The genius of the UN's resolution on Israeli settlements

[CriticalThought]

Author: Bob Carr

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Intro of author.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Carr

Robert John "Bob" Carr (born 28 September 1947)[1] is a former politician from Australia. A member of the Labor Party, he served in the government of Australia as Minister for Foreign Affairs from March 2012 to September 2013, while also serving in the Australian Senate as a Senator for New South Wales. From 4 April 1995 to 3 August 2005, Carr was the Premier of New South Wales.[2] He was the longest continuously serving Premier of the state (only Sir Henry Parkes served longer, although Parkes held the office on five separate occasions).

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Main article

Source: http://www.smh.com.au/comment/the-g...n-on-israeli-settlements-20161225-gthumf.html

• Bob Carr

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In 1967 Israel won control of the West Bank as a result of its success in the Six Day War. Its then prime minister Levi Eshkol wanted to consolidate control by planting settlements on the occupied territory. He asked Theodor Meron, his chief legal adviser, whether this would be legal.

No, said Meron. The Geneva Convention says no nation may settle its own population on land it wins in war.

Meron is alive today, an eminent international jurist. He says he was right then and is right now.

All those settlements, all illegal.

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I recall a conversation about 12 years ago with an Australian business leader, just back from Israel. He held out some hope for a negotiated peace.

"But what about the settlements?" I asked. At the time I was premier and patron of Labor Friends of Israel.

"Bob, don't worry. If the Israeli people get a peace deal they will withdraw the settlements."

Next time I looked settlement population numbers had soared another 150,000, something which left me with the distinct impression of having been conned – no, having been lied to – by the Israel lobby. Sure we subscribe to a two-state solution, they insist, but while you're looking the other way we're spreading settlements as fast as possible to render it impossible.

Both Labor and Likud governments have funded settlers, many religious extremists, and gifted them the best land.

Meanwhile, Palestinians are denied building approval for homes, even a chicken coop. If in Area C they throw up a granny flat it's promptly demolished by army bulldozers.

If Israel is really open to giving the land back in a peace deal why allow settlements in the first place? That's the question, if I'd been sharper, I would have put to my interlocutor. And settlements not just along the border. Thirty-five per cent are now being approved deep in the territory everyone sees as an ultimate Palestinian state.

This is the essence of the boiling US frustration that resulted in America refusing to veto Friday's Security Council resolution.

John Kerry told the Senate Foreign Relations committee that within days of a peace deal in 2014 along came an announcement of 700 new settlement units. "Poof!" he said, the deal got blown sky high. Barack Obama's envoy and former US ambassador to Israel, Martin Indyk, confirms settlements destroyed the deal. Obama has said the same. Hence this parting gift by the outgoing President to a headstrong Israel.

Historically the aged and corrupt Palestinian leadership has to bear some responsibility. They've let their people down.

But right now the Palestinians are offering a demilitarised state – a Palestine without an army – and Western peacekeepers within their borders. It is hard to imagine more explicit security guarantees.

Sixty per cent of the Netanyahu cabinet – the most chauvinist in the nation's history – are on record opposing a two-state solution. In other words, they want an indefinite occupation. Settlements are vital to their design – backed by demolitions and land confiscation, nothing less than a creeping annexation.

That means a majority Arab population – 83 per cent of the West Bank – being ruled by a racial and religious minority of 17 per cent.

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz referred this year to "the evil winds of racism and nationalism sweeping Israel". General Yair Golan, Israel's No.2 soldier, said the tone of the nation reminds him of Europe between the wars, and he was talking at a Holocaust commemoration.

Two former prime ministers, Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert, have warned their country risks getting saddled with apartheid, proving again that searching argument and criticism are among Israel's most resilient features.

But often nations under stress end up adopting the policies their enemies would most want. In this spirit Benjamin Netanyahu is sleepwalking to a nasty denouement: a Greater Israel, with an Arab population living under different laws, above all, with no right to vote. Israeli Labor policies are not a jot different.

The Security Council resolution demands that the world now treat settlements differently from the rest of Israel.

