This Plan was in violation of Israel’s right to all the land as provided by the San Remo Resolution and the Palestine Mandate.

Israel’s Declaration of  Independence on May 15, 1948, pertained to the land allocated to the Jews. The Arabs made no such declaration and chose war instead, They were joined by Jordan, Egypt, Syria and Lebanon in an effort to annihilate Israel.  An armistice could not be achieved, until Israel turned the tables, and started winning territory from the  Arabs.

The Arabs decided to cut their losses and agreed to an Armistice on February 12, 1949 in which they formally ended the hostilities of the 1948 Arab–Israeli War and also demarcated the Green Line, which separated Arab-controlled territory (i.e., the Jordanian-annexed West Bank and the Egyptian-occupied Gaza Strip) from Israel until the latter’s victory in the 1967 Arab–Israeli War.

It was agreed in the Armistice Agreement “that the Green Line was not to be construed in any sense as a political or territorial boundary, and is delineated without prejudice to rights, claims and positions of either Party to the Armistice as regards ultimate “settlement of the Palestine question”.

David Ben-Gurion’s Forgotten 1948 Land of Israel Proclamation for the Annexation of Judea and Samaria by Howard Grief included the following:

“Area of Jurisdiction and Powers Ordinance enacted on September 16, 1948 by the Provisional State Council and promulgated on September 22, 1948, but made retroactive to May 15, 1948, the date on which the Jewish state was reborn. This law, sometimes called Ben-Gurion’s law, was used by Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion in his capacity as Defense Minister of the State to annex areas of the Jewish National Home and Land of Israel recaptured beyond the frontiers demarcated in the UN Partition Plan of November 29, 1947.”

“This was legally required to be done in June 1967, at the end of the Six Day War, “

In the spring of 1967, the Arab counties, led by Col. Nasser of Egypt, decided to finish what they failed to finish in 1949. They began massing troops on Israel’s border, notwithstanding the Armistice Agreement,

But to their dismay, Israel pre-empted, and defeated Egypt, Jordan and Syria in 6 days. Thus Israel came into possession of all lands west of the Jordan River, including Gaza. As a bonus, she acquired the Golan Heights from Syria. President Trump recognized Israel’s sovereignty over same.

“However, the National Unity Government of Levi Eshkol did not apply Ben-Gurion’s law aiming to bring all such areas freed in the Six Day War within the framework of the State. It decided instead, almost three weeks after the end of the Six Day War, to draft an amendment to an existing law, Section 11B of the Law and Administration Ordinance, that was enacted by the Knesset on June 27, 1967 and promulgated the next day.¹ This amendment to the law, non-existent on June 7, 1967, when Judea and Samaria were repossessed and liberated by the IDF, gave the Government a choice whether or not to incorporate these areas of the Land of Israel into the State, while Ben-Gurion’s law left no choice as to what had to be done once the Minister of Defense defined in a proclamation that a particular area of the Land of Israel was being held by Israel’s Army.”

Howard Grief, it should be noted, was a Jerusalem-based attorney from Canada. He served as the adviser on Israel under international law to Yuval Ne’eman while Ne’eman was the Minister of Energy and Infrastructure in the Yitzhak Shamir Government.

I met him after making Aliyah in 2,009. We discussed these issues in great depth as did Salomon Benzimra, my best friend of blessed memory, who wrote The Jewish people’s Right to the Land of Israel. It quickly became a classic.

I digress.

Grief concluded:

“The uncritical acceptance or lack of protest by any respected Israeli jurist in 1967 and in the ensuing decades against the issuance of the aforementioned military proclamations by Brigadier-General Herzog for Judea and Samaria that applied international law (i.e., the Hague Regulations and also the Fourth Geneva Convention) instead of Israeli law, as well as those proclamations issued for Gaza, the Golan and Sinai, is not only deeply shameful and scandalous, but also exposes an amazing ignorance of Israel’s legal rights and title of sovereignty to the whole of the Land of Israel and Palestine under both international law and Israeli constitutional law. “

UNSC Resolution 242 authorized Israel to remain in possession of all lands conquered until they had an agreement for “secure and recognized boundaries”. These lands included Gaza.

And so it remained until 2005.

In February 2005, the Knesset passed the Disengagement Plan Implementation Law pursuant to which, PM Sharon disengaged from Gaza.

The disengagement was conducted unilaterally by Israel, in particular, Israel rejected any coordination or orderly hand-over to the Palestinian Authority. Despite the disengagement, the Gaza Strip is still considered to be occupied under international law.

If it is “occupied” then we possess it.

And so it remained, until Oct 7, 2023 when Hamas invaded Israel and killed 1,139 people, including 815 civilians.  A further 251 persons were taken hostage during the initial attack on Israel to the Gaza Strip.

Israel went to war against Hamas and is now in possession of all of Gaza, though there remain pockets of resistance.

By international law, Israel has the right to annex Gaza as she acquired it in a war of self-defense. But does she want it? She certainly doesn’t want to annex it all and thus have to give citizenship to all its Arab residents. Nor does she want to take on the world and expel all Gazans from the land, though that would be a great idea.

In my article The truth about UNRWA, I explained the fundamental difference between UNRWA with UNHRC.  UNRWA is tasked with the obligation of maintaining the refugees where they are, while UNHRC is tasked with the obligation to resettle all refugees under their mandate.  Israel is the only place where UNRWA exists.

Thus the conflict in Gaza is of the United Nations making. It should recognize this failed policy and replace UNRWA with UNHRC and resettle the Gazans. This would end the conflict and enable Israel to annex Gaza which was always intended to be part of Israel.

Wikipedia says “More than 70% of Gaza’s population are Palestinian refugees.“ By my reckoning that amounts to 1.3 million people out of a total population of 1.6 million Arabs.

Assuming for the moment that Israel isn’t prepared to deport the Gazans, she could certainly annex the northern one-third of Gaza or perhaps the northern one-half of Gaza i.e. everything north of the Netzarim Corridor.

Starting wars should have consequences and the loss of such lands would be what Gazans lose for doing so. It should not be cost-free.