how does israel justify settlements
There are situations involving lawful use of force, resulting in lawful occupations in the course of repelling aggression. Circular Deals involve the declaration of a given area as State Land, while concealing the fact that an Israeli developer claims that he has already purchased the land from its Palestinian owner on the private market. The illegality of Israel’s civilian settlements in territories it occupied in 1967 is one of the few clearly settled issues in international law. vs. the Government of Israel (the Elon Moreh case), outlining the Hague Conventions' limitations on Israeli land acquisition and settlements. Israel has justified its civilian settlements by stating that a temporary use of land and buildings for various purposes appears permissible under a plea of military necessity and that the settlements … It also argued that "no territorial acquisition resulting from the threat or use of force shall be recognized as legal" according to customary international law and defined by "Declaration on Principles of International Law concerning Friendly Relations and Co-operation among States in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations" (General Assembly Resolution 2625). Antonio Cassese and John McHugo disagree with this analysis. This policy brief focuses on the territories Israel occupied in 1967 – the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights – and more specifically on the Israeli settlements and outposts that were built in the occupied Palestinian territory (OPT). To re-iterate, every international organization involved in this affair has categorized this as false and has used it as leverage to safely call the Israeli settlements illegal. [56][o], The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) holds that the establishment of Israeli settlements violate Fourth Geneva Convention. General Assembly resolutions have condemned the deportations since 1969, and have done so by overwhelming majorities in recent years. The settlers made clear that their intention was to establish a permanent civilian settlement, founded for ideological and political purposes. In addition, there were approximately 110 “settlement outposts” located throughout the West Bank. Article 2 extends the Convention to "all cases of declared war or of any other armed conflict which may arise between two or more of the High Contracting Parties" and "all cases of partial or total occupation of the territory of a High Contracting Party". [146] Stone agrees with Lauterpacht's analysis and his view that sovereignty was acquired through other means: Lauterpacht has offered a cogent legal analysis leading to the conclusion that sovereignty over Jerusalem has already vested in Israel. Since 2005, settlements have existed almost exclusively in the West Bank, with a handful in the Golan Heights; they were also once erected in the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula. [88][89] In 1998 the Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs produced The International Criminal Court Background Paper. The total area of such land is estimated at 43,000 hectares. You cannot just evacuate people from their homes without due process. Using primarily these five methods: seizure for military purposes; declaration of state lands; seizure of absentee property; confiscation for public needs; andinitial registration, Israel has managed to take over about 50% of the lands in the West Bank, barring the local Palestinian public from using them. The statement also called on Israel to end all settlement activity and expressed concern at calls for possible annexation of areas in the West Bank.[84]. State Lands are public property and should benefit the entire local population, yet since 1967, the State has completely denied the Palestinians their right to use these lands, and has allocated them only for the establishment and expansion of settlements. [133], David Kretzmer, Professor of International Law at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has argued that it is "quite clear that by actively organizing or encouraging transfer of its own population into the occupied territory, an occupying power does indeed violate Article 49(6)".[134]. [a][b][c][d][e] The United Nations Security Council, the United Nations General Assembly, the International Committee of the Red Cross, the International Court of Justice and the High Contracting Parties to the Convention have all affirmed that the Fourth Geneva Convention applies to Israeli settlements.[f][g]. ", "The ICRC publicly stated that the building of Jewish settlements in the territories, the Israeli use of collective punishments, the destruction of Arab houses as punishment, the expulsion of Arabs from the territories, and the seizing of Arab lands and resources without compelling military necessity, inter alia, all violated the Fourth GC. Countless international organizations, both intergovernmental and nongovernmental, have taken this view. [67] Hoping to achieve a peace deal, he nevertheless asked Israel to freeze construction calling the settlements an "obstacle to peace". [42], At present, based on the result of numerous UN resolutions that cite Article 49 of the Geneva Convention, the consensus view of the international community is that Israeli settlements are illegal and constitute a violation of international law. In order to find Israel’s settlements to be a violation of international law, first, Israel must be considered an occupier of foreign