"Unlike a treaty agreement, customary international law is usually not written." So Ban Ki-moon, Secretary General of the United Nations, is siding with those that say that Israel is not following international law about East Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria. He, a north Korean, who attended U. of Washington and has a Doctor of Law from there and from Harvard, doesn't exhibit any knowledge about the problems between Israel and the surrounding Arab states who have kept attacking since 1948. He started serving in the UN in this capacity in 2007 and will remain until 2016. Ban Ki-moon has a Masters in public administration from Harvard, but I don't see anything about him being an international lawyer anywhere.
There are plenty of actual international lawyers who side with Israel in that they have the right to live and build in Judea and Samaria and to include East Jerusalem as part and parcel of all of Jerusalem, their capital today and past capital in their ancient history.
The Washington Times lists some excellent reasons why Israel is not acting illegally according to international law.
The San Remo Treaty of 1920, in which the victorious World War I allies dealt with the remnants of the defeated Ottoman Turkish Empire, created an entity called Palestine along both sides of the Jordan River. The powers intended it as the land on which Great Britain would turn its 1917 Balfour Declaration from aspiration to reality, assisting the Zionist movement in re-establishing the Jewish national home.
The Franco-British Boundary Convention of 1920 demarcated the French mandate for what would become Syria and Lebanon from that of the British in Palestine. This was in part to prepare for the Jewish state.
Article 6 of the League of Nations’ 1922 Palestine Mandate encouraged “close Jewish settlement” on the land west of the Jordan River. The mandate encouraged settlement only west of the river because Great Britain in the same year unilaterally severed Transjordan (today’s Jordan) from Palestine, creating a new Arab country.
The Anglo-American Convention of 1924 saw the United States endorse British administration of the remaining Palestine Mandate lands, so long as London helped bring a Jewish state into being.
The 1945 U.N. Charter, Chapter XII, Article 80, continues Jewish rights recognized under the Mandate. It protects “the rights whatsoever of any states or any peoples or the terms of existing international instruments” and is sometimes known as “the Palestine article.”
Israel has followed the rules established by Emir Feisal and Chaim Weizmann and the mandate. It was not Israel who turned against the Arabs but the Arabs who attacked the new state of Israel.
Monday is "Hate Israel Day" at the United Nations. This is despicable.
"Israel will be absent, as it has
been for the past year. The creation of the settlements probe -- the seventh
one-sided inquiry on Israel since the council's supposed reform in 2006, during
which time it generated but five probes on the rest of the world combined, and
none ever on Iran, China, or Sri Lanka -- was the last straw for then foreign
minister Avigdor Lieberman, who decided Israel would no longer participate
in, or with, the council."
"Headlining the program this time will be the presentation of a report by a "Fact Finding Mission" on how Israeli settlements are the direct cause of all Palestinian ills. The probe was a sham, its verdict having been declared in advance.
"Also on the program will be three additional UN reports condemning Israel, including one that devotes several pages to accusations by Cuba and Syria that Israel is grossly violating human rights in the Golan Heights. The world's worst abusers will then take the floor and emit vitriol." The Golan Heights a part of Israel. Syria is accusing Israel of abusing children. Nobody is saying a thing about Syria killing off 70,000 of its own people, of course, including Ban Ki-moon. Of all the nations in the world, Israel is the last to abuse its own children.
Read more: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/mar/9/rozenman-ban-ki-moon-wrong-about-israeli-settlemen/#ixzz2Np5gDDDK
Follow us: @washtimes on TwitterResource: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_law_and_the_Arab%E2%80%93Israeli_conflict
http://www.un.org/sg/biography.shtml on Ban Ki-moon
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ban_Ki-moon
UN Watch www.unwatch.org
UN Watch statement delivered by The Right Honourable Lord David Trimble, in the UN Human Rights Council debate on Israeli Settlements, 18 March 2013
ReplyDeleteThank you, Mr. President.
On receiving the Nobel Peace Prize 15 years ago, I cited Edmund Burke. My experience in Northern Ireland underlines his insistence that every idea or proposal derives its merit from circumstance, which carries more weight than abstraction and ideology.
I am a firm believer in a two-state solution, which will require difficult compromises.
Today was Hate Israel Day at the UN—click here for full story.
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UNHRC set to debate West Bank settlement report
By Tovah Lazaroff
03/18/2013
The United Nations Human Rights Council will on Monday debate a report by its fact-finding mission on West Bank settlements, which concluded that Israel could be culpable for building over the pre-1967 lines before the International Criminal Court, if the Palestinians become party to the Rome Statute. ...
Hillel Neuer, the executive director of the Geneva-based non-governmental organization UN Watch, said that the fact-finding mission was a “sham.”
“Despite claims to objectivity, the resolution creating the inquiry had determined the verdict from the start, declaring that settlements constituted ‘very serious violations’ of Palestinians’ human rights. Fact finding was only to support this foregone conclusion,” he said.
“The report is maliciously one-sided and its conclusions extreme. Its narrative omits any reference to terrorism from Palestinian areas, making Israeli security measures appear malevolent. UN Watch’s submission on highly relevant West Bank social, economic and security matters – quoting UN and World Bank reports – was completely ignored.” More
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For an expert legal analysis of the UN settlements report by JCPA's Amb. Alan Baker, click here.
This report, however, does not help. By urging the removal of all settlers living beyond the green line, the report is inconsistent with Security Council Resolution 242, endorsed by the Council decision establishing this commission.
It could lead to the utterly grotesque consequence that the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem should be returned to the desolate condition that existed between 1948 and 1967.
The Report’s conclusions address one of the issues in a high handed and one-sided manner. It is not the necessary comprehensive agreement; nor is it part of one. It amounts to a unilateral measure of the sort opposed by the international community.
I have to say that the very idea of this inquiry is wrong. Negotiations can only be by the Israelis and the Palestinians. Others at best can play a helpful role. But outside bodies purporting to make authoritative pronouncements on major issues over the heads of the parties can only undermine and subvert the peace process.
This report abandons principles established in the Clinton Camp David talks, and applied in the Road Map and the Olmert-Abbas talks.
The United Nations and its human rights bodies should all be working with others to advance the cause of peace, not to hinder it.
I regret to say that the Council displays the same selectivity that led to the abolition of the earlier Commission. I urge you to heed the criticism by successive UN secretary-generals of this Council’s habit of singling out only one specific country, to the exclusion of virtually everything else.
Thank you, Mr. President.
One should question what international law Israel has violated with regards to the Palestinians. UNSC Resolution 242 of 1967 calls for peace in exchange for territories (albeit not all territories captured by Israel in 1967. Gush Etzion was Jewish territory conquered by Jordan in the 1948 War of Independence as was the Old City of Jerusalem’s Jewish Quarter). Lord Caradon, Britain’s Ambassador to the UN and a key drafter of Resolution 242 said, “It would have been wrong to demand that Israel return to its positions of June 4, 1967. That is why we [the members of the UNSC] didn’t demand that the Israelis return to them and I think we were right not to.”
ReplyDelete