Banksy wall mural (Palestine 2005)
Separation wall between Israel and West Bank is NOT apartheid
By
Hendrik van der Breggen
Is apartheid the purpose
of the Israeli-built separation wall between Israel and the West Bank? Answer: No.
Although
inconvenience and suffering by Palestinians in the West Bank (a.k.a. Judea and
Samaria) may be tragic effects of the separation wall, the question that should
be asked is this: Why? Why was the
separation wall built? The oft-missed truth will surprise Westerners who have
succumbed to historical amnesia aided and abetted by anti-Israel media.
The
truth is this: Israel’s purpose for the wall is not apartheid but to restrain
hostile actors.
Whirlwind
historical tour
To
better understand why the separation wall exists, some knowledge of the history
leading up to the wall’s construction is helpful. It gets a bit complicated, so
please bear with me in the following whirlwind historical tour.
Let’s
go back to 1967. It turns out that the Israeli presence in the West Bank was a
result of a failed Arab attack on Israel in 1967. In that year Israel’s Arab
neighbours—Egypt, Syria, and Jordan—wanted to destroy Israel (that is, they again wanted to destroy Israel, as was the
case in their previously failed plan in the Arab-Israel war of 1948–49). But they
lost (also again).
Israel
was able to resist successfully against Egypt, Syria, and Jordan in what is
called the Six Day War: June 5–10, 1967.[1] The Six Day War was a defensive war
(via pre-emptive strike) on aggressor countries—Egypt, Syria, and Jordan—clearly
bent on wiping Israel off the map. Incredibly (some say miraculously), Israel defeated
the warring neighbours within a week.
Starting
(and losing) war has consequences
Consequently,
Egypt lost the Sinai Peninsula as well as Gaza to Israel (Israel returned Sinai
to Egypt in a 1979 peace agreement, and Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005 to
give Gazans independence). Also, Syria lost the Golan Heights to Israel (which
Israel still controls for strategic purposes against Syria). And Jordan lost
the West Bank to Israel (Jordan had annexed the West Bank in 1950, after Jordan’s
participation in the 1948–49 war against Israel).
These
territorial gains by Israel followed the well-recognized principle of war that
aggressor states, when defeated, can lose territory and subsequently have no
legitimate right to complain (because, after all, they were aggressors).
Our
focus here is the West Bank (and the wall).
After
the 1967 Six Day War, the West Bank came under control of Israel to provide a
security buffer against Jordan. (We will skip over the 1973 Yom Kippur War, in
which Egypt and Syria launched yet another
attack against Israel—and again lost.)
In 1988 Jordan renounced its claim to the West Bank. Then in the 1993 Oslo
Accords, which was an attempt to achieve a peace between Israelis and Palestinians,
the Palestinian Authority was set up to control the West Bank and Gaza as a
Palestinian state-in-the-making. Although Israel still maintained much control
in the West Bank, the hope was to create a State of Palestine alongside the
State of Israel. In other words, the goal was a two-state solution (which, by
the way, was also the UN goal prior to the 1948–49 Arab initiated Arab-Israeli war). And the
hope was for peace.
Possible
peace in 2000
In
the year 2000 a possible peace agreement at Camp David (hosted by U.S. President
Bill Clinton) was negotiated between Israel and Palestine to create a full
Palestinian state. This Palestinian state would include 90+ percent of the West
Bank, the whole of Gaza, plus sections of much-coveted Jerusalem. The idea was for
Israel to swap land for peace, and the deal was extremely generous to
Palestinians. A genuine two-state solution seemed very much to be in the offing.
But
then, to the astonishment of much of the world, the agreement was rejected by Palestinian
leader Yasser Arafat—and violence against Israel from West Bank ensued.
Rejection explained
Why
the rejection? Answer: The peace agreement required Palestinians to recognize
Israel as a legitimate state. For Palestinians, however, turning the West Bank
and Gaza into their own Palestinian state was not the main concern. Rather, their
main concern was that Palestinians should not recognize Israel—a Jewish
state—as legitimate. Why not? Because Jews and a Jewish state in the region are
anathema to Islam.
This
is a religious objection that seems not appreciated, or at least underappreciated,
by secular Western minds, so let me take some time to explain this religious
objection. (Reminder: In our whirlwind historical tour we are still attempting
to understand why Israel built a separation wall around the West Bank.)