territory. According to the Ottoman law code, which Israel makes use of in the West Bank, all lands are considered “… Before 1948 it belonged to the British crown. Justice Aharon Barak ruled against the Palestinian plaintiff, and for the project, accepting the claim by respondents that while it would benefit the residents of Israel, it would also favour the interests of West Bank Arabs commuting to Israel. [62] In November 2019, in a statement made after the change in the United States four-decade-old position, the European Union said that it continued to believe that Israeli settlement activity in occupied Palestinian territory was illegal under international law and eroded prospects for lasting peace. The Israeli Supreme Court has ruled that the fulfillment of the applicable Hague IV Convention criteria is a mandatory and integral part of satisfying those three preconditions of the local law. [115], According to Jean Pictet of the International Committee of the Red Cross, this clause intended to prevent the World War II practice of an occupying power transferring "portions of its own population to occupied territory for political and racial reasons or in order, as they claimed, to colonize those territories", which in turn "worsened the economic situation of the native population and endangered their separate existence as a race". [155], The report found "blatant violations of the law" by officials and state institutions. Furthermore, during the decade following the signing of the Oslo Accords, Israel began once again to make regular use of seizure injunctions for military purposes, particularly in order to establish the bypass road system on the West Bank, intended to make it possible for troops and settlers to travel without having to cross Palestinian population centers. Once the procedure of military seizure was no longer valid for the purpose of acquiring lands for settlement, a new legal procedure, based on a local interpretation of Ottoman law, was implemented to declare extensive areas in the West Bank as “State Lands.” Over the years, Israel confiscated more than 900,000 dunams in the West Bank in this manner, and at least 90 settlements are built on lands declared as “state lands.”. [158], According to a report of the Israeli Environmental Protection Ministry, waste water management is "virtually nonexistent" in unauthorized Jewish settler outposts and some other settlements, thus raw sewage is contaminating the ground water in parts of the West Bank. [161][162], Arguments based on UNSC Resolution 242 and the British Mandate, Arguments based on property rights and private ownership, "the establishment of the Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory has been considered illegal by the international community and by the majority of legal scholars. It claimed the settlements had only been established after exhaustive investigations making sure none were built on private land. The permissive attitude taken by America accelerated the pace of Israel's settlement programme. At the end of that period, the military must either relinquish control of the land to the owners – something which has rarely happened in the West Bank – or renew the seizure order. However, no country, not even Israel, considers West Bank settlements to be sovereign Israeli territory. ", 'the U.S. government does not recognize all of Jerusalem as part of On the Foreign Minister's reading, even if the Geneva Convention applies, voluntary transfers do not violate it, because the Occupying Power is not doing the transfer.'. Displacement of protected persons is dealt with separately in the Convention and paragraph 6 would seem redundant if limited to cases of displacement. [120], The official Israeli legal argument against the application of Article 2 to the situation in the West Bank is based on a 1971 interpretation, planned before the events of 1967, by Israeli Attorney-General, Meir Shamgar,[121] who in his capacity as Military Attorney General in the early 1960s had already worked out legal textbooks and military kits for the IDF to cope with a situation where that organization might find itself in a position of an occupying power. Sasson responded that there were no interim solutions and advised the bishop not to get carried away by such flimsy initiatives. for: the emphasis on the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war in Resolution 242 is of general application and, in sharp contrast to the Withdrawal Phase, is not limited to territories occupied in "the refent conflict". [152], Pressured by the United States, the Sharon administration commissioned the Sasson Report, which found that the Israeli government had funded the creation of Jewish settler outposts in the West Bank that were unauthorized and in violation of stated government policy. In November 2019, the Trump administration expressly repudiated the Hansell opinion and stated that the United States considered the status of the settlements as being "not inconsistent with" international law. Over the years, Israel confiscated more than 900,000 dunams in the West Bank in this manner, and at least 90 settlements are built on lands declared as “state lands.” In order to understand this mechanism, we must understand the situation of land ownership in the West Bank in 1967. [69] Since the Clinton administration, the U.S. has continued to object to the settlements, calling them "obstacles to peace" and prejudicial to the outcome of final status talks. Nevertheless, in at least one case – that