In Haaretz’s sub title they said “The move would require consent of the Palestinians,” and the article repeated this elsewhere. But the article said “According to the document, a copy of which was obtained by Haaretz, such an arrangement, even if carried out without the explicit consent of the population involved, “is not wrongful under international law”. Is the writer just stupid or malevolent? Ted Belman
RELATED ARTICLESBy Hilo Glazer | Jan. 9, 2014 | 10:49 PM |12
118Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman received a few weeks ago a classified legal opinion that paves the way for making Arab areas of Israel part of a future Palestinian state.
The document’s authors concluded that the move would comply with international law on condition that it were done with the consent of the Palestinians, did not leave anyone without citizenship and included a mechanism for providing compensation, similar to the one used with Jewish settlers during Israel’s 2005 disengagement from the Gaza Strip.
Lieberman has been raising the idea of a land and population exchange for the past several years. Addressing the annual conference of Israeli ambassadors on January 5, he said that such an arrangement was a necessary condition of a comprehensive arrangement with the Palestinians.
He took pains to emphasize that he was proposing not a “transfer,” but rather “simply moving the border” to the other side of Israel’s Route 6.
A few days earlier, as United States Secretary of State John Kerry began negotiating a framework agreement for peace talks with Israeli and Palestinian officials, Lieberman instructed the Foreign Ministry’s legal department to draft the legal opinion, and on February 17, ministry legal advisor Ehud Keinan submitted an 18-page document, “Territorial Exchange: Transfer of Sovereignty over Populated Areas in the Framework of a Final Arrangement with the Palestinians, Legal Aspects.”
According to the document, a copy of which was obtained by Haaretz, such an arrangement, even if carried out without the explicit consent of the population involved, “is not wrongful under international law, as long as the transferred population has a clear citizenship of some kind after the transfer.”
The legal opinion references a number of historical precedents from the past 100 years, including from Israel’s agreements with neighboring states, as follows:
– The 1919 convention between Greece and Bulgaria, after World War I, which included the transfer of Bulgarian territory to Greece and significant exchanges of population between both countries.
– The Israel-Egypt Armistice of February 1950, which included territorial exchanges. The Gazan village of Abasan and its inhabitants were placed under
Egyptian sovereignty in exchange for the transfer to Israel of territory of similar size in the northern Gaza Strip.
– The Evian Accords of 1962, ending French control of Algeria and giving the French colonialists three years to choose between French and Algerian citizenship.
– The 1997 transfer of sovereignty over Hong Kong from Britain to China. The crown colony’s British inhabitants were slated to give up their British citizenship in favor of Chinese citizenship, but after a fight they were granted a special status that cannot be passed down to their children.
A 1992 ruling by the International Court of Justice in a border dispute between Honduras and El Salvador, permitting the transfer of populated territories between states while emphasizing that it must be carried out in a sensitive and organized manner, in accordance with promises by both states to find appropriate solutions for the inhabitants.
In the past three months, a number of polls have been published in Israel on the issue of territorial and population exchange. Of the 500 Israeli
Arabs from Wadi Ara and the Triangle, Nazareth, Sakhnin and Shfaram (areas with large Arab populations) who responded to a survey conducted for Haaretz in January by the Dialog Institute under the supervision of professor Camil Fuchs of Tel Aviv University, 42 percent expressed a general interest in a territorial exchange and 31 percent said they would want their communities to come under Palestinian sovereignty, while 65 percent opposed the idea.
Lieberman believes support for the measure is much higher among Israeli Jews. For now, the idea’s biggest detractor is the Palestinian leadership, in part because of its association with Lieberman. Keinan’s legal opinion states very clearly that without Palestinian cooperation, the measure is unfeasible and illegal.
Lieberman has raised the issue at nearly every meeting with his foreign counterparts in the past two months. Now, with the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations at the brink of collapse, he hopes to return the issue to the international debate on the two-state solution.
Keinan also stresses in the document that while international law sanctions the transfer of sovereignty over inhabited territories between states, “The forced transfer of a population is defined as an international crime.”
According to the paper, the degree of legitimacy conferred by the international community on the transfer of the Triangle and Wadi Ara area to Palestinian sovereignty would depend on the motivation for and goal of the move. Keinan notes the global response to apartheid-era South Africa’s creation of Bantustans in the 1970s. To preclude a similar situation, he stipulates a number of conditions that must be present for the measure envisioned by Lieberman to conform to international law, starting with the express agreement of the leadership of the future Palestinian state, whose citizens the inhabitants of this area would become.