About
Islam/Islamism
It is important to understand the Islamic/Islamist mindset
of the majority of Palestinians in 2000 because the issue for Palestinians regarding
Israel very apparently was not over borders, but rather about whether Israel
should be allowed to exist at all—in fact, Palestinians didn’t want Israel to
exist at all. (And keep in mind that even at present most Palestinians still
hold this Islamic/Islamist mindset as they support the group called Islamic
Resistance Movement, whose acronym in Arabic is better known to Westerners as HAMAS.[2])
According to Islamic doctrine, all once-Muslim lands always belong to Islam. This includes
the Palestine region, i.e., the geographical
region that includes present-day Israel, West Bank, and Gaza, which was once
part of the Ottoman Empire—which was an Islamic caliphate. But in World War I the
Ottoman Empire had sided with Germany and had lost the war against Britain and
France. As a result, the Palestine region fell under control of the British who
then passed the control to the UN. The age of empire was ending and the age of
self-determining nation states was emerging. The goal of Britain and then the
UN was to create two nation states. The Palestine geographical region, no
longer controlled by the Ottomans or British, was to be divided by the UN in
1948 into two nation states for two peoples with legitimate claims to the land:
Arabs and Jews. Arabs would have their own state as would Jews.[3]
But, as mentioned, according to Islamic doctrine the region
was to belong always to Islam. So the
Islamist Arabs did not want the Jews to have their own state. And so the
Islamist Arabs rejected the proposed two-state solution—with violence.
Note: Islamists are Muslims who take Muhammad
(c. 570–632 AD) seriously as their prophet and ultimate revealer of God’s will.
According to Islamists, Islam is not merely a personal religion but also a
political ideology—and the goal for Islamists is to achieve a just global “peace” by dominating
the world via jihad and ruling via Sharia law. (When Islamist jihad stalls or
falters because Islamists are the weaker party, Islamists are amenable to
ceasefires or truces, but only temporarily and when they are weak, so they can
again become strong. Ceasefires and truces are a tactical ploy, not a permanent
solution.) In addition, according to Islamists, Muhammad’s later hateful and
violent teachings against Jews—teachings that abrogate/ cancel the prophet’s
earlier peaceful views concerning Jews—are also to be taken seriously.[4] Jews may
be tolerated as second-class citizens or they are to be killed. Significantly,
the prophet Muhammad, who is the
model Muslim for Islamists, was a warlord who killed or supported the killing
of many hundreds of Jews.[5]
Unfortunately for the Islamist Arabs, in the Arab-Israeli
war of 1948–49, a war in which five Arab countries attacked the newly formed
Israeli state to destroy it, the Islamist Arabs lost the once-Muslim land to
the Jews. This war—started and lost by the Islamist Arabs—was a huge
embarrassment to Muslims. Not only did a small fledgling Jewish state defeat
the Arab armies of five neighbouring countries, which is embarrassing enough,
but also that loss was a violation of Islam’s Allah-ordained domination of that
region, which is even more embarrassing.
Daniel Pipes, an American historian and president of the
Middle East Forum, elaborates:
Islamic doctrine holds that once a land has been conquered
by Muslims, it becomes part of the lands of Islam (Dar al-Islam) and an inalienable Islamic patrimony (a waqf). Accordingly, its loss constitutes
a robbery, and Muslims must exert to bring it back under their rule…
Palestine became a part of Dar al-Islam after its conquest
by Muslims in 638 CE, six years after the Islamic account records the death of
Muhammad. Muslims then ruled it until 1917, with the exception of two
centuries, from 1097 to 1291, when Crusaders controlled parts of it. The
British ruled all of it from 1917 to 1948 and Israel, most or all of
thereafter. This history has created a deep sense of entitlement: Palestine [i.e.,
the geographical region which includes Israel] belongs under Muslim control.[6]
Moreover,
according to Islam and Islamists, Islam is the true religion whereas Judaism, the religion of the Jews, is not
(nor is Christianity or any other religion). Thus, as previously mentioned, for
Islamists, that is, for Muslims who take Muhammad seriously as their prophet
and final revealer of God’s will, Muhammad’s later hateful and violent
teachings against Jews (teachings that abrogate the prophet’s earlier peaceful
views of Jews) are to be taken seriously. Jews are to be dominated as second-class
citizens or they are to be destroyed. Jews simply cannot have a state in a
once-Muslim land. A Jewish state is anathema to Islam.
