The ABCs of "Occupation"

A.  I repeat, we are not occupiers.  Yes, really.

B.  Here is Yesh Din's screech. Pitiful.

Attorney Michael Sfard, Yesh Din’s Legal Advsior: The Levy Committee was Conceived in Sin to Legalize a Crime, and Has Accomplished its Mission

There are basic errors in the committee's conclusions that contradict Israeli and international law The committee's conclusions will detract from the little protection afforded to Palestinian rights in the West Bank Adoption of the committee's recommendations will legalize land theft and complicate Israel's relations with the entire world Yesh Din refused to appear before the committee because its purpose was to bypass the State Attorney's Office, and its very establishment violates the principles of the rule of law. Yesh Din will present a legal opinion to the Attorney General.

Following the publication of the conclusions of the Edmund Levy Committee, Attorney Michael Sfard, the legal advisor to the human rights organization Yesh Din, said today: "The Levy Committee was conceived in sin to legalize a crime, and it has fully accomplished its mission. Its report is not a legal report but an ideological report that ignores the basic principles of the rule of law. The members of the Levy Committee apparently fell down the rabbit hole, and their report was written in Wonderland, governed by the laws of absurdity: there is no occupation, there are no illegal outposts and there is apparently no Palestinian people either. To that we must say in the words of Alice: ‘This is the silliest tea party I have ever been to.’”

Attorney Sfard explained that the committee's conclusions suffered from elementary errors: "For example, the committee's ruling that the government's conduct ought to be viewed as consent to establishing the outposts is no less than embarrassing. According to law, the Government of Israel expresses its consent to establish settlements solely by explicit decisions of its plenum or by a committee it authorizes to do so. The Levy Committee's suggestion to view illegal statements or actions by various ministers as government consent undermines the principles of the rule of law and good governance."

As for the determination that Israel is not occupying the West Bank, Sfard says that "the members of the Levy Committee are living in ‘La La Land.’ Israel occupied the West Bank by armed force and even though Jordan ceded the territory, the international community, via its binding resolutions (such as the Partition Resolution and many others) has designated it for a Palestinian state. Therefore, Israeli rule of the territory is a rule of occupation as long as there has been no agreement otherwise between the parties."

Adoption of the committee's recommendations would lead to widespread land theft and complicate Israel's relations with the rest of the world. The committee's recommendations are a targeted assassination of the rule of law and, consequently, of the protection of the rights of Palestinians in the occupied territories.

From the outset, Yesh Din refused to appear before the committee, because it was established with the goal of bypassing the Attorney General and the State Attorney’s Office, and, accordingly, the organization's position was that the committee's formation was itself a violation of the principles of the rule of law. In a letter sent to the committee upon its establishment, and signed by Yesh Din's Public Council, which includes several former senior officials of the State Attorney’s Office: Michael Ben Yair (the former Attorney General), Talia Sasson (the author of the Sasson Report on the unauthorized outposts), and Yehudit Karp (the former Deputy Attorney General), Yair Rotlevy, Chair of Yesh Din’s Public Council, emphasized that the Attorney General is the sole authority that is supposed to advise the Government of Israel on legal matters. “The leaders of the State were displeased with the advice they received from the Attorney General,” the letter stated, “and set out to seek advice from an external source. And thus, in the search for advice to bypass that of the Attorney General, the committee was conceived. The committee was conceived in sin and is contrary to the rule of law and the status of the head of law enforcement in Israel – the Attorney General. Accordingly, Yesh Din, which has devoted itself to the struggle to defend human rights by strengthening the rule of law, cannot lend its hand to a process that is essentially an act of defiance against the authority responsible for law enforcement.”

Yesh Din will present the Attorney General, the sole authorized interpreter of the law for the Government of Israel, with the organization's opinion on the issue of the unauthorized outposts, before he decides how to act on the Levy Committee's recommendations. For further details, please contact the Yesh Din Spokesperson, Hila Aloni –...

C.

I sent Hila this:-

I have received your press release,

Can I have your responses to my short questions so I can properly relate to your claims:

1.  Attorney Sfard writes:  "illegal statements or actions by various ministers as government consent undermines the principles of the rule of law and good governance."

but if the actions were not illegal, according to the present interpretation of international law, why would there be any undermining?

2.  He writes that there were "binding resolutions (such as the Partition Resolution...".

indeed, is the 1947 Partition Resolution a "resolution" or was it a recommendation?  And if the Arab states and the local Arab population living in the Mandate did not accept it and furthermore, went to war in a blatant act of aggression, indeed, did they not reject that decision, resolution or recommendation?

3.  He writes that "the international community...designated [the territory of Judea and Samaria] for a Palestinian state."

Was not the term an "Arab state"?

4.  There is no response to any of the interpretations of the international law opinions by several other legal experts (here and see below) such as the former President of the Hague Court for Justice concerning the issues.

Why was this?

