Palestine-Mandate

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice said at the sidelines of a NATO meeting in Brussels today that the announcement this week of new tenders for 307 new housing units to be built in the Har Homa settlement just outside Bethlehem, south of Jerusalem, did not help to build confidence between Israelis and Palestinians as a new series of negotiations is about to get underway. News reports call this a “rare U.S. criticism of Israel”.

UN Secretary-General BAN Ki-Moon said, through a spokesperson yesterday, that the move was unhelpful.

Actually, that comment from UNSG BAN had to be prodded. In the first reaction, a deputy UN Spokesperson said at first that she had no comment. Here is the exchange, starting with a journalist’s question, as reported in a UN transcript of Thursday’s regular noon briefing:
“Question: Do you have anything to tell us on Israel building over 300 new houses in eastern Jerusalem? And whether this is a breach to the Road Map and the commitments announced in the meeting Mr. Ban Ki-moon attended in Annapolis a few days ago?
Deputy Spokesperson: I don’t have an immediate reaction to that today.
[The Deputy Spokesperson later announced that the UN’s position on the illegality of settlement activity is well-known. These new tenders for 300 new homes in east Jerusalem, coming so soon after the renewed commitment to Road Map implementation at Annapolis, are not helpful, she said. She added that the UN will be discussing this with Quartet partners.]

It seems clear that this criticism would not have been forthcoming if the Palestinians were not cooperating with the American-backed Annapolis process of negotiations.

The growth of the Har Homa settlement on the formerly green wooded hilltop known as Jebel Abu Gheneim has been phenomenal, exponential, and inexorable, since construction started ten years ago, and accelerating recently — but the criticism and protests have been only sporadic. The land was expropriated in the early 1990s, causing an international outcry and many meetings of the UN Security Council in New York, but construction did not begin until 1997.

The Applied Research Institute of Jerusalem, located in Bethlehem, reports on its website that just “Between the years 2003 and 2007, the Israeli Ministry of Housing in corporation with the Israeli Municipality of Jerusalem declared 6 tenders to build an additional 2536 new illegal housing units in Har Homa settlement”.

The expansion has been very notable even this year:

ARIJ reports the following tenders for the 2536 units of new housing in Har Homa settlement since early 2003:

No.1
Date of declaration - 1/3/2003
Housing Units - 108

No.2
Date of declaration - 15/8/2003
Housing Units - 78

No.3
Date of declaration - 2/4/2004
Housing Units - 700

No.4
Date of declaration - 23/8/2004
Housing Units - 150

No.5
Date of declaration - 27/8/2005
Housing Units - 500

No.6
Date of declaration - 9/1/2007
Housing Units - 1000

As discussed in the UN Security Council in 1997 — when Benjamin Netanyahu was Israel’s Prime Minister — the Israeli plan was to build a 6,500 unit housing project in the Har Homa settlement on Jebel Abu Gheneim. See the 6 March 1997 UN press release here.

This would appear to mean that only about one-third of the planned Har Homa has so far been built

ARIJ writes that “Ten years after Har Homa (Abu Ghneim), since the construction in of Har Homa started and it never stopped once despite wide criticism. Israel continues with its policy: forcing facts on the ground … The existence of the Israeli settlements in the West Bank and their expansions are Illegal and contradicts with the international law rules, United Nations Security Council Resolutions such as 237 (1967), 271 (1969), 446 (1979), 452 (1979), 465 (1980), 681 (1990), and 799 (1992). Resolution 446 March 22, 1979 calls on Israel to rescind its previous measures and to desist from taking any action which would result in changing the legal status and geographical nature and materially affecting the demographic composition of the Arab territories occupied since 1967, including Jerusalem and, in particular, not to transfer parts of its own civilian population into the occupied Arab territories’ Also resolution 452 of 1979 ‘calls upon the Government and people of Israel to cease, on an urgent basis, the establishment, construction and planning of settlements in the Arab territories occupied since 1967, including Jerusalem’. Furthermore the Fourth Geneva Convention also states in Article 49 that ‘The occupying power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own population into the territories it occupies’, and Article 174 of the same convention ‘prohibits the ‘extensive destruction and appropriation of property not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly’.” This ARIJ report is posted here.

No resolution was adopted in the UN Security Council on the Har Homa settlement building, and — due to the U.S. vetoes of two draft resolutions , the matter went to a UN General Assembly Emergency Special Session, where resolutions were adopted condemning the plan and calling for an immediate halt to the construction of the settlement.