Europe was already mandating identification of products from settlement industries, giving consumers in Ireland or France the opportunity to decide whether they want to support illegal activities when they chose a product on a supermarket shelf.

The resolution has undermined the nationalist strategy that says Israel can lose Europe but enjoy new partnerships in Asia and Africa and with Vladimir Putin. In the end not only France and Britain but Russia and China voted to brand settlements flagrantly illegal. Netanyahu is left vowing retaliation against plucky little New Zealand and Senegal.

Donald Trump can tweet and bluster. But the resolution stands as international law, to be taken seriously by cabinets and bind the International Criminal Court. After years of provocation by Israeli hawks that's the genius of what Obama and Kerry have pulled off.

If Israel responds with more settlements, or annexes slabs of the West Bank, then UN agencies and member states have to decide how to react.

Leave that "how" to another day.

In the meantime consider the following motion, an elegantly simple one: "Given that Israel continues to defy the 2016 resolution of the Security Council and spreads settlements so that a Palestinian state is no longer possible we move that every resident of Greater Israel be afforded equal rights. This includes the right to vote in national elections."

How would you vote on that motion – in a parish council or church synod? At a union or party conference? A council meeting? On a campus?

And what happens next?

Bob Carr is a former foreign minister and NSW premier and a patron of Australian Labor Friends of Palestine.

 

[schoolboy]

What is unsaid is that the longer illegal settlements remain standing, the more compelling a counter argument that under customary international law a historical custom has arisen to consider such land as annexed. So after a hundred years Israel would have a strong claim under this doctrine to ask for those lands.

 

[Solomon2]

In 1967 Israel won control of the West Bank as a result of its success in the Six Day War. Its then prime minister Levi Eshkol wanted to consolidate control by planting settlements on the occupied territory. He asked Theodor Meron, his chief legal adviser, whether this would be legal.
No, said Meron. The Geneva Convention says no nation may settle its own population on land it wins in war.

"...Contrary to Theodor Meron's citation of Article 49, the Geneva Convention did not restrict Jewish settlement in the West Bank, acquired by Israel during the Six-Day War. As Eugene V. Rostow, formerly dean of Yale Law School and undersecretary of state for political affairs between 1966 and 1969, noted, the government of Israel neither "deported" Palestinians nor "transferred" Israelis during or after 1967. (Indeed, beginning with the return of Jews to Hebron the following year, settlers invariably acted on their own volition without government authorization.) Furthermore, Rostow noted, the Geneva Convention applied only to acts by one signatory "carried out on the territory of another." The West Bank, however, did not belong to any signatory power, for Jordan had no sovereign rights or legal claims there. Its legal status was defined as "an unallocated part of the British Mandate."

"With Jordan's defeat in 1967, a "vacuum in sovereignty" existed on the West Bank. Under international law, the Israeli military administration became the custodian of territories until their return to the original sovereign — according to the League of Nations mandate, reinforced by Article 80 of the U.N. Charter — the Jewish people for their "national home in Palestine." Israeli settlement was not prohibited; indeed, under the terms of the mandate, it was explicitly protected. Jews retained the same legal right to settle in the West Bank that they enjoyed in Tel Aviv, Haifa, or the Galilee..."​

So you see, while in theory the SC does have the power to invoke "world peace" it also is powerless under the Charter to declare Jewish settlement of the area illegal, as it neither has judicial authority nor can it change the terms of the League's Mandate. Furthermore, since there is no factual backing behind the "world peace" issue in 2334, it can't stand up in court when challenged that the SC is misusing it to in effect nullify Article 80.

 

[AZADPAKISTAN2009]

2 Seperate state deal all done in 1993 just awiating implementation from Israel's side as they claimed billions in funding from USA in return

It was broadcasted world wide

 

[CriticalThought]

"...Contrary to Theodor Meron's citation of Article 49, the Geneva Convention did not restrict Jewish settlement in the West Bank, acquired by Israel during the Six-Day War. As Eugene V. Rostow, formerly dean of Yale Law School and undersecretary of state for political affairs between 1966 and 1969, noted, the government of Israel neither "deported" Palestinians nor "transferred" Israelis during or after 1967. (Indeed, beginning with the return of Jews to Hebron the following year, settlers invariably acted on their own volition without government authorization.) Furthermore, Rostow noted, the Geneva Convention applied only to acts by one signatory "carried out on the territory of another." The West Bank, however, did not belong to any signatory power, for Jordan had no sovereign rights or legal claims there. Its legal status was defined as "an unallocated part of the British Mandate."