One reason for this is Israel’s status as a signatory to the United Nations’ 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, stipulating that any agreement involving territorial exchange must guarantee that no one will be made stateless as a result.
Keinan rejects as unacceptable and illegal under international law any transfer plan that would leave its subjects without citizenship. He notes that the accepted arrangement today is for the transferred inhabitants to gain citizenship of their new country and forfeit their previous citizenship the day the agreement goes into effect.
But in most of the precedents around the world, the population received a measure of choice in the matter, the most basic being the right to leave their homes and remain in the first country while retaining their original citizenship. In the case of Israel, this would of course mean Israeli Arabs staying in Israel as citizens. A second option would be for them to remain in their homes, now in Palestine, while retaining Israeli citizenship.
Keinan says in the legal opinion that while the right to choice is accepted practice, it is not required by international law. Noting that individuals are usually given a deadline for choosing their citizenship in such cases, he wrote that it is permissible to make the existence of an ethnic, religious or language link between the individual and the state a condition for citizenship.
Noting that Israeli law does not prohibit its citizens from holding dual citizenship, except in rare cases, Keinan wrote that dual Israeli and
Palestinian citizenship could be restricted, but would require an amendment to Israel’s citizenship law. He wrote that such restrictions were defensible in the light of the complexity of the arrangements between Israel and the Palestinians. “A Palestinian who seeks to maintain his Israeli citizenship while living in the Palestinian state would be considered an Israeli citizen who resides outside the state,” Keinan wrote, adding, “He cannot vote in Knesset elections and would be barred from passing his [Israeli] citizenship beyond one generation.”
A central condition for the legality of a population and territorial exchange program, Keinan wrote, is the creation of a compensation scheme similar to that of the disengagement from Gaza and northern Samaria in 2005. He quotes from the minority, dissenting opinion of then-Supreme Court Justice Edmond Levy, who died March 11, according to which the evacuations constituted “the destruction of the fabric of life” of the settlers. Keinan stresses that for the population involved, the transfer of sovereignty from Israel to Palestine would affect their ability to maintain the social, economic, cultural and community ties they have in Israel.
“These residents could find themselves in a state that is different from Israel regarding economic aspects, living conditions and individual rights and to be harmed in terms of freedom of occupation, freedom of movement, the right to education, the right to social security and the right to vote and be elected,” Keinan wrote, adding that they might view Palestine as a politically and economically unstable state that is insufficiently democratic and lacking in social services.
Because of these possibilities, Israel must provide sufficient financial compensation to make up for the loss in the property values of the affected population, as well as acclimatization payments, severance pay and aid in purchasing a new home or to compensate for lost businesses, as needed.
Keinan stressed that the state had learned the lesson of the need for adequate compensation from the aftermath of the disengagement from Gaza, writing that there was a definite correlation between the success of the measure, and its chance of passing civil and judicial review, and the ability to recreate, insofar as possible, the conditions that existed for the inhabitants before the plan was carried out.
In his conclusion, Keinan notes that the entire program for exchanging territory and populations must be approved in a public referendum and grounded in legislation that is proved to meet the values of the state and not to violate individual rights more than is necessary. In addition, in order to avoid discrimination, care must be taken to ensure that the Israeli settlers who are evacuated from the West Bank and the inhabitants of the areas in Israel that are to become part of the Palestinian state receive equal rights and conditions.
“The measure raises not only legal questions but also questions in the diplomatic, political and economic realms, in the social realm with regard to the relations between Jews and Arabs in the State of Israel and questions in the media-image sphere, that is, its effect on Israel’s image in the world,” Keinan wrote in the concluding paragraph of the legal opinion.
@ bernard ross:
A working political, economic and military alliance involving Israel, Russia, China and India, for purposes of counter-balancing Israel’s foolish and dangerous otherwise-permanent dependence on the good will of the USA and its now-shrinking power to dominate so much much of world affairs, has been a seismic shift I have long urged on these pages.
