Israeli Settlements

JERUSALEM — Law pro­fes­sor David M. Phillips sets the his­tor­i­cal and legal record straight on how Israeli set­tle­ments are not a vio­la­tion of inter­na­tional law:

Though rou­tinely referred to nowa­days as “Pales­tin­ian” land, at no point in his­tory has Jerusalem or the West Bank been under Pales­tin­ian Arab sov­er­eignty in any sense of the term…

The Ottoman Empire con­tained the area known as Pales­tine for hun­dreds of years. The British Empire defeated the Ottomans, took con­trol of the region, gave the land east of the Jor­dan River to the future king­dom of Jor­dan, and offered to split the remain­ing land west of the Jor­dan between the Jews and Arabs who were liv­ing there. The Arabs west of the Jor­dan rejected the par­ti­tion, the British with­drew from the area, Israel declared inde­pen­dence, and then the sur­round­ing Arab coun­tries invaded.

By the end of the 1948 war, Jor­dan had taken con­trol of the West Bank and east Jerusalem. (The so-called “Green Line” has merely been the divid­ing line between the Israeli and Jor­dan­ian armies at the time the cease-fire began.) Most of the Arabs west of the Jor­dan had moved to the West Bank and Gaza Strip (the lat­ter was held by Egypt). Some of the Arabs had fled for their safety; oth­ers had left Israeli ter­ri­tory to make way for the invad­ing armies; and still oth­ers had been pushed out by the Israeli army. Many of the Arabs in the West Bank even­tu­ally obtained Pales­tin­ian pass­ports; Yas­sir Arafat, of course, was an Egypt­ian from Gaza. In the 1967 war, the sur­round­ing coun­tries attacked Israel again. In the end, Israel took over the West Bank, west Jerusalem, and Gaza to pro­tect itself against any future attacks by Jor­dan and Egypt.

So, the only three enti­ties that could pos­si­bly have sov­er­eignty over the West Bank are Britain, Israel, and Jor­dan. Eng­land, of course, does not want to retake any pos­ses­sions in the Mid­dle East. Jor­dan does not want any­thing to do with the West Bank any­more because Pales­tin­ian ter­ror­ists nearly over­threw the monar­chy in 1970. This leaves Israel.

The Pales­tini­ans, of course, could have a state in the future — but they have never had col­lec­tive, sov­er­eign author­ity over the West Bank in the past. As the Euro­pean Union debates whether to rec­og­nize a Pales­tin­ian state with east Jerusalem as its cap­i­tal, it is worth remem­ber­ing this fact.