"With Jordan's defeat in 1967, a "vacuum in sovereignty" existed on the West Bank. Under international law, the Israeli military administration became the custodian of territories until their return to the original sovereign — according to the League of Nations mandate, reinforced by Article 80 of the U.N. Charter — the Jewish people for their "national home in Palestine." Israeli settlement was not prohibited; indeed, under the terms of the mandate, it was explicitly protected. Jews retained the same legal right to settle in the West Bank that they enjoyed in Tel Aviv, Haifa, or the Galilee..."​

So you see, while in theory the SC does have the power to invoke "world peace" it also is powerless under the Charter to declare Jewish settlement of the area illegal, as it neither has judicial authority nor can it change the terms of the League's Mandate. Furthermore, since there is no factual backing behind the "world peace" issue in 2334, it can't stand up in court when challenged that the SC is misusing it to in effect nullify Article 80.

Israel has a long history of manipulating legalese to suit their purpose. In the eyes of a just judge, these tricks would be dismissed outright. Except Israel exists not due to legal declaration, but through military intervention, which has been given legal protection by scoundrels. I am not going to debate any fine points here. Israel shall cease to exist via the same means it came into existence in the first place. It is only a matter of time.

 

[Solomon2]

Israel has a long history of manipulating legalese to suit their purpose. In the eyes of a just judge, these tricks would be dismissed outright.

Yourself, I suppose?

Except Israel exists not due to legal declaration, but through military intervention, which has been given legal protection by scoundrels.

There are few sentences more full of lies than this. Let's "fisk" it:

1) Israel was declared a state by its own parliament and the U.N.; and before that the re-establishment in Palestine of the Jewish National Home was the declared intention of both the Ottoman Caliph and the League of Nations.

2) Thus there was no "military intervention" to establish Israel.

3) The "legal protection by scoundrels" the Jews of Palestine enjoyed under the Mandate are those of political self-determination and the civil and property rights that existed under the tanzimat laws of the Ottomans.

I am not going to debate any fine points here. Israel shall cease to exist via the same means it came into existence in the first place. It is only a matter of time.

You don't have to debate "any fine points here." My question to you is: knowing that you've endorsed the unjust extermination of innocents to promote the evil of murderous robbers who stole the truth and the goodness of your heart, why should you sleep easy at night until you've changed your mind?

 

[CriticalThought]

There are few sentences more full of lies than this. Let's "fisk" it:

1) Israel was declared a state by its own parliament and the U.N.; and before that the re-establishment in Palestine of the Jewish National Home was the declared intention of both the Ottoman Caliph and the League of Nations.

Israeli parliament, U.N.: scoundrels.

The Ottoman Caliph was history by the time Israel was created. Good going calling my sentence a lie, and coming forth with your own lies.

League of Nations: Bunch of scoundrels.

2) Thus there was no "military intervention" to establish Israel.

I don't need to disprove that. You are displaying every single Jewish trait that the Jews are notorious for.

3) The "legal protection by scoundrels" the Jews of Palestine enjoyed under the Mandate are those of political self-determination and the civil and property rights that existed under the tanzimat laws of the Ottomans.

Nothing in Ottoman law ever envisaged planting yourselves as tyrannical, blood thirsty belligerents in Palestine and making Palestinians worse than slaves in their own lands. The thing is, this will not get resolved through an internet debate. It will be resolved by solidly punching you on the head so you blurt out the truth from your own tongue.

You don't have to debate "any fine points here." My question to you is: knowing that you've endorsed the unjust extermination of innocents to promote the evil of murderous robbers who stole the truth and the goodness of your heart, why should you sleep easy at night until you've changed your mind?

Where have I endorsed any unjust actions?

 

[theman111]

palastine people dont want state its mean they need to take care of them self and they depend in israel more then the world think