In European countries (and apparently Israel), the law of armed conflict is referred to as international humanitarian law. All of the articles in GC IV (and the GCs in general) are humanitarian in purpose, to impose certain rules and limitations on warring parties. So what the opinion is saying is that the general legal requirements of GC IV apply to the case. If you read GC IV and look at how it is discussed in the opinion, it is clear that you can’t parse out which articles in it would apply and which wouldn’t generally. Either GC IV as a whole applies to a military force occupying land or it doesn’t, though not every article would be relevant to a particular situation. The opinion discussed the articles that were relevant to the case at hand.
I never said it existed in 1967. What the PA is doing now is trying to build sovereignty backwards by signing all of these bedrock international law treaties (such as the Geneva Conventions) and being recognized as proper parties to them so that legal challenges to any particular action or practice are potentially subject to a given international treaty or convention and to generally build up to being recognized as a sovereign state as a fait accompli.
I don’t know if it will work, but the precedent has already been set within Israel that the GC IV applies to cases in which the Government of Israel takes some official action in the West Bank while acting as an occupying power during a time of hostilities that affects the Palestinian population living there. That particular genie is out of the bottle and it will be hard for Israel to argue in the future that while they agreed it applied in one case, it shouldn’t apply in another.
There’s a difficult difference there, though, and you yourself sort of gloss over it. Finland is a state for Finns, Ireland a state for Irish, but instead of saying “Israel is a state for Israelis,” you say it’s “a state for the Jews.” There’s a difference. As I am sure you know, twenty percent of Israeli citizens aren’t Jews. Most people in Nazareth are Arabic, actually.
There is obviously a significant different between saying that Israel is a state for Israelis, and that it is a state for Jews. The way Israel has tried to work it, with some difficulty but more success than one might expect, is to have it both ways; the country openly exists as a haven for the Jewish people, but still treats its non-Jewish citizenry as citizens.
(If anyone is at all confused, Israeli Arabs are not the Palestinians living in Gaza and the West Bank. I am referring to actual Israelis, living in Israel, who are Arabic.)
The quibble is semantic, not material. Just because Israel is called Israel, and not Yehuda (“Jew” in Hebrew is Yehudi) does not mean it is not a state for the Jews. Israel was the historical name of a Jewish state.
As for demographics - as I am sure you know, 11% of Finland’s citizens aren’t Finns. And 14% of Ireland’s citizens are not Irish. Does that make Finland not a Finnish state and Ireland not an Irish state?
I Googled “Mosques destroyed West Bank” and I’m getting one demolition in 2014 and one in 2010, both of which were (ostensibly) because building permits had been lacking. That is not remotely like the Arab effort to completely de-Judaize East Jerusalem when it was under their control.
True, but the winners of the war don’t need to make themselves further susceptible to “terrible things” as a pre-condition for negotiating a peace treaty.
Depends who’s guaranteeing that “independence.” The UN? Israelis don’t trust them, and with plenty good reason. Quite frankly, the Israeli government - which, immediately in 1967, gave control of Muslim holy sites in Jerusalem over to the Muslim Waqf - has proven itself to be a quite trustworthy steward of all religions’ shrines in Jerusalem. It’s not “international”, but what does that matter, if the people who want access can get access?
While there may be some value in that, if I may, I’d like to offer another:
Building more settlements in occupied territory is Israel’s attempt to eliminate the great majority of Palestinians by a policy of a thousand cuts.
To go into West Bank and physically displace people by forcing them to flee as refugees would draw a lot of criticism of Israel from the international community. And it would be richly deserved. Israel doesn’t want to deal with that kind of negative attention and suffer possible sanctions, which might even include the US.
So Israel, and Netanyahu specifically, is playing the long game policy of displacement of Palestinians one square foot by one square foot.
Israel can endure any number of non-binding UN sanctions so long as they are relatively minor and spaced out over extended period of time (decades, perhaps).
The key here, for Israel, is patience and determination. The goal is not a two state solution but a greater state of Israel and perhaps a very small remaining Palestinian population with citizenship rights. One that does not threaten Israel from remaining a great majority Jewish state.