In what appears to be an embarrassing and inept episode, the U.S. withdrew on Friday a draft resolution it had proposed to the UN Security Council because Israeli officials had said they felt it was “inappropriate” — they apparently did not want the Security Council involved — and because Israeli officials, in what has become a standard complaint that will kill any initiative, said that they were not informed about the move in advance.

Reuters has now reported that “Israeli deputy U.N. representative Daniel Carmon told reporters Israel welcomed council support for Annapolis, but added, ‘We feel that the appreciation of the council has other means of being represented and reflected than resolutions’. The brief draft resolution, made available to journalists, would have endorsed actions agreed at Annapolis and called on all states to support them as well as to aid the struggling Palestinian economy. Although Israel apparently had no problems with the uncontroversial text, analysts suggested it was worried a formal resolution would get the United Nations too involved in Middle East peace efforts. Israel and the United States often complain of bias in the world body against the Jewish state. [n.b., it was thought that those complaints are now largely over, thanks to the years of efforts by former UN SG Kofi Annan to make Israel more comfortable in the world body: during his administration, a 1974 resolution known as the “zionism is racism” text, was repealed, and the UN has now adopted several resolutions and a secretariat program of action to disseminate knowledge of the Holocaust, for example)”…

The Reuters report added that “Both Israeli and Palestinian officials indicated they had not seen the text before the United States circulated it to the other 14 members of the council, who do not include either Israel or the Palestinian Authority … Palestinian diplomat, who asked not to be identified, said on Friday his mission had still not seen the draft and therefore had no comment on it”. The Reuters report on the U.S. action in the UN Security Council is here.

The Associated Press added that The State Department said Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had decided such a resolution was unnecessary. ‘We have looked at this and, at the end of the day, the secretary believes that the positive results of Annapolis speak for themselves and there is really no reason to gild the lily’, spokesman Sean McCormack said. ‘I am not sure that we saw the need to add anything else to the conversation. Sometimes, the results and the event speak for themselves’. Two U.S. officials, who on condition of anonymity described Rice’s decision to withdraw the draft document, said there were several concerns about the resolution, including the failure to consult the Israelis and Palestinians on the language and the possibility that some on the Security Council might try to add anti-Israeli language to it” … The AP’s updated report is posted here.

A small corner of land that belongs either to Syria or to Lebanon is a real problem that many grown men have not been able to solve. It is the Shebaa Farms.

The United Nations took the position a few years ago that it belonged to Syria — and it just so happens that that part of Syria is occupied and has been “annexed” by Israel, though this annexation has been declared “null and void” by the United Nations Security Council and General Assembly.

Syria and Lebanon wrote letters to the United Nations saying that the Shebaa Farms belongs to Lebanon — but the UN says that Syria did not provide enough documentation.

Hizballah, formed to resist the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon, says that its mission will not be accomplished until the Shebaa Farms is returned to Lebanon.

And, an Israeli reserve Brigadier General told a group of journalists during a very recent tour of the Golan Heights that of course the Shebaa Farms is Lebanese. What, the journalists asked, is the problem then. But, he says, Hizballah is on the case, and the Lebanese Government does not want anything to do with Hizballah. So, the matter will stay as it is.

Israel invaded south Lebanon in 1972 because of Palestinian cross-border attacks. It withdrew unilaterally, after years of fighting Hizballah, in May 2000. Since then, Hizballah has insisted that its resistance will continue, because Israel’s withdrawal was not complete. The UN was asked to physically demarcate the Israeli-Lebanese border on the ground, and it more or less did so, with blue pillars, and painting stones blue — making the Blue Line. The UN relied on documents from the period of the French Mandate that ruled Syria, formerly part of the Ottoman Empire that was defeated during the First World War. The UN did not take Hizballah’s side.

Last summer, Israel went to war with Lebanon after Hizballah attacked a small group of Israeli soldiers near the Shebaa Farms, and seized two of them, who are still being held captive without any contact with the International Committee of the Red Cross. (Lebanese detainees are being held by Israel and Hizballah wants them returned to Lebanon.)

Yesterday, according to Haaretz, UNSG BAN Ki-moon “released the findings of cartographer Miklos Pinter, whose assignment had been to determine the borders of the disputed area. ‘I am pleased to report that, based on the best available information, the senior cartographer has arrived at a provisional definition of the Shaba Farms area’, writes the Secretary General. He also points out that ‘this exercise has not been aimed to delineate international boundaries as regards to the Shaba Farms, but should assist Lebanon and Syria in their efforts to agree upon their common border’. According to Pinter’s findings, the territory in question includes many IDF military positions, and serves as a strategic crossroads between the borders of Lebanon, Syria and Israel.

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