All
this to say: The peace negotiations of 2000 were rejected by Palestine because
a Jewish state simply could not be allowed by Arab Islamists.
The
sneaky part
There
is more. As is often said, the devil is in the details.
Yes,
the peace negotiations of 2000 were rejected by Palestine because a Jewish
state simply could not be allowed for religious reasons by Arab Islamists, but there
is an important wrinkle. The peace negotiations fell apart because it was a
Palestinian attempt to beat Israel, albeit sneakily instead of militarily, and
again the Palestinians failed.
As
mentioned, gaining the West Bank, Gaza, and parts of Jerusalem was not enough
for the Palestinians. The Palestinian sneaky strategy was to win against Israel
in 2000 by insisting on the alleged “right of return” of Palestinian refugees from
the Arab-Israeli war of 1948–49. This was a “right of return” not merely to
what would be the new state of Palestine (i.e., West Bank and Gaza), in which
most Palestinian refugees already lived, but to their former homes in Israel. In other words, Palestinians
wanted an Israeli political suicide.
A
look at some numbers will help us understand the Palestinian right-of-return
strategy as a way of defeating Israel. At the end of the 1948–49 war there were
750,000 Palestinian refugees who had left Israel, but that number increased by
the year 2000 to 3.7 million even though no more Palestinians left Israel.[7]
Why the increase? Because instead of settling those refugees, the United
Nations Relief and Works Agency/ UNRWA—a refugee settlement agency that was
co-opted by Palestinians and became an anti-Israel political weapon—nurtured
the identities of these original refugees as perpetual and resentful
anti-Israel refugees for 50 years, granted refugee status to their descendants,
and maintained refugee status even of those who became citizens elsewhere (which
is, to put it mildly, outlandish and unheard of in other international refugee
organizations such as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees/ UNHCR).
But Israel’s population in the year 2000 was 6.2 million, of which 1.4 million
were non-Jews. So in the year 2000 an additional 3.7 Muslim Arabs coming to
Israel would turn Israel into a state in which Jews no longer were the majority.
Significantly, this would undermine the Jewishness of the Jewish democratic state.
And this would allow Palestinians to win demographically in 2000 the war they
lost militarily in 1949. As a result of the so-called “right of return,” Israel
would become a Muslim/Islamist-majority state. Sneaky, indeed.
To
avoid political suicide (and worse), Israel could not allow this Palestinian
alleged “right of return.” So even though Israel was generously willing to turn
over West Bank, Gaza, and parts of Jerusalem in return for peace coupled with
an official Palestinian recognition of Israel as a bona fide state, Palestine said no. And violence against Israel
ensued.[8]
About
the Nakba
At
this juncture, it may be tempting for some pro-Palestine readers to object that
the Palestinian “right of return” is legitimate because Israel was the cause of
the Palestinian refugee crisis of 1948–49. That is, Israel was the cause of the
displacement of 750,000 Arabs, a.k.a. the Nakba
(Arabic for “catastrophe”). The idea, according to this objection, is that in
the 1948–49 Arab-Israeli war Israel committed a genocide or ethnic cleansing
against Arabs, so for justice to prevail Palestinian Arab refugees should be
allowed to return to Israel. Today, the view that Jews committed genocide or
ethnic cleansing at Israel’s inception is a highly popular view. But it is false
and should be challenged.
The
fact is that at Israel’s inception in 1948 the Palestinian Arabs started (and
later lost) a genocidal war against the Jews, a war that was an attempt by the
Palestinian Islamist Arabs and the surrounding Islamist Arab states to bring
Hitler’s “final solution” (extermination of Jews) into the region of Palestine.
Reminder: Nazi Germany lost World War II in 1945 yet many Arabs were
Nazi-collaborators who, after World War II, continued to hold firm to their
Nazi-like antisemitism and continued to fan the flames of this antisemitism in
the Middle East. But the Jews refused to be victims (again) and successfully
resisted the Nazi-collaborating Islamist Arab aggressors. The 1948–49 war was
the cause of the displacement of 750 thousand Palestinian Arabs, but that war
was started by Palestinian Islamist Arabs. Israel did not start the war and
thus was not the cause of the Palestinian refugee crisis.
