West Bank Story

Is diplomacy merely the costume politics wears when it ventures out into the international arena? Or are diplomacy and politics entirely different fields of endeavor, the one “about” the translation of national principles into the stuff of international relationships and the other “about” the need at least on occasion to surrender those very same principles for the sake of attaining the power necessary broadly to implement them in the forum of national affairs? It’s not that easy to say!

These were the thoughts that came to me this last week when I read that the United States government has determined that there is no inherent illegality to the establishment of Jewish settlements on the land Israel took over from Jordan after the Six Day War in 1967. Of course, illegal and ill-advised are not the same thing—and it is more than possible for something to be technically legal but still a bad idea actually to implement. (It is, for example, fully legal in New York State to purchase cigarettes and to smoke them wherever smoking is permitted.) And, that being the case, asking whether Israel should continue to construct settlements on the West Bank or whether the path toward peace will be made smoother or more rocky by this specific policy shift on the part of the U.S. government—those questions remain on the table for discussion and no doubt prolonged, rancorous debate. And rancor—to say the very least—is surely what will presently ensue now that this week’s decision is in place.

The United Nations has expressed itself repeatedly to the effect that allowing Israeli civilians to live on territory Israel acquired in the Six Day War is a contravention of the Fourth Geneva Convention, an international agreement to which both Israel and Jordan have been party since 1951. Leaving aside the moral bankruptcy of the United Nations and its decades-long history of unremitting and shamefully prejudicial hostility towards Israel, the issue here turns on the fact that the Convention in question specifically prohibits states signed on from moving civilians onto land seized by war, as might be done by a nation eager to establish an ongoing claim to the seized territory in question. But nothing in the Middle East is ever all that simple to unravel. (Also, it’s a good thing the U.S. only signed the convention in 1955—wasn’t Texas acquired by our nation in the Mexican War of 1848? Just sayin’.)

The territory in question on the west bank of the Jordan River was indeed part of sovereign Jordan before 1967. But Jordan only came to control the territory after the Israeli War of Independence in 1948 and its occupation of the territory was itself never recognized by a vast majority of the world’s nations. Furthermore, the land in question was specifically acknowledged as the heartland of the Land of Israel—the ancient homeland of the Jewish people—by the League of Nations in 1922. Most Americans will find it challenging to say whether any real importance should be ascribed to the decision of an organization that existed for a mere twenty-six years and which has been defunct since 1946. But for Jewish Americans, who come pre-equipped with much, much longer memories than their average co-citizens, the issue is rooted in a far older times than the Roaring Twenties anyway.

That the land on the west bank of the Jordan—called by many today by their biblical names, Judah and Samaria—that that land was part of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah in antiquity is debated today by no reputable historian or political analyst at all. Nor, as I wrote in this space a few weeks ago, is at all in dispute the fact that the history of the land that followed the collapse of the Maccabean kingdom in the year 67 BCE was one of endless occupation—first by the Romans, but then by Iran (then called Persia), and then in order by the Byzantine Empire, the Muslim Caliphate, the Crusader Kingdoms, the Mameluke Sultanate, the Ottoman Empire and, finally, the British Empire (acting behind the fig leaf of its League of Nations mandate to rule over what had previously—and at that point for almost five centuries—been Turkish Palestine). That’s a lot of occupiers—thousands of years’ worth—and not a single one held back from settling civilians on territory gained by war. Nor, for that matter, did even a single one of the above— including any of the Muslim occupiers mentioned above—consider the land currently referenced as “the” West Bank distinct or different from the rest of the historic Jewish homeland. When Americans talk about “the” West Bank, therefore, as though it were akin to a state in the Union or a department of the French Republic, they are therefore setting themselves up not at all to understand the issue as it feels on the ground to the average Israeli. Or, for that matter, to the average citizen of any country possessed of a clear sense of the history of the territory in question.