And the Jewish people have a mythos around the long game, and have been the victims of a death by a thousand cuts throughout Europe for hundreds of years - they know the will it takes to keep moving forward in those circumstances. What are a few decades of sanctions in the face of a millennium of diaspora? They are experienced in the game they are playing.
Finland and Ireland do not intrinsically identify their countries as being home to a particular religious group. Legally speaking, from the point of view of the Republic of Ireland, Irish is someone who is an Irish citizen. It’s easier to become Irish if your grandparents were Irish, but even they might have been of Spanish descent. If your parents have lived there for three years and you’re born in Ireland, boom, you’re Irish. In Finland, your parents might be from Botswana, but if you carry a Finnish passport, you’re a Finn.
Israel has a very different take on this - and given history, it’s a very understandable take to have.
One can speak of a Jewish nation, since “Jewishness” is defined by jus sanguinis. One might argue that if significant numbers of Jewish converts are admitted to Israel that would undercut the argument, but I don’t know if they are or not.
I don’t believe this is so…but, even if it were, this is not a “justification” for settlement building, so much as a condemnation of it. I think what was being asked for were justifications that even opponents of settlement-building could acknowledge as valid, while still not necessarily agree with them.
I certainly agree that there is an aggressive component of settlement-building, forcing some Palestinians out of areas they were living in. But this could not extend to “the great majority” of them without getting right into the heart of the major cities. There is no indication of that happening.
The death of a thousand cuts doesn’t usually get into the core of the major organs.
The burnings were not carried out by the Israeli government, they were crimes. The “one” I was referring to was the one in Khirbet-Al-Tahweel, and the reason for its demolition was that permits were lacking. The Israeli government demolishes illegally-built synagogues, too, it’s not a policy that targets mosques.
Yes, but not necessarily the return of borders to their precise pre-war positions.
That will depend on what body is overseeing the place.
Very depressing discussion on NPR a bit ago. The two viewpoints were painfully polarized. The two correspondents failed to agree on even the most basic points, and both of them grievously exaggerated their own views.
It’s a miracle talks have ever even taken place at all; how can we ever hope they’ll reach any kind of agreement?
So is this the pro-settlement argument? “There will never be peace anyway, so we might as well build?”
It seems to me that the only chance (however remote) for an eventual peace is a two-state solution, and the more that Israeli settlements are built up in the West Bank, the more remote that chance becomes.
However, I am no expert on these matters. If there’s a genuine argument that settlements don’t make peace less likely – other than the “peace will never happen anyway” argument – then please, I’d love to hear it.
The pro-settlement argument is that it’s a good way to force moderate Jewish Israelis into refusing to accept a Palestinian State.
Shamir said as much in the early 90s when he said if he’d been the PM in the 70s there’d have been “a million Jews in Judea and Samaria and there’d be no talk of a Palestinian State”.
Most Israeli Jews fall into two groups of people, those who were refugees from the Holocaust and those were refugees from Muslim countries. They’ll never agree to a settlement where fellow Jews are ruled by people who they believe want to kill them.
I think the Netanyahu/settler faction’s reaction to the UN declaration has been rude and uncouth to an extreme degree. The US should seriously reconsider its aid package to such an ungrateful recipient. Israel is behaving as a boorish international neighbor- they are like the hobo beggar who spits on you and bitches that there’s no mayo when you give him a sandwich and tell him, “I don’t have an opinion myself, but 13 people in this neighborhood suggest that you get a job.”
Is anyone who is in favor of building settlements actually arguing that more settlements will help result in peace? The argument I always hear in favor of settlements is that Israel has the right to settle land that it occupied, or that settlements are not as much of an impediment to peace as some of the things Fatah and Hamas are doing. And sometimes I’ll hear a more realpolitik argument that says building settlements will give Israel an advantage negotiating a peace deal with the Palestinians.
In reality, the settlements are a realpoltik strategy Israel believes will protect their national security interests in the long run. I’m not an expert on Israeli security, but I think it’s beyond hypocritical for America or the UN to question how Israel decides to defend its national security. America invaded Iraq to fight terrorism, and now its questioning Israeli settlements? This is just silly.