Yes,
many Arabs, especially those deemed hostile to Israel, were forced out by
Israel in 1948. This is truly tragic. But it was war—a war started by the
Arabs. And these facts remain: Many Arabs left Israel willingly to get out of
harm’s way because a war (to exterminate Jews) was at hand (and these fleeing
Arabs planned to return to Israel after Israel was destroyed); many Arabs left
Israel because the surrounding Arab nations (wishing to wage genocidal war on
the Jews) ordered them to leave to facilitate the war effort (and return later
to a Jew-ridden land); many Arabs who were not hostile to Israel stayed in
Israel (as citizens of Israel). In other words, the criterion for Arabs being
forced out of Israel was not whether they were Arab, but whether they were
hostile to Israel.
Middle
East expert Denis MacEoin observes: “It is true that the Israelis expelled some
Arabs, but they were mainly those in frontline areas and who were known to be
cooperating with the enemy. But they were only a small percentage of those
Arabs who became displaced.”[9]
Thus,
embedded in the criterion of expulsion is a distinction that shows the Nakba
was not genocide, not ethnic cleansing. Hostility, not ethnicity or religion,
was the concern. This is a significant distinction that should not be missed
(but often is) and it refutes the genocide/ethnic cleansing charge.
This
distinction is additionally significant because it also refutes the oft-heard
charge that Israel stole Arab land. That is to say, the distinction shows that
in 1948–49 many Palestinian Arabs forfeited the ownership of their houses and
land by siding with those who waged war on the Jews with the intent of
murdering all the Jews. Is “forfeited” too strong a word? No. As MacEoin points
out, “The Arabs in Palestine were being told: ‘You can leave now, you can get
out of the way, let the armies—let the Egyptian army, the Jordanian army [and
other Islamist Arab armies]—let them do their work, and then when you come back
you can have all the properties that belong to the Jews when we have wiped them
out.’”[10] Surely, abandoning one’s property (even with intent of doing so only
temporarily) so thereby one aids and abets a genocidal war against one’s
neighbours constitutes no legitimate grounds whatsoever for one’s complaint of
theft concerning the abandoned property’s subsequent appropriation by those
neighbours (as a nation state) when the genocide attempt is stopped by those
neighbours.
All
this to say: Palestinian refugees do not have a “right to return” to Israel,
and so the Palestinian rejection of the 2000 peace offer was because they did
not want Israel to be a state.
By
the way, for the sake of context, after the 1948–49 Arab-Israeli war about 800
thousand Jews fled or were pushed out of nearby Arab countries to find safety
in Israel and elsewhere.[11]
Back
to the separation wall
Again,
in the peace negotiations of 2000, turning the West Bank and Gaza into a
Palestinian state was not the main concern for Palestinian Islamist Arabs.
Rather, the main concern was that Palestinians should not recognize Israel—a
Jewish state—as legitimate. Jews and a Jewish state in the region are anathema
to Islam. The whole of the region was to be under Muslim control. Because
Muslim control could not be gotten via the alleged “right of return,” Islamic terrorists
in West Bank launched multiple suicide bombings and attacks against Israelis,
and so Israel struck back with force—and walls.
Daniel
Gordis, a Distinguished Fellow at Shalem College (Jerusalem), explains the sad
situation well, so I quote him in extenso:
In
2001, more than a hundred Israelis died at the hands of suicide bombers. Dozens
more died in attacks of other sorts. As the Palestinians grew increasingly
brazen, they attacked more heavily trafficked locations seeking ever higher
body counts. In the summer of 2001, a suicide bomber attacked a disco on the
Tel Aviv beach, which left twenty-one Israelis dead, most of them teenage girls
from Russian families who had immigrated to Israel. Over a hundred were
injured. Barely two months later, a suicide bomber attacked a pizzeria in
downtown Jerusalem, at one of the city’s busiest intersections. One hundred and
thirty people were injured in the blast, and fifteen were killed. Half of the
dead were children.
