Barak meets Mitchell

At the end of an article about Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak’s meeting with American Middle East envoy, George Mitchell the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler writes:

There are more than 120 settlements in the occupied West Bank that are legal under Israeli law but not internationally. The Fourth Geneva Convention, which Israel ratified in 1951, forbids an occupying power to transfer “parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies,” but Israel disputes that this provision applies to settlements. Israel seized the West Bank and other territories in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.

Why the difference between Israeli law and “internationally?” (Interesting that Kessler doesn’t write “international law.” Maybe he’s suggesting that the opposition to “settlements” is more political than legal.)

After explaining how only Israel is described as an occupying power in the course of a territorial dispute, Dr. Dore Gold explains the reasoning behind Israel’s claim that building on the territory captured in 1967 is legal:

Israel entered the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the 1967 Six-Day War. Israeli legal experts traditionally resisted efforts to define the West Bank and Gaza Strip as “occupied” or falling under the main international treaties dealing with military occupation. Former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Meir Shamgar wrote in the 1970s that there is no de jure applicability of the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention regarding occupied territories to the case of the West Bank and Gaza Strip since the Convention “is based on the assumption that there had been a sovereign who was ousted and that he had been a legitimate sovereign.”

In fact, prior to 1967, Jordan had occupied the West Bank and Egypt had occupied the Gaza Strip; their presence in those territories was the result of their illegal invasion in 1948, in defiance of the UN Security Council. Jordan’s 1950 annexation of the West Bank was recognized only by Great Britain (excluding the annexation of Jerusalem) and Pakistan, and rejected by the vast majority of the international community, including the Arab states.

At Jordan’s insistence, the 1949 Armistice Line, that constituted the Israeli-Jordanian boundary until 1967, was not a recognized international border but only a line separating armies. The Armistice Agreement specifically stated: “no provision of this Agreement shall in any way prejudice the rights, claims, and positions of either Party hereto in the peaceful settlement of the Palestine questions, the provisions of this Agreement being dictated exclusively by military considerations” (emphasis added) (Article II.2).

As noted above, in many other cases in recent history in which recognized international borders were crossed in armed conflicts and sovereign territory seized, the language of “occupation” was not used — even in clear-cut cases of aggression. Yet in the case of the West Bank and Gaza, where no internationally recognized sovereign control previously existed, the stigma of Israel as an “occupier” has gained currency.

And while Kessler writes “…Israel seized the West Bank and other territories in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war,” suggesting that Israel was the aggressor, Gold presents a timeline that shows otherwise:

Here the historical sequence of events on June 5, 1967, is critical, for Israel only entered the West Bank after repeated Jordanian artillery fire and ground movements across the previous armistice lines. Jordanian attacks began at 10:00 a.m.; an Israeli warning to Jordan was passed through the UN at 11:00 a.m.; Jordanian attacks nonetheless persisted, so that Israeli military action only began at 12:45 p.m. Additionally, Iraqi forces had crossed Jordanian territory and were poised to enter the West Bank. Under such circumstances, the temporary armistice boundaries of 1949 lost all validity the moment Jordanian forces revoked the armistice and attacked. Israel thus took control of the West Bank as a result of a defensive war.

On another diplomatic front, French premier Nicholas Sarkozy has decided to dictate the makeup of the Israeli government.

According to the newspaper Yediot Aharonot, Mr. Sarkozy told Mr. Netanyahu that he should remake his government so that he, Ms. Livni and the defense minister, Ehud Barak, could produce historic breakthroughs for Middle East peace.

He was reported to have said, “I’ve always received Israeli foreign ministers. I met with Tzipi Livni in the Élysée Palace, but with that one I simply can’t meet. I’m telling you, you need to get rid of that man. Get him out of the government and bring in Livni. With her and with Barak you can make history.”

It’s funny, because Lieberman has actually advocated territorial compromise, so it’s unclear how he stands the way of making history. It also appears that Sarkozy is offering a lifeline to Livni. No word if the Doctor of Holocaust denial offends Sarkozy’s sensibilities.

UPDATE: There are two points worth emphasizing.
The first is that the notion that settlements are “illegal” is more an assertion than a reasoned legal conclusion. Recently reporter Glenn Kessler wrote about a legal opinion written in 1979 declaring settlements illegal. But as Daled Amos shows, the State Department lawyer who wrote the opinion based his conclusions on an earlier opinion that declared settlements legal.

The second is an example of Dr. Gold’s claim that occupation is a sin ascribed to Israel alone. In a recent op-ed in the LA Times, Yisrael Medad of My Right Word wrote:

Some have questioned why Jews should be allowed to resettle areas in which they didn’t live in the years preceding the 1967 war, areas that were almost empty of Jews before 1948 as well. But why didn’t Jews live in the area at that time? Quite simple: They had been the victims of a three-decades-long ethnic cleansing project that started in 1920, when an Arab attack wiped out a small Jewish farm at Tel Hai in Upper Galilee and was followed by attacks in Jerusalem and, in 1921, in Jaffa and Jerusalem.

In 1929, Hebron’s centuries-old Jewish population was expelled as a result of an Arab pogrom that killed almost 70 Jews. Jews that year removed themselves from Gaza, Nablus and Jenin. The return of my family to Shiloh — and of other Jews to more than 150 other communities over the Green Line since 1967 — is not solely a throwback to claimed biblical rights. Nor is it solely to assert our right to return to areas that were Jewish-populated in the 20th century until Arab violence drove them away. We have returned under a clear fulfillment of international law. There can be no doubt as to the legality of the act of my residency in Shiloh.

In other words, the acquisition of territory by force is admissible, as long as those who are displaced are Jews. There’s a word for this sort of double standard.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.