Palestine-Mandate

Amnon Rubenstein, an eminent Israeli professor, has denounced the Israeli settlement enterprise as undemocratic, discriminatory, and against international law, in an article published in today’s Jerusalem Post.

Professor Rubenstein wrote: “Settling Jews outside of Israel proper is - it is submitted - illegal in international law and is defective morally. The fourth Geneva Convention, which Israel has signed and ratified, prohibits such settlements. True, the Knesset has not translated these provisions into Israeli legislation, but in the opinion of this writer such an act of domestic reception is unnecessary as the convention by its very definition relates to occupied territories which lie outside the limits of Israeli law and jurisdiction. At any rate, Israel accepts the humanitarian provisions of this convention, and the Supreme Court has acted upon these provisions. The government has declared, in sworn affidavits, that settlements in occupied territories are there for a limited duration and are justified by military considerations.

These declarations are, to put it mildly, not accurate.

THESE SETTLEMENTS, established at great cost to provide housing for tens of thousands of Jews, are seen as permanent communities; the uprooting of settlements from the Gaza Strip was a heartrending experience even for those who advocated this decision at the time.
For successive Israeli governments to state the opposite and for the courts to accept this blatant untruth, has been an exercise in unmitigated insincerity.

But the issue is not merely one of international law. By establishing purely Jewish communities in the West Bank and by applying an Israeli legal system to their residents, Israel has created a dual system within the same territory - one applicable to Jews, and one to Arabs. This duality has had a negative impact on Israeli public life, has rightly antagonized many of our friends and is responsible for the radicalization of the Israeli Left.

It also nullifies the equation often made between these settlements and the ones established by the yishuv under the British mandate. The socialist settlers of the past saw themselves as precursors of a Jewish state in which Jews and Arabs shared the same equality by law and never dreamt of any separation between Arabs and Jews. Add to this the flouting of Israel’s undertaking to stop establishing and expanding these settlements, and you will begin to understand the folly of the Givat Ze’ev decision.

In short, Israel, according to its basic laws, aspires to be both Jewish and democratic. Its outposts in the West Bank are Jewish, but not democratic“.   This piece is published in the JPost here .

News agencies are reporting this evening that Israel has put out a call for bids “to build more than 300 new homes in a disputed east Jerusalem neighborhood”.

Actually, the area affected is Har Homa, just outside Bethlehem (which is just to the south of the main area of Jerusalem); the site is known in Arabic as Jebel Gheneim, and when Israel first began building on this hill top between Jerusalem and Bethlehem in 1997 — in the middle of the Oslo process — the UN Security Council met in crisis session for weeks on the matter.

The Jebel Gheneim area was one of the most beautiful green wooded hilltops in Palestine, say the Palestinians. Now, it is covered with buildings, and a 10-or 12-story hotel has gone up recently, apparently to accomodate visitors.

The Applied Research Institute of Jerusalem (ARIJ), which is actually located just inside The Wall in Bethlehem, offers these views:

Here are two images of Jebel Abu Gheneim/Har Homa from 1997 posted on the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs website –
(1) the view of the green forest:

(2) Planned construction - red indicates roads, green indicates open public areas, other colors indicate various construction plans

AP reported today that “A Housing Ministry spokesman said 307 units would be built in Har Homa, a Jewish neighborhood in east Jerusalem … Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said he sent an urgent message to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, asking her to block the project from moving forward”.

However, Israel says this is not a settlement, so it will not be frozen, as Israel should do if it’s to fulfill its Phase One Road Map requirements. AP added that ” ‘Israel makes a clear distinction between the West Bank and Jerusalem’, said Mark Regev, spokesman for Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. ‘Israel has never made a commitment to limit our sovereignty in Jerusalem. Implementation of the first phase of the road map does not apply to Jerusalem’.” The AP news report is posted here.

Agence France Press reported that “The Palestinians slammed the move as an attempt to undermine the renewed peace drive which was officially launched after a seven-year hiatus at an international peace conference in the United States last week. ‘The Israel Land Administration has published a tender for the construction of 307 housing units in Har Homa’, an official in the housing ministry told AFP, referring to a neighbourhood in east Jerusalem. At the Annapolis conference last week, Israel and the Palestinians pledged to implement the 2003 roadmap plan, the first phase of which calls on Israel to freeze all settlement activity and for Palestinians to improve security … Israel does not consider construction in east Jerusalem — which it captured in the 1967 Six-Day war — as settlement growth because it annexed the Arab part of the Holy City shortly after the conflict [actually, Israel extended its administration to East Jerusalem in 1967, but it announced only in 1980 that Jerusalem would be Israel's eternal and undivided capital -- the UN declared this action null and void, and, despite Israel's invitation, only three or four countries have moved their embassies to Jerusalem]. ‘The neighbourhood is under the jurisdiction of the Jerusalem municipality and does not require any authorisation of the defence ministry’, which issues construction permits for settlements in the West Bank, the official said. But the annexation of east Jerusalem has not been recognised by the international community, and Palestinians want to make it the capital of their future state. Palestinian peace negotiator Saeb Erakat lambasted the move, which comes a week before Israeli and Palestinian teams are to hold their first talks on a permanent peace deal which the sides aim to clinch by the end of 2008. ‘This blatant Israeli violation of the roadmap will destroy any trust among all the nations that have participated in the Annapolis conference’, Erakat said in a statement. ‘If Israel does not backtrack and cancel this settlement decision it will undermine the results of the Annapolis conference before they have even begun to be implemented’, he added”. The AFP report is here.