Soccer Dad

3 on occupation

Twenty years ago Jeane Kirkpatrick wrote (.pdf) |:

There is disagreement among Arab governments about who has rightful sovereignty over this area, but all agree that it is not Israel. Arab states have aggressively pushed their case. They have fought costly wars and made it necessary for Israel to maintain large, powerful, expensive military forces to defend itself against them. But when Israel's military victories made the price of large wars too high, the struggle was moved to the UN, an arena whose chief activity is not conflict resolution (as is generally believed) but what has been correctly termed "collective legitimization" and "collective delegitimization."

In no way has that been more apparent than the way the term "illegal occupation" has been used. If the lands Israel captured in 1967 are illegally occupied then Israel has not just an interest in making peace with the Palestinians but a moral (and legal) obligation to make peace by acceding to every single demand made by the Palestinians. Years of terrorism are washed away and Israel by virtue of its "illegal occupation" is now the villain.

Here a number of articles that deal with the misuse of the term occupation, which, by itself, is a legal concept not a violation of international law and its selective application to Israel.

From "Why Is Israel's Presence in the Territories Still Called "Occupation"?" by Avinoam Sharon (.pdf|)

The term "occupation" is employed politically, without regard for its general or legal meaning. The use of the term "occupation" in political rhetoric reduces complex situations of competing claims and rights to clear-cut, predefined categories of right and wrong.

The use of the terms "occupation" and "occupier" in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict also serves to advance the argument that Israel bears ultimate responsibility for
the welfare of the Palestinians, while limiting or denying Israel's right to defend itself
against Palestinian terror,59 and while relieving the Palestinian side of responsibility for
its own actions and decisions and their consequences. This purposeful use of the term
"occupation" would appear to be an important factor motivating the reinterpretation
and expansion of the concept of occupation.

The use of the term "occupation" to maintain Israel's responsibility for the fate of the
Palestinians also serves the agenda of those who question the legitimacy of the State
of Israel or who view Israel as an American or Western proxy. This political abuse of the
term "occupation" to demonize Israel as part of a general assault upon the West, or upon Israel's legitimacy, underlies the continued use of the term in regard to Israel as part of a geopolitical narrative that has little to do with Israel's status as an occupier under international law.

From "From 'occupied territories' to 'disputed territories'" by Dore Gold.

The politically-loaded term "occupied territories" or "occupation" seems to apply only to Israel and is hardly ever used when other territorial disputes are discussed, especially by interested third parties. For example, the U.S. Department of State refers to Kashmir as "disputed areas."5 Similarly in its Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, the State Department describes the patch of Azerbaijan claimed as an independent republic by indigenous Armenian separatists as "the disputed area of Nagorno-Karabakh."6

Despite the 1975 advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice establishing that Western Sahara was not under Moroccan territorial sovereignty, it is not commonly accepted to describe the Moroccan military incursion in the former Spanish colony as an act of "occupation." In a more recent decision of the International Court of Justice from March 2001, the Persian Gulf island of Zubarah, claimed by both Qatar and Bahrain, was described by the Court as "disputed territory," until it was finally allocated to Qatar.7

Of course each situation has its own unique history, but in a variety of other territorial disputes from northern Cyprus, to the Kurile Islands, to Abu Musa in the Persian Gulf -- which have involved some degree of armed conflict -- the term "occupied territories" is not commonly used in international discourse.8

Thus, the case of the West Bank and Gaza Strip appears to be a special exception in recent history, for in many other territorial disputes since the Second World War, in which the land in question was under the previous sovereignty of another state, the term "occupied territory" has not been applied to the territory that had come under one side's military control as a result of armed conflict.

From the "Illegal Settlement Myth" by David M. Phillips.

That is a key reason why Julius Stone termed the anti-settlement interpretation "an irony bordering on the absurd" and commented: "Ignoring the overall purpose of Article 49, which would inter alia protect the population of the State of Israel from being removed against their will into the occupied territory, it is now sought to be interpreted so as to impose on the Israel government a duty to prevent any Jewish individual from voluntarily taking up residence in that area."

There is simply no comparison between the establishment and population of Israeli settlements and the Nazi atrocities that led to the Geneva Convention. The settlements are also a far cry from policies implemented by the Soviet Union in the late 1940s and early 1950s to alter the ethnic makeup of the Baltic states by initially deporting hundreds of thousands of people and encouraging Russian immigration.

Nor can they be compared to the efforts by China to alter the ethnic makeup of Tibet by forcibly scattering its native population and moving Chinese into Tibetan territory. Israel's settlement policies are also not comparable to the campaign by Morocco to alter the ethnic makeup of the Western Sahara by transferring Moroccan Arabs to displace the native Saharans, who now huddle in refugee camps in Algeria, or to the variety of population displacements that occurred in the various parts of the former Yugoslavia.

All these would seem to fit the offense described in Article 49(6) precisely. Yet finding references to the application of Article 49(6) to nations other than Israel is like looking for a needle in a haystack. What distinguishes a system of "law" from arbitrary systems of control is that similar situations are handled alike. A system where legal principles are applied only when it suits the political tastes of anti-Israel elites is one that has lost all credibility. The loose use of international law, disproportionately applied to Israel, undermines the notion that this is "law" entitled to authoritative weight in the first place.