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The Political Battle Over the

(Israel Hayom) Dore Gold - Looking back over the last two weeks, what appeared to hit a raw nerve with the critics of the report of Justice Edmond Levy's committee was not what it had to say about the specific issues for which it was appointed. This became evident in how the reaction focused on the report's conclusion that "the classical laws of 'occupation' as set out in the relevant international conventions cannot be considered applicable to Israel's presence in Judea and Samaria." How did Justice Levy, who recently retired from Israel's Supreme Court, reach this conclusion along with his two colleagues? They argued that the Israeli presence in the West Bank was unique, sui generis, because there was no previously recognized sovereign there when it was captured by the IDF during the Six-Day War in 1967. The Jordanian declaration of sovereignty in 1950 had been rejected by the Arab states and the international community, as a whole, except for Britain and Pakistan. There were other issues that made the Israeli presence in the West Bank unique. With the advent of the Oslo Agreements in the 1990s, there was no longer an Israeli military government over the Palestinian population. With the establishment of the Palestinian Authority in 1994, some functions of government were retained by the IDF, other functions were exercised by the Palestinians, and there were also shared powers. True, the Palestinians did not have an independent state, but they could not be considered to be under "occupation" when at the same time they were being ruled first by Yasser Arafat and then by his successor, Mahmoud Abbas. It is instructive to see how the international community looks at far clearer cases of territories that came under military control of foreign forces as a result of armed conflict. The cases of Northern Cyprus, Western Sahara, and the Kuril Islands are open-and-shut cases of foreign occupation under international law and yet in the diplomatic arena the term "occupation" is not formally applied to them. Ironically, in the case of the West Bank, where the Israeli presence is a far more complex legal issue, the term "occupation" has been uncritically applied, even by Israelis. Thus the decision to use the term "occupation" appears to emanate as much from political considerations as it does from any legal analysis - for "occupation" is a term of opprobrium. Those being constantly bombarded by the term "occupation" in Europe undoubtedly make subconscious links between Israeli behavior in the territories and the events of the Second World War. Indeed that is the intention, in many cases, of those adopting this language, despite the fact that such analogies are repulsive to anyone with the least bit of Jewish historical memory. At the end of the day, there is a huge difference in how a compromise will look if Israel's negotiating team comes to the peace table as "foreign occupiers," who took someone else's land, or if they come as a party that also has just territorial claims. If the Palestinians are constantly fed the "occupation" narrative by the international community, their propensity to consider making a real compromise, which is critical for any future agreement, will be close to nil. In fact, this false narrative only reinforces their mistaken belief in the delegitimization campaign against Israel as an alternative to seeking a negotiated settlement of the conflict. Former Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations Dore Gold is President of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.
2012-07-20 00:00:00
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