UNMIA

The Arab League and the anti-Israel left wing activists in the US, Europe and Israel commonly claim that any Jewish building outside of the 1949 Armistice lines is illegal and contravenes international law. They fail to point out what provision of which international law is violated, but they point out that most of the members of the United Nations are against Israeli building. Evidently they consider majority opinion to be international law. However, that isn’t actually international law. Then what is international law? Aren’t UN resolutions international law, and so can’t it be said that majority opinion and political pressure is international law?

General Assembly resolutions are commonly cited as international law, but in practice, they are not treated as and international law, but only international suggestions. UN Security Council resolutions carry much more weight, but they are frequently ignored by nations around the world and are only partially enforceable. Membership in the UN is voluntary, as is acceptance of UN decisions. Any nation may withdraw from the UN, and any nation may reject UN determinations and resolutions, as the Islamic nations aligned against Israel and some African nations regularly do, for example, or as Germany, Italy, Great Britain, China, North Korea, the USSR, the US and most other countries have done. UN organizations themselves frequently break the UN resolutions they were set up to monitor. These resolutions cannot be called binding or have the status of international law, since they are not enforced except for political reasons and are not made with the agreement of the affected nations. They are simply statements and demands, perhaps to be honored and perhaps not.

But if UN resolutions are rejected as binding international law, what is international law? The only real basis of international law are those conventions and treaties that are signed by two or more nations. The signatory nations are considered to be bound by the agreements they signed. Israel has signed many such agreements and can be said to be bound by them. The Arab nations have likewise signed many and are bound by them. The Arab terrorist groups who were given the status of legitimate government in Israel and membership in the UN in 1993 have signed few agreements and have reneged on all of them.

What conventions, treaties and agreements apply to the larger issue of whether Jews may live and build in Judea, Samaria and East Jerusalem, or as the Arabs and their left-wing allies like to call them, the “occupied territories”? Is it reasonable to call Judea, Samaria and East Jerusalem “occupied territories”? That’s a very basic question, and other issues that build upon that issue can’t be settled until this most basic issue is settled. There are even more basic issues that disputed such as Israel’s right to exist and Israel’s right to be a Jewish state. However, this article is dealing with the issues of territory. It’s necessary to understand what documents legally define Israel’s borders. The theoretical no-man’s land that is legally neither Israel’s, Egypt’s nor Jordan’s is commonly called “Palestinian”. That non-Israeli Arabs have any claim to any part of Israel is also a matter that can be reasonably disputed, and the two issues are tied together. The issue of Arab claims to Israel and the Arab “right of return” is discussed in an earlier posting.

The first document that applies to the establishment of a Jewish Homeland and its location is the Balfour Declaration of 1917, in which Great Britain, which gained control of what is today Jordan and Israel, agreed that Palestine should be set aside for the purpose of Jewish settlement, as the “Jewish Homeland”. This decision was confirmed and ratified in the Paris Peace Conference of 1920, which called for a Jewish national homeland to be established in Palestine. Palestine was a region, not a nation, that was part of the lands vacated by the Ottoman empire after its defeat. This establishment of a Jewish Homeland was specifically to be done according to the principal of the Balfour Declaration, and it was authorized by the San Remo Resolution, and written into the Treaty of San Sevres. The treaty of San Sevres was superceded by the Lausanne Treaty of 1923 with Turkey, after Attaturk came to power in Turkey. In that treaty the area known as Palestine was released by Turkey and turned over to the allied powers of WWI. In turn, the former Ottoman territories that were not already absorbed into other countries were divided into “mandates” by the League of Nations with the goal of developing these areas so that they could become independent nations. Consequently, a Jewish homeland in area known as Palestine was established by international law. It is interesting that liberal academics, Arab nations and liberation theology Christians like to refer to this establishing of new nations from mandates as colonialism, when in fact it was planned as the purposeful end of colonialism. The majority of the Arab nations came into existance because of the Paris Peace Conference, the Lausanne Treaty and the League of Nation mandates.

