Upset About International Law Clubbing Israel?

Many are upset that international law has been hijacked to club Israel.

Fear not.  Just remember:-

1) occupation in and of itself is not illegal, and does not mean the occupier could not perfect sovereign rights.

"belligerent occupation" results from being involved in a war.  and if that war was in self-defense, as was 1967 (and was one that had continued since November 30, 1947 on the morrow of the UN Partition recommendation, never having stopped but being pursued by various Arabs groupings, some state-sponsored, in a campaign of terror directed at civilians), and Israel came into control of territories, then that "occupation" is just fine.

and if the territory happens to be portions of the land area originally intended to become the Jewish National Home according to a decision by international law as in the case of the League of Nations Mandate of 1922, following deliberations at the 1919 Versailles Peace Conference, the 1920 San Remo Conference among other arrangements, then that "occupation" cannot be illegal but must be resolved by negotiations.  there is nothing a priori wrong with that administration.

and

2) "settlements", the perceived principal rub, are not "transfers" under Geneva Convention 49(6) for a variety of reasons, including their limited scale and, most importantly for some, the fact that they are populated on private initiative, and indeed often in the face of governmental opposition.

and moreover, since Article Six of the League of Nations Mandate decision prescribed a right of "close settlement of Jews" in those areas that now are claimed by Arabs to be off-limits to Jews - and that throughout history Jews had actually resided in those areas - "Jewish settlements" cannot be illegal in any form or manner.

And let's add material from a recent Howard Grief letter, redacted:

the assertion that the Mandate for Palestine was awarded by the League of Nations to Britain reveals that one never read the minutes of the San Remo Peace Conference for April 24 and April 25, 1920, nor the final text of the San Remo Resolution of April 25, 1920, that resulted from that Conference, otherwise he would know that it was the Supreme Council of the Principal Allied Powers that conferred or entrusted the Mandate for Palestine to Great Britain in order to create the political, administrative and economic conditions in the country to secure the establishment of the Jewish National Home and future independent Jewish State, as set out in Article 2 of the Mandate.

The statement that “…the Balfour Declaration ceased to have legal effect when the UK discharged its Mandate” is astounding. Britain never executed the Mandate for Palestine in accordance with the original purpose noted above. In truth, the Balfour Declaration, as a British policy statement in 1917 that Prime Minister David Lloyd George described as a “bargain” or contract between World Jewry and Britain, was converted into a document of binding and irreversible international law by the adoption of the San Remo Resolution by the Supreme Council of the Principal Allied Powers on April 25, 1920, that subsequently became Articles 94 to 97 inclusively plus Article 132 of the Treaty of Sèvres. This Resolution, insofar as Palestine was concerned, was then incorporated into the first three recitals of the Preamble of the Mandate for Palestine, subsequently approved by all 52 members of the League in 1922 and separately by the United States. It continues in legal force today, mutatis mutandis, and no action taken by the United Nations today or by Britain itself can nullify this binding act of international law upon which the State of Israel draws its legal existence. The San Remo Resolution means that all of Palestine is Jewish land, not Arab land, and that any partition of this land is perforce illegal and null and void. Britain did adopt a different direction beginning with the ascension of Winston Churchill to the Colonial Office on February 14, 1921 and the convening of the Cairo Conference in mid-March 1921 which was in opposition to the previous international decisiions, though.

In citing UN Security Council Resolution 242 regarding “the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war, one fails to understand is that Israel never acquired title to Judea, Samaria and Gaza by war, and it is therefore under no obligation to withdraw from those regions that the Allied Powers accorded to or recognized as belonging to the Jewish People. As the devolee or assignee of the Jewish People, the State of Israel has inherited all the legal rights derived from the San Remo Resolution and the Mandate for Palestine that were vested in the Jewish People. In the Six-Day War of June 1967, Israel was only recovering territories that were originally designated or intended for the Jewish State by the Principal Allied Powers.  As an example, is Alsace-Lorraine “French-occupied Germany” and is was it “inadmissible” for France to re-acquire its former territory by war?

Israel's Supreme Court has never decided on the merits or accepted as a proven argument that Judea and Samaria are “occupied territories” under international law, but merely adopted the position of the Government of Israel, that it adjudicate all cases before it as if Judea and Samaria were governed by the laws of war embodied in the Hague Regulations and Fourth Geneva Convention, without ruling on the actual legal status of these territories. This policy is based on the erroneous legal advice of then Military Advocate-General Meir Shamgar, the Government of Israel violated its own constitutional law and caused foreign states to believe that this indeed was the legal status of those regions, even though, ironically enough, Shamgar himself, later President of the Supreme Court, issued a disclaimer stating that he did not consider these military administered territories to be necessarily “occupied territories”.

To call Judea, Samaria and Gaza the “Occupied Palestinian Territories” is not only an oxymoron but also an abuse of the English language in the service of the imperialistic Arab cause, as well as an outright denial or attempted erasure of the legal, political and diplomatic history of the Palestine Question. For some, history only begins in 1967.

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