U.S. says Israeli Settlements in West Bank Are Not Illegal
- by Ernesto Newman
- in World
- — Nov 20, 2019
Extra than 700,000 settlers contain taken up space within the West Financial institution and east Jerusalem since the 1967 war. Israel's counter-attack was victorious.
And the decision on settlements is a problem for the American Jewish community, because it further deepens the partisan divide on Israel. In fact, we are called Jews because we are the people of Judea.
That was five decades ago, and as the settlements have grown and spread, the world has condemned them as an illegal exploitation of land seized in war.
However, Israel says the Fourth Geneva Convention does not apply de jure to the West Bank because, it says, the territory is not technically occupied.
In 1978, the Carter administration adopted the position that the settlements violated worldwide law.
"In December 2016, at the very end of the previous administration, Secretary Kerry changed decades of this careful, bipartisan approach by publicly reaffirming the supposed illegality of settlements", Pompeo went on. Pompeo added that he sees the settlements as "ill-advised" - a term once used by Ronald Reagan - rather than illegal "per se".
The US policy shift on Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank makes no difference from a legal point of view.
"We continue to follow the long-standing position of the United Nations that Israeli settlements are in breach of worldwide law", United Nations human rights spokesman Rupert Colville told a news briefing.
Micah Goodman, author of the book "Catch-67", which offers an in-depth look at the debate over Israel's settlements, said the USA announcement could help to remove the debate over legal status of the land and put the focus on ethics. "But calling the settlements illegal and freezing building there did not promote peace either". From now on, the legality of individual settlements would be a matter for the Israeli courts to decide.
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He also said the decision did not mean the administration was prejudging the status of the West Bank in any eventual Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement. "Approving settlements outside the blocs will force us to choose between a bi-national state and an apartheid state, in which case the Zionist vision can be folded away".
Mr Pompeo said USA statements about the settlements on the West Bank - which Israel captured during a 1967 war - had been inconsistent since the time of Democrat President Jimmy Carter in 1978.
"Israeli settlements are a grave violation of worldwide law, including global humanitarian law".
He said the hard truth was there will never be a judicial resolution to the conflict, and arguments about who is right and wrong as a matter of global law will not bring peace.
The US decision "is also likely a preemptive move for an imminent ICC [International Criminal Court] ruling, to be taken by December 2nd, regarding whether Israeli settlements amount to war crimes according to worldwide law", Ofer Zalzberg, an Israel analyst with the global Crisis Group, wrote on Twitter. "As president, I will reverse this policy and pursue a two-state solution", tweeted Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.).
Pompeo rejected a 1978 State Department legal opinion that held that civilian settlements in the occupied territories are "inconsistent with global law".
Benjamin Netanyahu called the Trump administration's declaration, which stepped back from four decades of USA policy and reversed the policies of President Barack Obama, a "huge achievement" that "fixed a historic wrong". When it comes to discussing Israel, there's a strong hubris within both political and academic circles that manifests itself as baseless moral outrage, followed by an assertion that the worldwide community-steeped in anti-Zionism, if not outright anti-Semitism-knows what is best for the state of Israel.
Netanyahu, who has been a staunch supporter of settlements and proposed annexing the Jordan Valley into Israel true, praised the pass as reflecting "a historical truth - that the Jewish folks are no longer foreign colonialists in Judea and Samaria".