All of Palestine, which includes what today is Israel and Jordan, was given to the jurisdiction of Great Britain as the “British Mandate” of 1922. In the British Mandate, Britain’s responsibility as a trustee of Palestine was spelled out in considerable detail, and it’s responsibility to encourage and facilitate Jewish settlement in Palestine, for the purpose of creating an independent Jewish Homeland was listed in direct terms. Almost immediately Britain acceded to Arab demands that Muslim Arabs be given the greater part of Palestine, all of the territory east of the Jordan River and Dead Sea. The region of Transjordan was formed and documented in the Churchill White Paper of June, 1922. The British zionist ideas behind the Balfour document reversed in post WWI times, as is documented in the Passfield White Paper of 1930 and the Peel Whitepaper of 1939, both of which limited Jewish movement and settlement in Palestine and limited Jewish land ownership, in contradiction of its mandated responsibilities in Palestine. This is even more serious given the backdrop of events at the time. In 1929 for example, widespread Arab riots, which were encouraged by Muslim religious leaders and treated lightly by the British, led to the massacre of the Jews of Hebron and the occupation of their property by the Arabs in the town, as well as Arab attacks on Jews in other areas. In Europe, Hitler was coming to power and by 1939 had begun his persecution of Jews in Germany and Poland. Jews in Europe had begun to try to escape to Palestine and other countries, and Britain, the US and many other nations were purposefully blocking their escape. At that same time in Palestine, Arabs started another round of murderous rioting against Jews, and Britain was enforcing the restrictions it had imposed on the Jewish population in Palestine. That is when the Peel Whitepaper limiting Jewish immigration to the “Jewish Homeland” was written, in direct contradiction British responsibilities to international law and human decency.

Immediately after WWII, Trans-Jordan gained its independence by UN resolution in 1946, and became the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. Syria and Egypt likewise had gained their independence without controversy. Lebanon had gained its independence from the French mandate earlier. That left the land on the west side of the Jordan River and Dead Sea for the Jews. There were no further legal divisions of the British Mandated lands. In 1947, the boundaries of Israel were defined by the boundaries of the adjacent nations.

In November, 1947, the UN General Assembly passed UN Resolution 181, which specified the establishment of a Jewish state in areas currently settled by Jews, an Arab state in areas currently settled by Arabs, and international jurisdiction over Jerusalem and other religious sites in Israel. In actuality this plan abrogated the terms of the Mandate of 1922 and earlier agreements and resolutions regarding Palestine as a homeland for the Jewish people, and was not valid. However, Israel accepted the terms, realizing that was the best they would get in the UN. However, the Arab nations and their allies from other parts of the world rejected the partition plan, because they wanted no Jewish state at all for ethnic and religious reasons, and consequently this resolution, the Partition Plan, never went into effect legally. Arab nations attacked Israel en masse as soon as it had declared itself as a state in May, 1948.

The background for the passing of UN Resolution 181 was that Britain had requested to be relieved of its duties in the British Mandate. Britain found that it was not able to fulfill its mandated duties. The rosy idea of Jews and Arab Muslims living side by side in peace and tranquility was turning out to be impossible. Giving 75% of the mandate to Muslims did not satisfy them, because their goal was 100% of the Palestinian mandate with no Jews. British anti-semitism and desire for good relations with Arab states did not make their job any easier, since they were charged with doing what neither they nor their desired allies wanted: to provide for the establishment of a Jewish State on the historical Jewish territory. In the meantime, Jewish Freedom Fighters and Militants fought the British regularly, and there was even less love lost between Palestinian Jews and the British government. The British wanted out as soon as possible, and could not fulfill the terms of their mandate. Consequently the UN General Assembly met to decide how to solve the problem. The most honest, courageous and effective method would have been to assign all the remaining area of the Mandate for the Jewish Homeland, as was originally intended. Instead, in deference to Arab threats and pressure and their own collective mixed feelings about Jews and a Jewish Homeleand, they attempted a territorial and political compromise. The compromise failed, as these compromises still do today, because they do not take into account the unchanging Arab/Muslim goal of having no Jewish State in existence.

Anthony D’Amato believes that the British Mandate was a sacred trust, even though it was in many ways abrogated by the British. He says that Britain had the sole decision making authority for its mandate, in the role of a trustee, and when Britain withdrew from its position of trustee and handed the matter to the UN, the UN resolution dividing the remainder of Palestine between Arab and Jewish jurisdictions, the boundaries they defined and the condition of having Jerusalem be an internationally administered area was binding and is still in effect today. He believes that no other agreements, not even treaties, invasions, armistices and agreements between Israel and the Palestinian Authority supercede the boundaries of Resolution 181, even though D’Amato states that General Assembly resolutions are not international law, this one was because it was the settlement of the issue of the British Mandate. For D’Amato’s theory and the following discussion, see his online symposium.