As for questions about legalities of expelling or otherwise “transfering” entire populations of unwanted persons, I really would not worry about any of that. From near the end of World War 2 until only a few years later, some 14.5 million ethnic Germans were expelled en masse from the Baltic states, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Jugoslavija, Hungary and Romania. Most of these wound up in the two-thirds of Germany which was all that remained of that country after Hitler destroyed it for them. I don’t remember many people, statesmen or otherwise, who argued against what happened to all those people. The only exception was that of small numbers of Germans I had met over the years whose families were among the expellees, and who were whimpering about it because they mistook me for a typically kind-hearted American. All things considered, they probably did better in their new “heimat” than they ever could have lived elsewhere in central and eastern Europe. But nobody knew that 50-60 years ago.
As for American power to punish Russia: I note from an almost hidden article I found this morning that the BRICS countries — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — all announced their opposition to sanctions against Russia regarding the secession of Crimea and its adsorption into the Russian Federation. These states — two of which are the other other world superpowers, also include most of the world’s land areas, almost half the world’s populations and probably the bulk of the earth’s treasures. Nobody is in position to shove them around. By the way, more than half the US population wants this country to back off its involvement with Russia’s borderlands. None of this bodes well for the latest indiotic and poorly thought-out foreign policy venture on the part of Obama and Kerry. And I am more than ever certain now that Putin’s Russia will stand off Obama’s USA even when Russia arranges more plebiscites of the Russian-oriented population of eastern and southern Ukraine, then moves ahead with the annexations those Russians will surely ask for.
While we are on the topic of really good harbingers: Netanyahu and the Chinese government have now signed off on construction of the high-capacity and high-speed rail link from Eilat on the Red Sea to Ashdod and Haifa on the Mediterranean Sea. China is expanding its overseas trading by leaps and bounds, and Israel will play a role in all of that.
I would like very much to see Russia back Israel in annexing all of Area C, or for that matter, getting it over with and annexing the whole of Shomron and Yehuda outright. Following that, I should like to see President Putin personally invited to Israel for a welcoming of the type that President Obama could have had, if we all had not been given reason to regard him as nothing more than President Southside Chicago Blacksnake.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
@ Yidvocate:
https://www.israpundit.org/archives/63594506
@ Ted Belman:
there are a number of problem details especially when considering timeline and inter-dependencies:
1-If the venture were to be successful it would likely mean the permanent giving up of A & B.
2-the Pals would likely disagree and one would have to evaluate this effect
3-The Israel Jordan treaty effects assuming the new state would control the Jordan border(unless confed with Israel)
4-How would pal autonomy work as they would no longer connect to Israel(I beleive)
5-HOw would pal confed with jordan work if the border with jordan is controled by the new state of C.
Perhaps the independence movement has value even if not successful because it would probably neccessitate a formal consideration of the settlers demands according to international law of self determination.
the breakup of yugoslavia was based on warring ethnicities and set a precedent
Israel should seriously consider an all out support of the crimean secession and annexation by russia. Perhaps some sort of geostrategic deal can be made with russia? This of course, would be a risky path and would likely endanger US Israel relations. It does not have to be a complete shift in alliances. However, “secret” talks with russia might precipitate stronger US support for Israel to avoid losing the relationship like was lost with Egypt. There is no greater reliable and stable ally in the ME that the US can depend on at this time. The west would be forced to seriously consider the ramifications of losing Israel from the western SOI. The west currently takes Israel for granted, as a mendicant, because they assume it has no other options.
@ Ted Belman:
Can’t access your link.
https://www.israpundit.org/wp-admin/post.php?post=63594506&action=edit&message=1
@ CuriousAmerican:
@ bernard ross:
Just today I talked with David Haivri and Dani Dayan about my idea of holding a referendum in Area C on the question of seceding from Judea and Samaria. They both thought it worth talking about. Dayan said he would discuss it with Alan Baker.
If Crimea, I told them, can secede from a sovereign state based on a referendum, surely Area C can secede from a territory which is not a sovereign territory. A and B would then have to decide whether they want limited autonomy or prefer to be annexed by Jordan.
CuriousAmerican Said:
You are correct and my prior post on the same subject is stated on the shomron foreign ministry forum as such.
Think that through.
Judea and Samaria are still majority Palestinian. The independence the Palestinians seek is as Palestine.
Rephrase that to Area C Independence – (which is the only area which is majority Jewish). In that case, you would be pulling the Texas maneuver of 1835 where the Texans split the state of Coahuila y Tejas to declare their own country.
Of course, you would have honeybee’s full support.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ioxwwFhMhz4
If Judea-samaria formed an independence movement and declared a state all of this would be moot.