The formidable Natasha Hausdorff, in the Spectator, sets us straight on the Israeli settlements lie:
There are few phrases in international affairs repeated with greater confidence or subjected to less scrutiny than ‘illegal Israeli settlements’. It appears in UN resolutions, government statements, NGO reports and news bulletins as though it were an established fact. Add the words ‘under international law’ and apparently further discussion becomes unnecessary.
The trouble is not just that this is political rhetoric masquerading as law, but that it is in fact contrary to real international law, properly applied. The claim rests upon a series of propositions about Israel’s borders, the legal nature of occupation and the meaning of provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention, propositions which have hardened into orthodoxy through repetition. They have been endorsed by the International Committee of the Red Cross, the UN Security Council and majorities of the International Court of Justice (ICJ). But institutional repetition does not transform defective legal reasoning into law.
The nub of the argument:
Judea and Samaria – subsequently renamed the West Bank after their seizure by Jordan – did not become sovereign Jordanian territory merely because Jordan occupied them between 1948 and 1967. Nor did the 1949 armistice lines become international borders, as the armistice agreements made explicit. They were military ceasefire lines, and Egypt and Jordan were adamant they would never constitute more.
This matters because the entire settlements argument rests upon the prior assumption that Israel is the occupying power in foreign sovereign territory. A state cannot occupy its own sovereign territory. Crimea illustrates the point: Russia’s occupation does not extinguish Ukrainian title. If Ukrainian forces recover Crimea tomorrow, Ukraine will not suddenly become the occupying power just because Russia controlled the peninsula for a decade. The sovereign title comes first….
The phrase ‘illegal settlements’ is increasingly being used to mean something much more disturbing: that Jews should not live in certain places because they are Jews. Consider what is being demanded. A future Palestinian state is routinely imagined as requiring the removal of hundreds of thousands of Jews from their homes. The Jewish residence in Hebron, the cradle of Jewish civilisation, is inexplicably presented as an international crime. As is the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem or the Jewish communities re-established after their inhabitants were expelled.
No comparable demand would be tolerated elsewhere. We would immediately recognise the ugliness of saying that peace between two peoples requires territory to be cleansed of one ethnicity. Yet once the proposition is dressed in the language of ‘settlements’ and ‘international law’, politicians repeat it.
Also – this talk of ethnic cleansing. The whole Arab world, from Morocco to Yemen, has been ethnically cleansed of Jews since 1948 – an estimated 850,000 Jews forced out by state-sponsored antisemitic violence: communities that had lived there for thousands of years, longer than the Arabs have lived in Palestine. The only area in the Middle East that hasn’t been ethnically cleansed is Israel, where some 20% of the population are Arabs.
As ever, the Jews are being held to different standards from everybody else.
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