In answer to that I would say that the General Assembly is not given the authority to rule on these issues, nor to set boundaries for territories or nations, and his argument isn’t valid, but appears to politically motivated, judging by the Arab propaganda terms he uses in his argument, and his hostility towards responders who give good arguments for the opposing view. The UN charter has a trustee framework set up, and if the British Mandate were to be transferred to the UN, it should have been passed to the UN trustee framework, not to the General Assembly. As the General Assembly had no authority in this particular matter, has no general authority to establish boundaries, and their resolutions are not considered international law, and the resolution was not even accepted by all the parties involved as a viable framework for future agreements, it cannot be considered binding, and is certainly not the last word on Israel’s boundaries.

As stated many times by Arab nations and the leadership of the Arab factions that seek to make a claim on the former British Mandate, the Arab factions, whether religious or secular, do not want any non-Muslim state in the Mideast, and especially not a Jewish state. This is the real basis of their objection to the State of Israe, and their continued military, political and economic agression against Israel. The idea that only Muslim Arab states may be established in the Mideast is a racist concept, and the Arab reaction to the establishment of Israel was definitely racist and genocidal, which contravenes international law. The UN and Great Britain, in unilaterally taking more land out of the specified Jewish homeland for the purpose of establishing an Arab state was also breaking international law. Israel was not breaking international law in declaring itself to be a nation, in not allowing all Arabs who had deserted Israel at its creation to come back, or in re-taking the mandated land that had been occupied by Arab armies since 1949.

The war continued into 1949, with Israel surviving, but being unable to drive the invading armies out of its territory. Jordan occupied the eastern side of Israel, in what is now called the “West Bank”, and the eastern part of Jerusalem. Jordan slaughtered hundreds of Jews in Jerusalem, destroyed synagogues and other Jewish property, held control of the Temple Mount, not allowing access to Jews or Christians, and its armies occupied the the towns of the “West Bank”. Syria and Lebanon occupied Mandate territory on the northern side, and Egypt occupied Gaza and large parts of the Negev. This was in direct opposition to international law, UN Security Council resolutions and the UN charter.

In 1949 Armistices were signed between Israel and Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon and Syria. Armistice lines were determined at the point where troops were at the time of the armistice. The point was to bring a quick stop to the fighting, not to establish national boundaries. Consequently the Jordanian, Egyptian and Syrian armies were allowed to occupy large parts of the land granted to Israel, and UN troops were stationed in the Sinai until 1956. These are the 1949 lines that anti-Israel goups refer to as if they were national boundaries. They are specifically described as NOT being boundaries, but only temporary cease fire lines. Jordan had annexed the west bank territory, but that annexation was not recognized because Jordan had no prior claim of any kind to the land on the west side of the Jordan River, and was strictly based on its military occupation of those lands.

In 1967 the neighboring Arab states, except for Lebanon, again invaded Israel in a joint effort to destroy the Jewish state. This time, Israel drove the invading armies completely back to the national borders of the invading nations, and in the case of Egypt, beyond. Israel held all of Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, all of Judea and Samaria, Gaza and a large portion of the Sinai. Israel later gave up the land it took in the Sinai, in the peace negotiations with Egypt, but kept control of all of its land in Israel until the Oslo Nakba of 1993. At this point Israel did not occupy those areas, since those areas were part of the land originally granted to it by the League of Nations, and it had a reasonable claim to that territory. If it had been any nation but Israel, this would have been acceptable according to international law and world opinion. Israel annexed the Golan and East Jerusalem, but did not annex the area known as the West Bank, in deference to international politics. The area annexed as Jerusalem was the area defined as Jerusalem in Article 8 of UN Security Council resolution 194:

Resolves that, in view of its association with three world religions, the Jerusalem area, including the present municipality of Jerusalem plus the surrounding villages and towns, the most eastern of which shall be Abu Dis; the most southern, Bethlehem, the most western, Ein Karim (including also the built-up area of Motsa); and the most northern Shu’fat, should be accorded special and separate treatment from the rest of Palestine and should be placed under effective United Nations control;

In 1973 the nearby Arab nations except for Lebanon and Jordan again invaded Israel, with the help of the USSR and other nations, in an attempt to destroy Israel. Again Israel forced them out, and this war did not result in changes to who controlled the various regions of Israel. As in 1967, the UN ordered all sides to quit fighting, but as usual, did not censure the attacking Arab nations for invading a UN member state, nor attempt any sort of discipline or sanctions on those nations.