Most
of the perpetrators of the violence were coming from the West Bank….
On
the first night of Passover in 2002, some 250 guests had gathered for the
traditional Seder [a Jewish service or dinner to celebrate the beginning of
Passover] at the Park Hotel in the seaside city of Netanya. A Palestinian
terrorist disguised as a woman managed to get past hotel security and detonated
a large explosive in the crowd, many of whom were elderly and some of whom were
Holocaust survivors. The blast killed 28 civilians and injured about 140 people.
Twenty of the wounded were severely injured, and two later died of their
wounds. Several married couples were killed, as was a ninety-year-old. A father
was killed with his daughter.
Gordis
adds:
In
the aftermath of this attack, Ariel Sharon [then prime minister of Israel] decided
to respond, and shortly thereafter, Israel launched Operation Defensive Shield.
The largest Israeli military operation in the West Bank since the Six-Day War,
it was designed to uproot the terror infrastructures in the major Palestinian
cities there. In essence, Israel took back the cities that it had transferred
to the Palestinians in 1995 as part of the Oslo Accords.
Israel
did not stop there. Committed to stopping the terror and the attacks on its
citizens, the government decided in September 2002 to build a separation
barrier cutting off Arab areas in the territories from Israel. The wall, which
took more than five years to construct, covered 480 miles (though it was never
completed). When the northern section of the wall was completed, it managed to
stop all terrorist attacks from that section of the West Bank. Despite its
undeniable effectiveness, the wall evoked widespread international condemnation
for the inconveniences it imposed on innocent Palestinians, but Israel’s
leadership was not moved. Construction of the wall continued, and by December
2004, the number of suicide attacks had decreased by 84 percent.[12]
Presently,
the West Bank (a.k.a. Judea and Samaria) is a territory of which parts are
controlled by the Palestinian Authority and parts by Israel—and it is complicated.
Areas are divided as Palestinian-controlled, as Israeli-controlled, and as
something-in-between. As mentioned, the segregation and Israeli presence in the
West Bank are due to security reasons. It is not done for the sake of apartheid,
as often is alleged in news and social media. The segregation and Israeli
presence are no doubt difficult for Palestinians, but this is Israel’s response
to the many past Palestinian attacks and suicide bombings against Israel.
Again,
it is not apartheid. Nor is it racism. It is not discrimination or oppression
based on race or ethnicity. Rather, it is an attempt to restrain hostile
actors. Again, the separation wall was built by Israel for security reasons.
And shortly after the wall was built Palestinian attacks and suicide bombings
dropped significantly.
Sadly,
at time of writing (November-December 2024) there has been an upsurge in
Palestinian terrorism in Judea and Samaria
Although
inconvenience and suffering by Palestinians in the West Bank (a.k.a. Judea and
Samaria) may be tragic effects of the separation wall, the question that should
be asked is this: Why was the separation wall built? As our whirlwind
historical tour has shown, the purpose of the separation wall between Israel
and the West Bank is not apartheid. This
oft-missed truth may surprise Westerners who have succumbed to historical
amnesia aided and abetted by anti-Israel media, but the fact is that the wall
was built for the sake of Israel’s security against Palestinian Islamist attacks—and
reasonably so.[13, 14]
Endnotes
1.
For a detailed examination of the Six Day War, see Michael B. Oren, Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of
the Modern Middle East, 50th anniversary edition (New York: Ballantine
Books/ Presidio Press, 2017). Oren has a PhD in Near Eastern Studies from
Princeton University and is a former Israeli Ambassador to the United States.
2.
“Poll: Hamas Remains Popular Among Palestinians,” Foundation for Defense of
Democracies, March 22, 2024, https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2024/03/22/poll-hamas-remains-popular-among-palestinians/.
3.
For a defence of the falsity of the claim that Israel’s inception was a
colonial enterprise, see Hendrik van der Breggen, “Settler-colonialism and
ethnic cleansing: Two false assumptions about Israel’s inception,” APOLOGIA,
October 8, 2024,
https://apologiabyhendrikvanderbreggen.blogspot.com/2024/10/settler-colonialism-and-ethnic.html.
