By Ted Belman
The international community keeps referring to Judea and Samaria as “occupied territories”. It relies on the Fourth Geneva Convention which applies only to territories of one High Contracting Party being occupied by another High Contracting Party during or after a war.
But, as is clear, Judea and Samaria were not lands of a HCP at the time of the war because Jordan’s annexation of same was not recognized by the world save for Britain and Pakistan. It follows that they are not “occupied territories” pursuant to the FGC.
Furthermore, the U.S. Definition of “Occupied Territory” is:
-
“Territory under the authority and effective control of a belligerent armed force. The term is not applicable to territory being administered pursuant to peace terms, treaty, or other agreement, express or implied, with the civil authority of the territory.”
Currently, Judea and Samaria are being administered according to the Oslo Accords. Thus the Oslo Accords trumps the provisions of the FGC.
In no way can it be argued that the lands are “illegally” occupied. Res 242 of the Security Council gave Israel a licence to remain in occupation until she had “secure and recognized borders”. This licence continued as a fundamewntal part of the Oslo Accords.
bernard wrote:
It is not a simple matter because the system is corrupt. When you have unjust judges often dressed in black repeatedly making decisions against Israel, what is to be done? The international court system is run through the UN and it supports Muslims and opposes Israel. Perhaps that is why Ted has at the top of his home page: THERE IS NO DIPLOMATIC SOLUTION. I think he used to have something there like THERE IS ONLY A MILITARY SOLUTION.
That’s exactly the point, Bill: “international law … is perversely applied when it comes to Israel.”
For how long can we tolerate this selective application of the law? Isn’t that the worst form of injustice? This is precisely what we should stress if we want to shift public opinion.
Israel is not being drowned out by the world. Israel and the jews cannot agree on a position that is willing to demand all its legal rights. The world will never consider anything more than the least position any jew is willing to give. Therefore, it is incumbent on Israel and the jews to inform itself and put forard a unified positon that begins with claiming all their rights as the muslims are doing. After putting forth and fighting for that position it may then consider some accommodations for peace based on its own generosity. Most important and to Israels detriment it must focus attention on the fact that the first leg of a swap of populations has been completed with the flight of jews from arab countries and the next step of the process should also take place. If jews and israel cannot see their own interest and rights then why should anyone else?
Agreed, the real problem is that the jews cannot be convinced or educated on their own rights and history.
So, the question is what is wrong with Israel and the Jewish people that the world keeps swindling them and have them as cats chasing their own tails? It seems a simple matter of taking legal steps. I want to add another principle in law and that is that contracts made under duress are not legally binding. In Israels case she may have acquiesced to forced conditions. The 2000 year slaughter culminating in the holocaust, the killing of jews to keep them out of israel by the UK, the invasions and subsequent wars of the arabs are duress. Any Israeli leader who has the guts should invoke this principle and return to the Palestine mandate as its legal position including Jordan. The creation of jew free Jordan should have been followed by its being designated the arab portion for it to have any legal standing. The arab refugee problem is simply solved by Jordan reinstating its withdrawal of citizenship from the west bankers and the completion of the exchange of populations that the jews from arab countries have already completed. The arabs in Israel remaining after the creation of jordan are still a legal sticking point. Will the jews ever claim their rights even after so much spilling of jewish blood. Do the jews want to continue to pay their masters for spilling their blood or will they finally exact payment and retribution?
No, Salomon. Realpolitik includes international law. So long as international law is applied to political-economic disputes not involving Israel, the Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims, I believe it works fairly well to govern treaties and agreements and to determine disputes between high contracting parties.
International law however, is disingenuously referenced and perversely applied when it comes to Israel. For instance, world opinion is that all Israeli expansion beyond the green line is illegal. Obama takes that position when saying all settlements are illegal. No cogent legal argument is presented to support that statement of opinion which is asserted, without more, as a fact. In saying that however, implicit reference is being made to international law.
You cannot have an effective advocacy of Israel so long as the governments of Israel undermine any basis for such advocacy by adopting the narratives of the enemy. Rights not asserted cannot be defended by advocacy. Israel does not demand or assert rights but needs for security.
Define adequately what is security for a country like Israel surrounded by hundreds of millions of enemies with the most modern weapons sold or given mostly by America? The whole concept of security in our context is an oxymoron. A few miles more here or there will not bring security.