The politics of the years between 1967 and 1975 was extremely complicated and volatile. There was the rise of OPEC, the oil embargos on western nations who supported Israel during the Arab attacks on Israel, shifts in international alliances, major economic changes with western nations leaving the gold standard, Viet Nam, energy politics, radical Communist ideologies, detente, two wars in Israel, the rise to prominence of several Arab terrorist groups, the rise of some nations to political power and the falling back of others, the instability and changes of government in South and Central America and Africa, the changing economic forces world wide…all of these things had a great effect on issues relating to Israel and international support. However, as long as the “rule of law” has any pretence of importance in the UN and international thinking, the hot issue of the boundaries and jurisdiction of the State of Israel would best be considered objectively through the criteria of applicable law and documents, and not of international politics.

International politics cares only for international law when it appears to suit the goals of the players, which is to say international politics tends towards agression, whether political, economic or military. However, even at its most idealistic and chastened moments, such as during the founding of the League of Nations and the United Nations after WWI and WWII, the international community is a political and ruthless beast, as it always has been. The new world order of the UN is a realignment of the world order, not a reform. International law is applied as a tool of international politics, and so loses its standing as a fair arbiter of international disuputes.

If international law could be applied justly in the sensitive matter of Israel, and if nations of the world could discipline themselves to abiding by true and objective international law, it could prove itself as a viable means to achieving world peace. However, if international law and the UN continues to be a tool of international political alignments, the international body of the UN and pretenses of international law will not lead to peace, but to a war which will be worse than any that came before.

In 1978 Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat met at Camp David with Jimmy Carter to work out the first Camp David Accords, and in March, 1979 Egypt and Israel signed a peace treaty. The treaty required Israel to give up all of its holdings in the Sinai, including towns, roads, utilities and oil fields. An international border was agreed upon between Israel and Egypt, and the Sinai was demilitarized. Anwar Sadat was assasinated two years later, in 1981 by a group affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood and Palestinian terrorist groups because of the treaty. Both Israel and Egypt have so far kept substantially to the treaty, and it may be said that both sides have benefitted from it. The treaty gave the first direct delineaton of a part of Israel’s national boundaries, the southern border.

In 1987 the first intifada broke out in Israel, among the Arabs in Judea, Samaria and Gaza. The violence was incited by Muslim clerics in Israel, and orchestrated throughout by Marwan Barghuti, and Yasser Arafat with the PLO in Tunis, Tunisia. The violence of the intifada brought an attempt by the world community, led by the US and supported by the USSR and other nations, to broker peace in the region, as had successfully been done between Israel and Egypt in the Camp David Accords.

A series of conferences were held, starting with the Madrid conference, which sought to work out a framework for implementing the “two state” solution in Israel between the Arab terrorist factions that ruled the Palestinian Arabs, especially Yasser Arafat and his PLO/Fatah gang, and Israel. In 1993, following secret negotiations after the Madrid conference, the PLO and Israel worked out a “declaration of principles” at a conference in Oslo, Norway, known as the Oslo Accords, and had a public signing in Washington DC between Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin and PLO chairman Yasser Arafat, witnessed by the US and Russia.

The Oslo Accords did not change or establish any boundaries. The issue of final borders was left to “final status” negotiations to occur at an unspecified time in the future, after the other parts of the accords had been done.
In the Oslo accords Israel agreed to withdraw from Jericho and Gaza and to turn over civil control of Arab areas to Palestinian control, but does not prohibit Israel from building suburbs, buildings, roads or other infrastructure in Jewish areas anywhere in Israel. There is no prohibition against “settlements” or expansion in the Oslo Accords. The main feature of the Oslo Accords was the promise of mutual recognition between the PLO and Israel, and intentions to cooperate on many joint projects towards normalization of relations between Palestinian Arabs under the leadership of the PLO and Israel, and improvement of Palestinian areas so that they could act as an orderly self governing group. Also prominent were agreements to settle all disputes peacefully and directly, by negotiation and arbitration, without outside interference.

Inspired by the peace treaty with Egypt and the Oslo Accords, Jordan and Israel negotiated and signed a peace treaty in 1994. This treaty fixed Israel’s eastern border with Jordan, based on the border established in the British mandate, with some adjustment for overlapping private ownership in two areas.

