For Those Who Harp About Israel’s “Illegal Settlements.”
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“Since it’s passage on November 22, 1967, Security Council Resolution 242 has been regarded by the international diplomatic community as the basis for a lasting peace between Israel and her neighbors. Feelings about ‘242′ in Israel tend to be more mixed, particularly because of the resolution’s insistence on the ‘withdrawal if Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent ['Six Day War] conflice.’
Arthur Goldberg, a deeply committed Jew, was the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. at the time the resolution was passed. Goldberg subsequently insisted that the resolution never intended to bring about a complete Israeli withdrawal from every inch of land occupied in 1967. Goldberg noted that the resolution spoke of Israeli withdrawal ‘from territories,’ and not from ‘all the territories.’ Lord Caradon, the former British representative to the U.N. and a diplomat much less friendly to Israel than Goldberg, confirmed the American ambassador’s view. ‘It would have been wrong,’ Caradon explained to the Beirut Daily Star on June 12, 1974, ‘to demand that Israel return to its positions of June 4, 1967, because those positions were undesirable and artificial. After all, they were just the places where the soldiers of each side happened to be on the day the fighting stopped in 1948. They were just armistice lines. That’s why we didn’t demand that the Israelis return to them, and I think we were right not to…”
From rabbi Joseph Telushkin’s Jewish Literacy page 337-8.
Okay, so there are those, typically from the political left, who claim Israel’s settlement activities are illegal. Their measurement rod is “international law”. The above quote from the good rabbi’s book proves that argument to be specious.
On the extreme political right (typically) there are those who do not recognize the legitimacy of international law, especially as represented by the U.N. Within this group are some who also don’t recognize Israel’s claims to Judea and Samaria.
Those who hold this viewpoint make the claim that Israel’s settlement activities are immoral/illegal because they are allegedly occupying the land of another people. There are a few problems with this argument as well. Historically, when an entity possessing land uses that territory to launch an aggressive war against another entity (be they “nations” or not) and the aggressor subsequently loses the war, they also lose any territory gained by the entity who was forced to defend itself.
The second problem with this argument is that there was never a “people” called Palestinians. Prior to the re-birth of the Jewish nation which we now refer to as Israel, the term Palestinian was used to denote Jewish residents of the Roman named territory called Palestine. Most of these Arabs immigrated to what is now called Israel during the same period that Jewish immigration increased.
During the British Mandate, territory was set aside for the Arab peoples who also lived in this part of “Palestine” and that is now called Jordan. The population within Jordan is 80% “Palestinian”. The language, culture and customs of the Arab people who live in Judea and Samaria are the same as those who live in Jordan.