of Ma’ale Adummim – 1,000 hectares of Palestinian land were confiscated for the settlement. This policy has also been justified in terms of security interests, taking into consideration the dangerous geographic circumstances of Israel before 1967 (where Israeli areas on the Mediterranean coast were potentially threatened by Jordanian control of the West Bank ridge). The report blames Israeli settlements for pumping contaminated water into the sewers, not Palestinian villages. As many of these lands were uncultivated for years, they were later declared State Lands. [97], In 2009, British Foreign Secretary David Miliband called Israeli settlements "illegal". [93], Israel contends that the Geneva Convention only applies in the absence of an operative peace agreement and between two powers accepting the Convention. Many of the more than 100 outposts investigated added at state expense paved roads, permanent housing, power lines and other infrastructure. 70% of the Jewish communities east of the Green Line are connected to treatment facilities, so "illegal outposts" are the main source of the untreated water, according to the Israeli report. It should be marked that Israel may be following the Ottoman law code to the letter, but it is doing it in an improper and discriminatory manner. The question remains, however, whether this is of any practical value. [citation needed] Whereas the UNSC resolutions 660 and 687 regarding Iraq's Invasion of Kuwait and the UNSC 1441 before the Gulf War demanded Iraq's immediate withdrawal from land it occupied belligerently, and regarded as a casus belli its putative recourse to a programme for building weapons of mass destruction, Israel, though occupying a foreign territory and reputedly having an atomic arsenal, was treated differently. Since 1967, Israel has allowed and even encouraged its citizens to live in the new settlements established in the territories, motivated by religious and national sentiments attached to the history of the Jewish nation in the land of Israel. ", "Self-Determination, Population Transfer and the Middle East Peace Accords", "The Status of Palestine/Land of Israel and Its Settlement Under Public International Law", "Israel effectively annexes Palestinian land near Jordan Valley", "Emergency Special Session of General Assembly condemns Israel's failure to Cease Building of New Settlement in East Jerusalem", "Israeli Report Condemns Support for Settlement Outposts", "Europe Affirms Support for a Corpus Separatum for Greater Jerusalem", "New support for West Bank outpost movement", "Group: Settlement info implicates Israeli gov't", "The Jewish Settlements in the West Bank: International Law and Israeli Jurisprudence", "No, Israel Didn't Offer to Trade the West Bank for Peace in 1967", "State Department Legal Advisor's letter to the Congress Concerning the Legality of Israeli Settlements in the Occupied Territories, 21 April 1978", "Diplomatic and Legal Aspects of the Settlement Issue", "How to Respond to Common Misstatements About Israel: Israeli Settlements", "Implementation of the Fourth Geneva Convention in the occupied Palestinian territories: history of a multilateral process (1997–2001)", "The International Criminal Court Background Paper", "International Labour Conference, 93rd Session. If within the stated time they did not achieve peace, Israel would return its forces to the territories upon UN authorization. It has been argued that Israel took control of the West Bank as a result of a defensive war. The third precondition is that a settlement can only be established according to a lawfully designed building scheme, which has the power to produce a building permit. Military necessity had been an afterthought in the planning portions of the Elon Moreh settlement. [148], However, international law scholar John Quigley has written, "... a state that uses force in self-defense may not retain territory it takes while repelling an attack. According to the Ottoman law code, which Israel makes use of in the West Bank, all lands are considered “State Land” unless proven otherwise. ', "there is an overwhelming (and rare) international legal consensus that the territories are occupied, that the law of belligerent occupation applies, and that the settlements are illegal and indeed constitute a grave breach of the GC IV,". The fact that they had been established to initiate profitable agriculture was of no legal concern. In these circumstances, that writer is led to the view that there was, following the British withdrawal and the abortion of the partition proposals, a lapse or vacancy or vacuum of sovereignty. [137] In practice, Israel does not accept that the Fourth Geneva Convention applies de jure, but has stated that on humanitarian issues it will govern itself de facto by its provisions, without specifying which these are. Egypt and Jordan demanded simultaneous negotiations and withdrawal,[27] with Jordan's King Hussein suggesting that if negotiations did not achieve peace within six months or a year, the withdrawn Israel troops could reoccupy the West Bank and make a separate peace treaty with the Palestinians. [51], According to records of the 1998 meeting of Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, Theo van Boven said, The status of the settlements was clearly inconsistent with Article 3 of the Convention, which, as noted in the Committee's General Recommendation XIX, prohibited all forms of racial segregation in all countries.
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