BLOGMOCRACY IN ACTION!
This Thread By “Contributor” & Netizen – “Eliana”
Israel has a solid case under international law for the ownership of all of the land included in the Palestine Mandate. On November 28th, the Jerusalem Post published this article:
NGO to Clinton: Settlements are legal
By JACOB KANTERThe Office for Israeli Constitutional Law, a non-governmental legal action organization, sent a letter to US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton last week, warning that by labeling Jewish settlements in the West Bank illegal, she is violating international law.
The little-known Anglo-American Convention, a treaty signed by the US and British governments in 1924, stipulated that the US fully accepted upon itself the Mandate for Palestine, which declared all of the West Bank within its borders.
“The treaty has been hidden,” said OFICL director Mark Kaplan. “But if you look at the House [of Representatives] deliberations during World War I, people are saying, ‘Look, we’ve invested a lot of money in Palestine, and we expect that this treaty will be upheld.'”
Though the United Nations’ 1947 partition plan declared the West Bank an Arab territory, the mandate’s borders still hold today.
“The mandate expired in 1948 when Israel got its independence,” Kaplan said. “But the American-Anglo convention was a treaty that was connected to the mandate. Treaties themselves have no statute of limitations, so their rights go on ad infinitum.”
“The UN partition plan was just that-a plan,” said OFICL chairman Michael Snidecor in a statement. “The General Assembly has no authority to create countries or change borders…
The OFICL letter also warned Clinton that if her office does not comply with the civil rights recognized in the Anglo-American convention, OFICL will file a class-action suit in a US district court….
From the letter to Hillary Clinton from the OFICL:
Thereafter, the United States of America ratified a treaty a with the British Government known as the Anglo-American Treaty of 1924, which included by reference the aforementioned Balfour Declaration and includes, verbatim, the full text of the Mandate for Palestine.
“Whereas the Principal Allied Powers have also agreed that the Mandatory should be responsible for putting into effect the declaration originally made on the 2nd of November 1917, by the Government of His Britannic Majesty, and adopted by the said Powers, in favour of the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people…”
By doing so, the United States of America is legally bound to the principles contained in the “Balfour Declaration” and the “Mandate for Palestine.”
THE ARGUMENT used against Israel in the claim that the Jewish settlements in Judea, Samaria and the Jewish neighborhoods in eastern Jerusalem are illegal is a cynical and wicked twisting of an article in the 4th Geneva Convention that was meant to prevent another Holocaust:
Many who allege that Jewish communities in the West Bank violate international law cite the 4th Geneva Convention, Article 49. It states that an occupying power “shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.” But Julius Stone, like Rostow a leading legal theorist, wrote in his 1981 book, “Israel and Palestine: An Assault on the Law of Nations,” that the effort to designate Israeli settlements as illegal was a “subversion . . . of basic international law principles.”
Stone, Stephen Schwebel, a former judge on the International Court of Justice, and others have distinguished between territory acquired in an “aggressive conquest” (such as Nazi Germany’s seizures during World War II) and territory taken in self-defense (such as Israeli conquests in 1967).
The distinction is especially sharp when the territory acquired had been held illegally, as Jordan had held the West Bank, which it seized during the Arab states’ 1948-49 war against Israel.
Further, Article 49 of the 4th Geneva Convention was intended to outlaw the Nazi practice of forcibly transporting populations into or out of occupied territories to labor or death camps. Israelis were not forcibly transferred to the West Bank, nor were Palestinian Arabs forced out of it. Two years after President Carter’s State Department determined that Israeli settlements violated international law, President Reagan said flatly that they were “not illegal.”
The “Palestinian” Claim to Judea, Samaria, Gaza and eastern Jerusalem is Illegitimate
The “Palestinians” claim is that they are entitled to the land up to the pre-1967 cease fire lines because these areas of land were “taken” from Jordan and Egypt.
In Article 5 of the Mandate of Palestine (which is incorporated into the Anglo-American treaty of 1924 and the United Nations Charter) states:
“The Mandatory shall be responsible for seeing that no Palestine territory shall be ceded or leased to, or in any way placed under the control of, the Government of any foreign power.”
Jordan and Egypt violated international law when they (as “foreign powers”) took control of Judea, Samaria, Gaza and eastern Jerusalem. After these “foreign powers” had been expelled, they did not have legal heirs to this land in the form of fellow Arabians who call themselves “Palestinians.”
This legal matter will have to be addressed in the American legal system because the Obama Administration’s and the U.S. State Department’s obligations to recognize that all of the land belongs to Israel are at the center of the legal arguments.
Let’s hope the case moves forward.