Most Americas do not like the Saudis very much but who really has the power of influence in America, the Jews or the Saudis? Money wielded or applied strategically is what matters and we can never match their resources or make up for the decades lost to Saudi money and influence.
We used to say “Money Talks Shite Walks”
Does any-one know or care about Legalisms, history, historical rights of other peoples or nations? Power and Money is what drives policies and opinion. Israel can’t compete with money but we can by changing the leadership here and begin to assert our power to define and delineate our rights giving short shrift to any opinions not to our liking or national interest and be willing to take the hits when they come.
Bill, you say..
In other words, you are saying that realpolitik can be divorced from international law. If this were so, the world would fall into total chaos as treaties between nations would lose all validity.
Hugo Schmidt-Fisher is absolutely right: the provisions of international law should prevaiil. If they are not fully understood, they should be hammered on and on. But in no way can they be ignored, dismissed or fraudulently distorted.
There is one only solution to counter the lies and accusations against Israel as an “illegal occupier of Judea and Samaria.” The GOI must break its silence, and assert once and for all its Rights to all of the land from the Jordan to the Mediterranean, as declared in the San Remo Resolution in 1920.
For as long the rights to the land remains Israel’s best kept secret, the lies and myths will grow, and one must ask; WHY NOT?
The Palestinian Arabs keep doing what they do best;
They lie and defame Israel, hold claim the land that does not, has not and will not belong to them, with seeming complicity by the GOI due to their deafening silence.
There is something amiss, when Israel’s mainstream population, and its youth is uninformed of the most basic facts about their rights to the land.
It is imperative that the Israeli Education Ministry make a sea change, and incorporate into its curriculum the Jewish People’s Rights to the Land of Israel before the next generation – our future leaders—become contaminated by distorted Middle East studies provided at most Western universities corrupted by oil rich countries.
Lois wrote:
Do not lose hope. G-d is bigger than the elephant.
De 7:6 For thou art an holy people unto the LORD thy God: the LORD thy God hath chosen thee to be a special people unto himself, above all people that are upon the face of the earth.
7 The LORD did not set his love upon you, nor choose you, because ye were more in number than any people; for ye were the fewest of all people:
8 But because the LORD loved you, and because he would keep the oath which he had sworn unto your fathers, hath the LORD brought you out with a mighty hand, and redeemed you out of the house of bondmen, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt.
9 Know therefore that the LORD thy God, he is God, the faithful God, which keepeth covenant and mercy with them that love him and keep his commandments to a thousand generations;
10 And repayeth them that hate him to their face, to destroy them: he will not be slack to him that hateth him, he will repay him to his face.
11 Thou shalt therefore keep the commandments, and the statutes, and the judgments, which I command thee this day, to do them.
Simple- Israel is being drowned out. 1.40 bilion muslims vs 14 mil Jews. The elephant vs. the flea.
Know one disputes your argument in this forum. But really how important is this forum? How can you get these arguments across to the people who count. The power brokers, the huge international business interests.The international media that create world opinion.
dweller: Countries are arming themselves, supporting the Muslim Brotherhood and one view of the recent US troop movements could be interpreted as Israel being invaded. Make that petitioning campaign slips of paper into cracks in the Western Wall. You need all the help you can get.
Why indeed?
Perhaps what is needed is a world-wide petitioning campaign in this mattter, aimed squarely at the Govt of Israel.
It isn’t “world opinion” that needs to hear it, Bill.
World opinion will never accept an opinion it doesn’t WANT to accept
— and what it doesn’t want to accept it will always find (or create) ‘justification’ to support its perverse rejection.
The argument still must be made, mind you
— only not to the world.
It needs to be made to the JEWS.
Because it is only when Jews know that they are legally right in the matter that they will be willing to shed the enemy’s blood (whoever the enemy may be) in the matter.
When that day arrives, “world opinion” will start finding itself amenable to a challenge to its present view
— not until then.
Knock yourself out!!!
There is only one argument than can win any debate: G-d gave the entire Land to the Jews. Any counter argument would require both a denial of the Jewish bible, which would undercut the foundations of both Christianity and Islam. I would love to see Obama and Clinton enter into a debate on these terms and all Muslim leaders as well as the Pope and the Vatican.—-
G-d gave the entire land of Israel to the Jews, is the only argument not yet contended by the Jews as an argument and justification for jewish control of the whole of what was the original British mandate. The Balfour Declaration accepted this premise indirectly.