See also Adam Kirsch, On Settler
Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice (New York: W.W. Norton &
Company, 2024). For my review of Kirsch’s book, see Hendrik van der Breggen,
“Book review of Adam Kirsch's On Settler
Colonialism,” APOLOGIA, November 7, 2024, https://apologiabyhendrikvanderbreggen.blogspot.com/2024/11/book-review-of-adam-kirschs-on-settler.html.
4.
It should be noted that the Qur’an is not ordered chronologically. Instead, it
begins with the longest chapter and ends with the shortest chapter. The result,
it seems to me, is that it is not clear to the peaceful Muslim that the violent
verses come after—and abrogate—the peaceful verses. Muslims who follow
Muhammad’s violent teachings are scripturally correct in doing so.
5.
It would be reasonable to describe Islamists as what Ayaan Hirsi Ali calls
“Medina Muslims,” i.e., they follow the violent teachings of the Prophet
Mohammed when in the city of Medina the prophet effectively became a warlord
after his peaceful approach to spreading Islam in Mecca was rejected (“Mecca
Muslims” follow the Prophet Mohammad’s peaceful teachings when he first began
his religion in Mecca). For more on the distinction between Medina Muslims and
Mecca Muslims, see Ayaan Hirsi Ali, “Islam Is a Religion of Violence,” Foreign Policy Magazine, November 9,
2015,
https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/11/09/islam-is-a-religion-of-violence-ayaan-hirsi-ali-debate-islamic-state/.
For further thought about Islam and Jews, see Mark A. Gabriel, Islam and the Jews: The Unfinished Battle
(Lake Mary, Florida: Charisma House, 2003). For further thought about Islam in
general, see R. C. Sproul & Abdul Saleeb, The Dark Side of Islam (Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway Books, 2003)
and see Robert Spencer et al., Islam:
What the West Needs to Know, DVD (98 minutes), produced and directed by
Gregory M. Davis and Bryan Daly (Lorain, Ohio: Quixotic Media Productions,
2006), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mllMkm8pcVU.
6.
Daniel Pipes, Israel Victory: How
Zionists Win Acceptance and Palestinians Get Liberated (New York &
Nashville: Wicked Son/ Post Hill Press, 2024), 32–33. See, too, Serge
Trifkovic’s comments at 51:25–52:36 in Spencer et al., Islam. For further thought, see Mordecai Kedar, “Arabs and Muslims
Will Not Accept Israel as the Jewish State,” The Begin-Sadat Center for
Strategic Studies, January 18, 2018, https://besacenter.org/muslims-israel-jewish-state/.
7.
Source: “Total Palestinian Refugees (1950–Present),” Jewish Virtual Library
(based on UNWRA statistics),
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/total-palestinian-refugees-1950-present.
8.
For further thought about how Palestinians with the help of UNRWA use the
so-called right of return of Palestinian refugees to undermine Israel, see the
following: Richard Goldberg, “Close Down UNRWA: Western nations must not
continue to contribute to a UN agency that is effectively controlled by a terrorist
organization,” Quillette, February 7, 2024,
https://quillette.com/2024/02/07/close-down-unrwa/; Zoe Booth, “Should We Get
Rid of UNRWA?” Quillette, December 3, 2024,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpyrt0hK7v4&t=11s; Einat Wilf & Adi Schwartz, The War of Return: How Western Indulgence of the Palestinian Dream Has
Obstructed the Path to Peace (New York: St. Martin’s Publishing/ All Points
Books, 2020); Einat Wilf, The
Israeli-Arab Conflict: Seminar by Dr Einat Wilf, ed. Jaime Kardontchik
(Independently published, April 25, 2022). I find the work of Einat Wilf
especially helpful. Wilf holds a BA from Harvard and a PhD in political science
from Cambridge, served as an intelligence officer with the Israeli Defense
Forces, is a former member of the Israeli parliament, and presently works with
the Israeli Citizen Spokespersons’ Office.
9.
Denis MacEoin, in “The Status of Jerusalem, the 1949 Armistice Lines, and
Refugees,” Whose Land? Episode 12
(London: UK Lawyers for Israel: 2024),
https://uklficharity.com/whose-land/whose-land-episode-12/. MacEoin has a PhD
in Persian/ Islamic Studies from Cambridge University, was a lecturer in Arabic
and Islamic Studies at Newcastle University, and was a senior editor at Middle
East Quarterly.
