“We keep hearing the word ‘annexation’” regarding Israel’s plans for several major settlement areas and parts of the Jordan River Valley, noted Arsen Ostrovsky, an expert on international law, on a Jewish Policy Center conference call June 25. But that’s the wrong term, he stated. What the coalition government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Deputy Prime Minister and Defense Minister Benny Gantz intend is “application of Israeli sovereignty.”
The difference is crucial legally and politically, Ostrovsky said. When it comes to “annexation” versus “sovereignty” Israel and its supporters “are fighting a war of narratives. … Words matter” because they shape people’s perceptions, positively or negatively, he added.
Palestinian factions, some but not all Arab states and some but again not all member countries of the European Union have warned Israel of dangerous consequences should it declare a formal replacement of ostensibly temporary military administration with sovereign government. At issue as part of the Trump administration’s “Vision for Peace” are large Jewish communities including Ariel and Ma’ale Adumim and up to 30 percent of the Jordan Valley in the disputed West Bank (Judea and Samaria).
A human rights lawyer, Ostrovsky noted that Israel gained the territories in self-defense the 1967 Six-Day War. Jordan illegally had occupied them as a result of aggression during Israel’s 1948 War of Independence. Previously part of the League of Nations/U.N. Palestine Mandate, under which international law recognized the Jewish people’s right to reestablish its national homeland, Israel hardly can annex “what’s legally yours,” he said.
“We keep hearing about U.N. Security Council Resolution 2234,” adopted in December 2016, Ostrovsky pointed out. The measure falsely condemned Jewish communities in the territories—including post-’67 Jewish neighborhoods in eastern Jerusalem—as illegal under international law. Hostile to Netanyahu, the Obama administration withheld a U.S. veto.
Legal Roots
But the fact that the land at issue “was not taken from another state … is critical under international law,” he said. Territories illegally annexed from one country to another include Russia’s grab of Crimea from Ukraine and Turkey’s Cyprus invasion that created the “Turkish Republic of North Cyprus.” Israel’s presence in the West Bank is contrary to Russia’s in Crimea and Turkey’s on Cyprus, so Resolution 2234 “negates the Jewish people’s very connection to Judea and Samaria,” connections rooted in both history and law.
Further, applying Israeli sovereignty to the 500,000 or 600,000 Jewish residents of the territory would make their lives easier by ending overlapping remnants of Ottoman law, Mandatory regulations and Israeli law. But it would not impose a major change on the region’s Palestinian Arabs, according to Ostrovsky. (The Palestinian Authority claims 2.9 million Arabs live on the West Bank; some Israeli demographers charge that figure double-counts several hundred thousand and ignores emigration of many others.)
Contrary to critics, sovereignty would not create Israeli “apartheid” over Arab communities but “maintain more or less the status quo,” Ostrovsky said. In the long term, should Palestinian leaders finally choose to negotiate an end to the conflict, “these areas could become part of a Palestinian state” with 70 percent of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, he said. That’s one reason some Jewish settlers are “not jumping up and down for joy” at talk of extending sovereignty.
The Israeli public, considering Palestinian rejection of two-state offers—Israel and a West Bank and Gaza Strip Palestine with eastern Jerusalem as its capital—in 2000, 2001 and 2008 “has moved on. … We don’t have a real peace partner.” That being so, it’s time to regularize the status of many if not most of the Jews living in the territories—and perhaps, by doing so, prod

Ver todos los episodios