Maps
Maps
Maps
It’s the Arabs who are the occupiers.
If the “international community” is the sole arbiter of our national rights, then why focus on the specious claims of the “Palestinians” who did not even exist at the time the international community divvy-ed up the pie. The same international community that established a myriad of other exclusively Arab-Muslim states conferred upon the Jewish people alone the right to establish its homeland in what today is greater Israel, Gaza and Jordan while permitting other inhabitants only civil and property rights in these areas. This Mandate has never been abrogated through the League of Nations and the United Nations and is as valid today as it was then. Why isn’t Israel hollering these manifest facts from the roof-tops and exposing the bigotry and hypocrisy of the international community?
Such argument cuts no ice with realpolitik world opinion that continuously repeats as an accepted fact, without ever bothering with making a cogent argument based on fact and law, that Israel is in illegal occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.
Pro-Israel advocates, who hold to the contrary view must find some way to be heard, easily grasped and accepted or at least be heard enough to induce world opinion to question their preciously held view that Israel is in illegal occupation of J & S and Gaza.
You are absolutely right. These are not occupied territories, neither are they ‘disputed’ territories.
Importantly, Res 242 affirmed Israel’s right to retain some of the territories. The resolution sprecifically made clear that subject to negotiations, Israel may withdraw from some of the territories, but by no means from all. Since such negotiations never were concluded the resolution is anyhow not applicable.
Furthermore, the Oslo accords have not been consummated by the Arabs. Therefore, they as well are not by any means binding upon Israel.
What persists in this respect is the historic rights of the Jewish people to the land of Israel.
In modern time, the correct legal framework is the international recognition that was bestowed by the international community on the Mandate in Palestine, which covers the entire landmass of present day Israel and what is called Jordan.
The Balfour Declaration transformed into the San Remo Resolution on April 25, 1920 and combined with Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations found in the Treaty of Versailles is the pre-eminent foundation document of the State of Israel. The Supreme Council of the Principal Allied Powers at the San Remo Conference on April 24, 1920 was devoted entirely to Palestine and de jure sovereignty over the entire land of Palestine was devolved upon the Jewish People from the moment of the adoption of this resolution. It is the Charter of Jewish Freedom and Rights to all of Palestine and the Land of Israel.
The San Remo Peace Conference resolution was inserted into the Peace Treaty with Turkey – namely, the Treaty of Sèvres signed on August 10, 1920. This treaty still has legal value. The provisions of this treaty were subsequently carried out in Palestine, Syria, Iraq, the Arabian Peninsula and the rest of the Middle East. The Treaty of Lausanne which replaced that of Sèvres left the basic political and legal settlement made in respect of Palestine as the Jewish National Home intact. The San Remo Resolution a binding act of international law since the Mandate was then approved by 52 nations in 1922 and separately by the United States in a 1924 treaty. The Mandate for Palestine became the final resting place for the Jewish legal title of sovereignty over the entire country. The right of Jews to live or settle in what was once called Eastern Palestine, now the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, has never been legally altered and remains in full theoretical force today under international law and remains valid today in all regions of Eretz-Israel under Israeli control, based on the rights inherited and devolved from the provisions of the Mandate as well as on the 1950 Law of Return that applies to Eretz-Israel, not just to the State of Israel.
Under the doctrine of estoppel, which applies in all democratic legal systems, a country is estopped from denying or impugning Jewish legal rights to former Mandated Palestine and transferring those rights to Arabs in the Land of Israel. For example, the U.S. can no more do that than Britain can revoke U.S. independence under the 1783 Treaty of Paris or revoke the creation of Canada under the U.K. statute known as the British North America Act of 1867.
It is a rule of international law as well as a legal norm that rights that emanate from a treaty or international agreement and are subsequently implemented to create a new state as in the case of Israel cannot thereafter be revoked by the party which granted those rights or by any party that recognized them in return for due consideration as happened in the case of the 1924 treaty mentioned above. The matter has already been decided and it becomes a closed chapter. If it were otherwise, international chaos would result and there would be no legal order in the world.
The principle that rights survive the expiry of a treaty has been codified in the 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, specifically in Article 70(1)(b).
This information needs to be credited to Howard Grieff