"It is perfectly legitimate for Donald Trump to move the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Nobody doubts Israel has sovereignty over West Jerusalem." So wrote the Australian's foreign editor, Greg Sheridan, on 15/5/18 (Moving American embassy to Jerusalem perfectly legitimate).
As always, Sheridan couldn't be more wrong - as American professor of international law, John Quigley, long ago pointed out:
"... no single territorial sector [between Israel and the Palestinians] is more contested than Jerusalem, which both sides claim as their capital. 'Jerusalem, complete and united' is 'the capital of Israel,' declares an Israeli statute. The phrase 'complete and united' means the western and eastern sectors, the eastern sector in the boundaries that Israel extended in 1967 farther into the West Bank. An Israeli court has read the statue as an assertion of sovereignty over both sectors.
"The Palestinian claim is asserted no less strongly. When the Palestine National Council issued its call for independence in 1988, it declared 'the establishment of the State of Palestine in the land of Palestine with its capital in Jerusalem.' The claim for sovereignty in Jerusalem is part of the more general Palestinian claim to territory in Palestine, based on centuries-long occupation.'
"The UN General Assembly's partition resolution of 1947 proposed that Jerusalem be placed under international administration. Israel's prime legal claim to territory in Palestine was the partition resolution, but since the resolution called for an internationalized Jerusalem, it provided Israel with no basis for sovereignty in West Jerusalem. West Jerusalem is almost entirely Jewish-populated, the absence of Arabs the result of their having been forced out in 1948.
"Israel occupied west Jerusalem in 1948 and declared it Israel's capital in 1950. Other states declined to move their embassies from Tel Aviv to west Jerusalem, however. They viewed sovereignty over Jerusalem as unresolved and feared that moving their embassies to west Jerusalem would bolster Israel's claim. Their refusal to move their embassies bespoke rejection of Israel's claim.
"In 1967 the United Nation Security Council in Resolution 242 asked Israel to withdraw from territory that it occupied in that year. This call was read by some as an implicit recognition of Israeli sovereignty in the territory it held before June 1967, which of course includes west Jerusalem. There is no indication, however, that the Security Council implicitly recognised Israeli rights over west Jerusalem. Resolution 242, only a few paragraphs in length, made no attempt to deal with the many outstanding political and territorial issues. After 1967 other states kept their embassies in Tel Aviv, a fact that suggests that they did not view Resolution 242 as changing the picture.
"While Israel has claimed all of Jerusalem as an Israeli city, the PLO, in the proposals it has made, has been more modest, even though it has the stronger legal claim to the city, in its entirety. It has proposed variously an east-west division of Jerusalem or shared sovereignty over the entire city. Moreover... it insists on repatriation of the Palestine Arabs displaced in 1948, which includes the thousands displaced from west Jerusalem." (The Case for Palestine: An International Law Perspective, John Quigley, 1990, pp 225-26)
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
I love the way Greg just asserts, "Nobody doubts Israel has sovereignty over West Jerusalem." Well, as you so brilliantly point out MERC, there are more than several international objections to that sham. Yet again we see Sheridan's lack of journalistic integrity, an affliction seemingly suffered by the majority of the MSM. It hasn't dawned on the newspapers that perhaps their decline is largely due to their lack of real reporting in favour of spruiking a "party" line.
Greg's comment, "Nobody doubts Israel has a sovereign right over West Jerusalem." , is a sham that is perpetuated by MSM spruikers, totally devoid of journalistic integrity. Perhaps this is why newspapers today are in such financial strife, who wants to pay for 'Opinion'? It might be worth Greg investing in an atlas to recognise the world has a few more countries than, Israel, the US and Australia. This from the website of the AALEP. (European Parliament):
"The Current Status of Jerusalem in International Law
1.Consideration of the legal status of Jerusalem cannot be divorced from consideration of the status of Palestine as a whole. Prior to the Mandate, sovereignty over Palestine, including Jerusalem, vested in the Ottomans. The Mandate did not transfer sovereignty to the Mandatory Power, nor was sovereignty transferred to the League of Nations.
During the time of the Mandate sovereignty was in effect in abeyance. That situation remained until the establishment of the State of Israel and her recognition as a state by the international community and her admission to the United Nations in 1949. Although recognition of Israel implied recognition of Israeli sovereignty over some area of territory in the former mandated territory of Palestine, since possession of territory is one of the criteria for statehood, it did not imply recognition of Israeli sovereignty over all the territory claimed by Israel. In particular, it did not imply recognition of the 1949 Armistice boundary lines or sovereignty over West Jerusalem. "
A trouncing of Sheridan's misleading assertions.
https://www.un.org/unispal/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/P2-Mr.-Zias-Abuzayyad-E.pdf
Post a Comment