I could have added this:

If Yesh Din presumes it acted correctly in not appearing, was then the State of Israel correct not to appear before the investigation by the Goldstone Committee and now, the new UN Human Rights Council team coming to investigate the "settlements" issue?

I also received this note:

The partition resolution was a resolution. It made a recommendation, but that doesn’t make it any less a resolution. It just means that it was not binding. And, incidentally, if the partition resolution had been binding (i.e., if the General Assembly had the authority to make a definitive determination of borders and if the resolution had been passed as such a definitive determination, rather than as a recommendation), the rejection of the Arab states would not have made it any less so. The Arab rejection is only important as a demonstration that the non-binding resolution did not subsequently morph into a binding agreement between the parties. [well, that was my point]

As to Sfard’s opinion, I would state the opposition much more clearly. Sfard writes that “the international community, via its binding resolutions (such as the Partition Resolution and many others [but which wasn't]) has designated it [the West Bank] for a Palestinian state.” This is simply false. The “international community” made only one binding resolution designating the status of the territory. This occurred in 1922, when the League of Nations designated the territory, together with the remainder of Palestine for “reconstituting the national homeland” of “the Jewish people.” The “international community” never had the authority to make any subsequent legally binding resolution re-designating the territory for a different people, and it never purported to do so.

I rest my case.

UPDATE

D.  Her first reaction:

Hey Yisrael,

Are you a reporter? Where do you write for?

Best,

Hila

P.S.

PM Netanyahu Comments on Retired Judge Edmund Levy's Report
(Communicated by the Prime Minister's Media Adviser)

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, today (Monday, 9 July 2012), commented on retired Supreme Court Judge Edmund Levy's report:

"First of all, I very much appreciate the efforts of Judge Levy and the people who worked with him. They did serious, quiet work over long months. I will submit this report to the Ministerial Committee on Settlement Affairs that I established and we will discuss it and make a decision.

This is important. This report, in my opinion, discusses the question of the legality and legitimacy of the settlement movement in Judea and Samaria on the basis of the facts and claims that merit serious examination."

_______________

Articles on the legality of Settlements (in chronological order)

Eugene V. Rostow: “Resolved: Are the Settlements Legal?” New Republic, October, 1991
CAMERA.ORG: “Jewish Settlements and the Media”, by Ricki Hollander, October, 2001
Joseph Farah: “The ‘Settlements’ Issue”, 2002
Jeffrey Helmreich: “Diplomatic and legal Aspects of the Settlement issue”, January, 2003
Julius Stone: “Israel and Palestine – Assault on the Law of Nations”
Yoram Shifftan: “Israeli Complicity in the Delegitimization of the Settlements”, September 2004
David Meir-Levi: “Occupation and Settlememt: The Myth and Reality”, June, 2005
Moshe Dann against Akiva Eldar: “The War over Israel’s Settlements”, Spring 2009
Gerald M. Adler: “Preserving a legal inheritance: settlement rights in the ‘Occupied Palestinian Territories’” September, 2009
David Phillips: The Illegal-Settlement Myth, December 2009
Alan Baker: “The Settlements Issue: Distorting the Geneva Convention and the Oslo Accords” , January, 2011
David Matas: “The Settlements: Dismantlement or Deconstruction”, June 2011
Israeli Foreign Ministry: “Israel’s use of land for settlements conforms to all rules and norms of international law.” (undated)

MORE

by Howard Grief: LEGAL RIGHTS AND TITLE OF SOVEREIGNTY OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE TO THE LAND OF ISRAEL AND PALESTINE UNDER INTERNATIONAL LAW

http://myrightword.blogspot.com/2010/11/yes-no.html
http://myrightword.blogspot.com/2011/06/illegitimate-illegitimacy.html
http://myrightword.blogspot.com/2009/06/shmuel-katz-2001.html
http://myrightword.blogspot.com/2010/03/legal-ilegal-legal.html
http://myrightword.blogspot.com/2009/11/that-anglo-american-convention-of-1924.html


Yehuda Z. Blum, Ambassador and Permanent Representative of Israel to the United Nations had this to say on June 11, 1979,  (via Eli Hertz):

"A corollary of the inalienable right of the Jewish people to its Land is the right to live in any part of Eretz Yisrael, including Judea and Samaria which are an integral part of Eretz Yisrael. Jews are not foreigners anywhere in the Land of Israel. Anyone who asserts that it is illegal for a Jew to live in Judea and Samaria just because he is a Jew, is in fact advocating a concept that is disturbingly reminiscent of the 'Judenrein' policies of Nazi Germany banning Jews from certain spheres of life for no other reason than that they were Jews. The Jewish villages in Judea, Samaria and the Gaza district are there as of right and are there to stay.

"The right of Jews to settle in the Land of Israel was also recognised in the League of Nations 'Mandate for Palestine' which stressed 'the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and ... the grounds for reconstituting' - I repeat, reconstituting 'their national home in that country.'

"The Mandatory Power was also entrusted with the duty to encourage 'close settlement by Jews on the land, including state lands and waste lands not required for public purposes.'"

^