All that being the case, the notion that the Fourth Geneva Convention can be simply be applied to the territory in question as though we were talking about the German occupation of Namibia—a place in Africa with no historical tie of any sort whatsoever to Germany—seems, to say the very least, facile.

And also worth noting—and stressing—is the degree to which I constantly see people with little or no background in the actual history of the region speaking or writing negatively about Israel’s presence on the West Bank at all.  The Balfour Declaration of 1917, for example, was an expression both of acceptance of the indigeneity of the Jewish people in the Land of Israel and also of their natural right to establish a Jewish nation in their historic homeland. That, of course, was nothing more than an expression of British policy with respect to the eventual future of what was soon to become—at least slightly ironically—British Palestine. But dramatically less well known is that the San Remo Conference of 1920 that divvied up the territories of the nations defeated in the First World War among the victors formally affirmed the basic principles of the Balfour Declaration, speaking overtly “in favor of the establishment in Palestine of a national homeland for the Jewish people.” There is not the slightest evidence of any sort that the participants at San Remo meant to exclude the land currently referenced as the West Bank in that thought.

I can’t recall hearing much about the San Remo conference lately, but even less about the Treaty of Sèvres that resulted from San Remo and which, as one of the final agreements that ended World War I, yet again reaffirmed the Balfour Declaration’s intent, and firmly, in these words:  “The Mandatory shall be responsible for placing the country under such political, administrative and economic conditions as will secure the establishment of the Jewish national home, as laid down in the preamble, and the development of self-governing institutions, and also for safeguarding the civil and religious rights of all the inhabitants of Palestine, irrespective of race and religion.” It was these words that the League of Nations affirmed and confirmed in 1922 when it adopted them into the formal mandate declaration awarded Turkish Palestine to the British.

All that being the case, to refer to the West Bank as being “occupied” by Israel because they wrested it from a nation that itself only ended up as its overlords because they managed to seize it militarily after the British withdrew their forces in 1948 and then had their overlordship of the region affirmed by the Armistice Agreement that ended the Israeli War of Independence seems, again to say the very least, forced.

Another point I generally hear made by none in this fraught context is that the United Nations Charter itself affirms the validity of all treaties entered into or brokered by its predecessor organization, the League of Nations. As a result, when the United Nations passed a scurrilous resolution in 2016 decrying all Jewish settlements on the West Bank as one large violation of international law, it was not only ignoring the specific details of the Oslo Accord of 1995 (which, pending a final peace treaty between Israelis and Palestinians, divided the West Bank up into three areas, innocuously labelled A, B, and C, and specifically awarded Israel the right to govern the Arabs and the Jews resident in Area C), but also its own historical obligations. That our government dishonorably allowed that resolution to pass without a veto was a betrayal not only of Israel, but of our own supposed devotion to the rule of law.

People talk about “the settlements” as an untraversable barrier preventing Israel and the Palestinians from moving forward towards a peaceful resolution of their dispute. But even that commonplace assertion only really works on the assumption that the presence of a relatively small Jewish minority in a Palestinian state is impossible to imagine. On the other hand, if Israel is able to pursue its national destiny as a Jewish state with 20% Arab minority, why shouldn’t Palestine also be able to move forward with a Jewish minority of about 380,000 people among its three million citizens? And that number is not even remotely correct because the chances of every single Jewish resident of the West Bank remaining in place after a declaration of Palestinian independence is zero, which would bring the percentage of Jews present in independent Palestine to less than 10%. To describe that as an intractable problem only really makes sense if it goes without saying that a future independent Palestine must be wholly judenrein, an opinion I find both odious and deeply offensive.

Our government acted in a principled and proper way to reject the notion that the presence of Jewish towns and villages on the West Bank is an ipso facto example of illegal settlement under the Fourth Geneva Convention. In a week already filled with cringe-worthy moments by the dozen, the Secretary of State’s announcement of this shift in American policy (which was really just a return to the policy adopted by the Reagan administration) was both welcome and just.