In 1995 Israel and the PLO, under the benign eye of the US, the USSR, Japan and the EU signed the Interim Agreement for the West Bank and Gaza that were the continuation of the 1993 Oslo Accords. This agreement did not fix any boundaries and the jurisdictional areas defined in this document were not to be considered even preliminary boundaries. That was to be held until bilateral “Final Status” negotiations. However, the jurisdictional boundaries and arrangements were used as practical boundaries, even if not final boundaries, and the Arab dominated UN General Assembly passed a series of resolutions against Israel demanding withdrawal from “occupied territories”, the Golan and so on, to the point that the US reprimanded the General Assembly for its detrimental interference in the “peace process”.

In August, 1999 the Arab aligned block of the UN, in another “emergency” session called for a Fourth Geneva Convention, boycotted by Israel and the US, much like the infamous Durban conference on racism in 2001. A resolution was passed unanimously, declaring that the fourth article of the 1949 Geneva convention applies to the West Bank, Jerusalem and Gaza. The more serious and more deadly issues of religious and ethnic strife and genocide in several Muslim and allied countries, such as Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia, Lybia, the Sudan, Somalia, Russia and so on were of course not considered at this convention.

This bears on the matter of international law, because the UN is acting as both judge and prosecutor in regards to Israel, and controlling blocks of the UN obviously have idealogical, political and financial interests that cause the UN as a body to set aside its mandate of bringing world peace and being an objective world arbitrator in favor of acting on the desires of the majority political alignment. Consequently the UN is compromised and unable to fulfill its duties as an international arbiter. The judging body has serious conflicts of interest in the case it is hearing, and if it were ethical it would recuse itself. If the judge is shown to be compromised, his decisions are invalid.

The Oslo process broke down during the years between 1995 and 1998 due to Palestinian terrorist attacks in Israel, Hizbullah attacks in northern Israel, Israel’s crossing into Lebanon to stop Hizbullah, and the artificial issue of Israeli building in Jerusalem and Jewish areas the West Bank. During these years there was no change or further establishment of Israeli borders except in regard to Jordan.

In 1998 the US attempted to revive the “peace process” with the Wye River Accords, and again in 2000 with a second round of negotiations at Camp David. In 2001 Israel and the PA met at Taba, Egypt for discussions after the second intifada, but the situation didn’t change and the “final status” negotiations of the Oslo process never came near, although both sides implemented many of the steps. In 2002 Saudi Arabia proposed a peace plan, and in 2003 the US introduced the “Roadmap”, which was similar to the Saudi Arabian plan. These plans require Israel to retire to the 1949 Armistice lines and give the rest of the land to the Palestinians in return for “normalization” of relations with Arab nations. Essentially this plan is a forced surrender, since there is no legal reason for Israel to give up all land that it holds now, that it didn’t hold in 1949, and there is no reason aside from racism and religious hatred for Arab nations not to have “normal” relations with Israel since its founding.

As of 2007, the borders of Israel remain essentially the remainder of the British Mandate, after with the removal of Jordan from the mandate. The last legal delineation of Israeli boundaries was in 1996, based on its peace treaty with Jordan, and the Oslo process begun in 1993 has had no binding effect on those boundaries. These agreements establish rules for relations between Israel and the Palestinians, but in no way establish boundaries. The Palestinian Authority has no legal boundaries, although it has the practical boundaries established by Israeli-Palestinian agreements and the “facts on the ground” that both Israel and the PA have worked to achieve in order to influence the outcome of whatever negotiations may be forced on Israel in the future.

In August, 2005 Israel forcibly removed all Israelis from Jewish towns in Gaza and three towns in northern Samaria. Their property, businesses and synagogues were turned over to the PA and generally destroyed in Gaza, in complete violation of the various peace agreements. They did not receive adequate or timely reparation, their deeds and mortgages were not settled, even though they could not enjoy their property, and in many cases they received no reparation for their losses, either from the Israeli government, the PA, the UN, or any of the overseers of the “peace process”. This was done in accordance with the Oslo Accords, which called for Israel to withdraw from Gaza, although it was done on the initiative of Ariel Sharon and out of sequence.

Despite the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and PA and Hamas control of the region, the withdrawal did not change the legal boundaries of Israel in regard to Gaza, as no treaty or other binding agreement was made about that boundary. If Israel re-took Gaza, its status would be the same as was established in 1979, with the Egyptian peace treaty, and if Israel does not re-take Gaza, the boundary remains the same.

This is the history and chain of title of Israel in modern times, and left-wing and Arab claims of “Palestinian Land” and “occupied territories” are false and groundless.