International Law in the Service of Illegality

My good friend, Howard Grief, is publishing next month his major work of the legal aspects of Israel in the post-1967 era which means dealing with subjects such as "occupation", "illegal settlements' and such.

Another person dealing with that theme is Louis Rene Beres, a professor of International Law at Purdue University and the author of many books and articles dealing with military affairs and international law.

Here are excerpts from his today's op-ed:

Israel 'occupies' no Arab territories

...The still generally unchallenged language referring provocatively to an Israeli "Occupation" always overlooks the pertinent and incontestable history of the West Bank (Judea/Samaria) and Gaza.

Perhaps the most evident omission concerns the unwitting manner in which these "Territories" fell into Israel's hands in the first place. It is simply and widely disregarded that "occupation" followed the multi-state Arab aggression of 1967 - one never disguised by Egypt, Syria or Jordan.

...[after 1948] the West Bank and Gaza came under the illegal control of Jordan and Egypt respectively. These Arab conquests did not put an end to an already-existing state or to an ongoing trust territory. What these aggressions did accomplish was the effective prevention, sui generis, of a state of Palestine.

...a continuous chain of Jewish possession of the land was legally recognized after World War I, at the San Remo Peace Conference of April 1920. There, a binding treaty was signed in which Great Britain was given mandatory authority over "Palestine" (the area had been ruled by the Ottoman Turks since 1516) to prepare it to become the "national home for the Jewish People." Palestine, according to the Treaty, comprised territories encompassing what are now the states of Jordan and Israel, including the West Bank and Gaza. Present-day Israel comprises only 22 percent of Palestine as defined and ratified at the San Remo Peace Conference.

In 1922, Great Britain unilaterally and without any lawful authority split off 78 percent of the lands promised to the Jews - all of Palestine east of the Jordan River - and gave it to Abdullah, the non-Palestinian son of the Sharif of Mecca. Eastern Palestine now took the name Transjordan...

...IN 1967, almost 20 years after Israel's entry into the community of nations, the Jewish state, as a result of its unexpected military victory over Arab aggressor states, gained unintended control over the West Bank and Gaza. Although the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war is codified in the UN Charter, there existed no authoritative sovereign to whom the Territories could be "returned." Israel could hardly have been expected to transfer them back to Jordan and Egypt...the idea of Palestinian "self-determination" had only just begun to emerge after the Six Day War, and - significantly - had not even been included in UN Security Council Resolution 242, which was adopted on November 22, 1967.

...International law is not a suicide pact. Because a Palestinian state would severely threaten the very existence of Israel - a fact that remains altogether unhidden in Arab media and governments - the Jewish State is under no binding obligation to end a falsely alleged "Occupation." No state can ever be required to accept complicity in its own dismemberment and annihilation...