Melanie Phillips
Consternation
in Israel over the EU’s malicious decision to boycott individuals or
institutions situated over the ‘Green Line’ between Israel and the
disputed territories. This would presumably include boycotting, for
example, the Hebrew University which is just over that line or, even
more grotesquely, Jewish residents in Jerusalem’s Old City – where
ancient Jewish settlement far predated the arrival of a single Arab,
dating as it does since King David who built it as the capital of the
kingdom of the Jewish people.
The EU says Israeli settlements
beyond the Green Line are illegal under international law. Nothing new
there – so do the UN and associated bodies say so. But they are simply
wrong.
International law in general is known to be highly
contentious and far from authoritative, since it is anchored in no
single jurisdiction and arguably therefore constitutes nothing other
than international politics by another name.
In any event, the
charge that Jewish residence over the Green Line is illegal first rests
on the application to this situation of the wrong treaty; and second,
totally ignores the treaties which gave the Jews the right to settle
anywhere in these territories.
To take the second point first.
The San Remo Treaty of 1920, in which the victors of the First World War
parcelled out the remnants of the defeated Ottoman Empire, created a
geographical area called Palestine along both sides of the Jordan River.
Article
6 of the Palestine Mandate signed by the League of Nations in 1922
stipulated ‘close Jewish settlement’ on the land west of the Jordan
River. The river served as the boundary because that year the UK created
a new Arab country, today known as Jordan, by unilaterally bestowing
the land east of the river onto the Hashemite dynasty and thus giving
some three quarters of Palestine away.
That Mandate treaty
obligation to settle the Jews in Palestine from the river to the sea has
never been abrogated and endures today. The 1945 UN Charter, Chapter
XII, Article 80 explicitly says than nothing within it shall ‘alter in
any manner the rights whatsoever of any states or any peoples or the
terms of existing international instruments to which Members of the
United Nations may respectively be parties’.
Now to the main
argument mounted by the ‘illegalisers’. This rests on their claim that
the Israeli settlements breach Article 49 of the Geneva Convention. But
this article does not apply to the settlements. Written in the shadow of
the deportation of European Jews to their deaths in Nazi Europe, it
prohibits
‘individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as
deportations of protected persons from occupied territory to the
territory of the Occupying Power or that of any other country, occupied
or not…The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own
civilian population into the territory it occupies.’
But none
of the Israelis living beyond the Green Line has been transferred or
deported, forcibly or not; they all chose voluntarily to live there.
(The only force ever used against these residents was in fact when
Israel forcibly transferred them from Gaza into Israel in 2005.)
Moreover,
the Geneva Convention applies to actions carried out on the territory
of a ‘High Contracting Party’ with a sovereign claim to that territory.
But the areas in question over the ‘Green Line’ never belonged to any
sovereign power. As remains the case to this day they merely constitute
no-man’s land, having never been allocated to any ‘High Contracting’
sovereign state. The only treaty obligations ever made in respect of
these areas was in fact to the Jews, who were promised ‘close
settlement’ of the land in which they were included.
Furthermore,
Israel’s ‘occupation’ of these areas is legal twice over – since it
merely gained them in a war of self-defence in 1967, and is thus legally
entitled to hold onto them until the belligerents stop waging war upon
it. Which they still have not.
As for the ‘Green Line’ itself,
this is not a legal border. It has no significance other than where the
cease-fire line was drawn in the war of 1948-49 when the Arabs tried to
destroy the newly restored State of Israel. Indeed, the Armistice
Agreements of 1949 stated that the demarcation lines were ‘not to be
construed in any sense’ as political or territorial boundaries’, and
were not in any way to prejudice the parties’ claims in ‘the ultimate
peaceful settlement of the Palestine problem.’
Which ‘prejudice’
is of course, precisely what the EU is now busily imposing. Indeed, by
effectively corralling Israel behind the 1949 armistice line it is
forcing it back behind what has been called the ‘Auschwitz border’,
since this line leaves Israel militarily indefensible against attack.
This
is an act of malevolence. But the fault in large measure surely lies
with Israel. For although some may find this incomprehensible, Israel
does not make to the world the one case that matters – why Israelis are
fully entitled under international law to build their homes in these
territories; and exactly how Britain, the EU and the UN have grossly
mis-stated and misapplied that international law.
Instead,
Israel merely protests that the EU move will inhibit a peace settlement.
Which it undoubtedly will. But it will do so principally by upending
law, truth and justice – a case Israel never makes in public, thus
allowing the irrational hatred of Israel in the west, fed by racist lies
and propaganda, to spread its poison unchecked.
The reason it
does not properly make this case is partly through the epic
dysfunctionality of the Israeli political class (which could fill many
volumes). It is partly through Israel’s isolation in the face of the
bully-boys of the western diplomatic world. But it is also through
Israel’s bleak and despairing judgement that the international
community, composed of those who historically and presently were and are
driven by obsessive hatred of the Jewish people and which finds
expression for that hatred through vehicles such as the UN and EU, will
always do the bidding of those who wish to destroy the Jews and is
therefore impervious to reason and morality.
News of the EU’s
act of existential spite against Israel broke on the fast of Tisha b’Av,
when Jews mourn the destruction of the Temple (you know, that Temple,
the one that stood in Jerusalem all those centuries ago before any Arabs
existed, let alone any Green Line) along with the seemingly
never-ending list down through the ages of all those prosecuting their
uniquely murderous and baseless hatred of the Jewish people.
Some coincidence. To that list of infamy, the EU can now add its name. For shame.
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