By Ted Belman Sept 17,2024
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.
Another fact seems to have slipped our collective minds: when Egypt finally reached a peace agreement with Israel in 1979, they declined to take back the Gaza Strip along with the Sinai peninsula, insisting instead that the Gaza Strip and the “West Bank” become autonomous regions. Those Egyptian Arabs in the Gaza Strip were abandoned by the Egyptians and thus remained under Israeli control until 2005.
Macron Protecting hezbollah
https://open.substack.com/pub/lel817/p/macron-protecting-hezbollah?r=1q2uiq&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
@Per
Thank you for raising this point. The connection to the American Declaration of Independence has somewhat overtaken the reality of Israel’s Declaration of Sovereignty, though I usually use the term Declaration of Statehood. Unlike the 13 colonies in America, Israel simply picked up after the perfidious British left, following which the Arabs went to war, of course with the aid and support of the British behind the Arab Legion. But there was no revolution in 1948, but rather the long overdue fulfillment of the Mandate even while the Mandate power of England was still being leveraged against the Jewish population which it was intended to support in pursuit of their own statehood.
An often forgotten fact is that “Palestine” never was a British colony, ant that the Declaration of 14 May 1948 was not a “Declaration of Independence,” but rather a Declaration of Sovereignty over the Land of Israel by the Jewish people. The Declaration of Sovereignty was made before the invasion by Arab armies and covered the entire Mandate area west of the Jordan river. This fact was later confirmed in the peace and border treaties with Egypt and Jordan.
It is not widely known that in 1951, during follow-up negotiations to the 1948-49 armistice agreements brokered by the United Nations and the United States, Israel proposed to annex Gaza, while granting Israeli citizenship to all Gaza residents, whether long-time residents or refugees from the 1947-49 war. This proposal was unanimously rejected by the Arab states and by Egypt, which at the time occupied Gaza.
Brilliant fact review and analysis by Ted.
The “Philadelphi Corridor” is an integral part of the internationally recognized state border between Israel and Egypt. The Peace and Border Treaty of 1979 makes no exception for that part of the boundary.
GARDEN-
I had responded with a deeply researched answer to your post, which has been chewed up by the site computer.
So the following is a synopsis only.
The Nachal Mitzraim is about 150 miles EAST of Present Suez, which was positively identified many years ago. I have a well researched and footnoted book about it written sometime in the late 1940s or early 1950s. The scholarly opinion is te same, today.
Your “Suez Canal/Pelusic branch” is somewhere in the middle, about 50-60 miles west of the Nachal, which many regard also as “The Wadi El-Arish”
Interestingly an issue of “SCIENCE” tells of Israeli scientists in 1967, having discovered the Pelusium branch of the Nile. They said that it was a right angled and then reversed offshoot of the ancient Suez Canal, which was used up to about 700 CE when Blocked by Arab Conquerors for military reasons.
The Pelusium branch was used from about 4000 BCE until 2500 years ago when it silted up. 800 years before the old Suez Canal was blocked up.
Then another article in “SCIENCE” headed ” The Original Suez Canal” followed by a QUESTION MARK. …………This may be what you read, missing the question mark. ??
So you, although in error, have brought up a majorly interesting issue deserving of an essay, maybe a series of them.
Thank you.
Not only Gaza but all the land between the Euphrates and the Brook of Egypt (which used to be the Pelusium arm of the Nile River but that was dried up to build the Suez Canal so today the Suez Canal is the Brook of Egypt) which Hashem promised to Avraham Avinu and no the Arabs have no claim as Hashem told Avraham during the Akediah, that Yitzchak was Avraham’s one and only son.