10.
MacEoin, “The Status of Jerusalem, the 1949 Armistice Lines, and Refugees.”
11.
Some might argue that because Israel presently tells non-Israeli Jews they have
a right to return to Israel (their ancestral homeland), Israel is being
inconsistent in not giving Palestinian refugees a right of return. This is
problematic because the Palestinian refugees, unlike diaspora Jews, sided with
those who wished to destroy Israel.
12.
Daniel Gordis, Israel: A Concise History
of a Nation Reborn (New York: HarperCollins Publishers/ Ecco, 2016),
382–383.
13.
For additional thought about the separation wall, thought that takes into
account Palestinian as well as Israeli views of the separation wall, thought
that ends on a positive and hopeful note, see this 15 minute video: “Why Did
Israel Build a Wall Around the West Bank?” Unpacked, October 11, 2023,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIP0TMkuqGw. I should add that this video is now
over a year old, that many Palestinians in the West Bank now support Hamas, and
that over the last year terrorist attacks launched from the West Bank against
Israel have increased. That is, keep in mind that the video’s positive and
hopeful note may not be as justified as it used to be. Still, the video is
helpful for getter a better understanding of why the separation wall was built.
14.
One final note: The popular idea that Israel “occupies” the West Bank is
disputed—and not unreasonably so. According to Natasha Hausdorff (a British barrister and international law
expert, with degrees in law from Oxford University, Tel Aviv University, and
Columbia Law School), the term “occupation” regarding Israel in the West Bank
is a misapplication of international law because of the rule uti possidetis
juris (Latin for “as [you] possess under law”). This rule has to do with the
borders of newly emerging states at their moment of independence retaining the
borders they had while dependent. In Israel’s case the rule determines that the
pre-existing administrative lines of the British Mandate became Israel’s
borders when Israel declared independence in 1948, and this means that the West
Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza fall within Israel’s borders. This also means
that after Israel’s 1948–49 war of independence, a war in which five Arab
nations attacked Israel—nations including Jordan and Egypt—Jordan ended up occupying
West Bank and Egypt ended up occupying Gaza. Thus, when Egypt, Jordan, and
Syria in 1967 again attacked Israel and again lost, Israel resumed, legally,
its control of the West Bank and Gaza. That is to say, in 1967 Israel
legitimately took back West Bank and Gaza from the occupation of, respectively,
Jordan and Egypt. That is, in 1967 Israel did not occupy the West Bank and
Gaza, nor does it continue to do so. Here is the legal point: A country does
not “occupy” its own territory that was occupied by another country but then
recovered militarily from that occupier. So Israel does not occupy the West
Bank.
For some critical legal discussion of
Israel’s alleged occupation of the West Bank, see 1:09:06–1:13:32 of Konstantin
Kisin and Francis Foster’s interview with Natasha Hausdorff in “There is No
Genocide, No Apartheid, No Occupation,” Triggernometry,
July 14, 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wrhzDBvhEc.
For a long well-researched article that
helpfully sets out in layman’s terms the problems with the International Court
of Justice (ICJ) vis-à-vis Israel, see Stephen Daisley, “How to undermine
international law,” Stephen Daisely Substack, July 31, 2024, https://stephendaisley.substack.com/p/how-to-undermine-international-law.
Daisley is a journalist whose work appears often in The Spectator and The
Scottish Daily Mail.
Confession:
In Daisley’s layman-friendly article, I did have to look up the meaning of one
word. That word is “farrago.” Farrago means a confused mixture or hodgepodge.
It’s found in the fourth sentence of this paragraph: “Countries hostile to
Israel sponsored a resolution at the UN General Assembly. This resolution was
essentially a charge sheet and accused Israel of every crime in history with
the possible exception of the Jack the Ripper murders. It was passed despite
attracting the support of fewer than half of member states. A farrago of
untruths, half truths, distortions, misrepresentations and profoundly partisan
interpretations of history, the resolution formed the mandate for the ICJ’s
inquiry and the advisory opinion reflects that. It cobbles together Palestinian
demands, anti-Israel sources and an exclusively Palestinian reading of history
into a judicial manifesto for the Middle East.”
Hendrik
van der Breggen, PhD, is a retired philosophy professor (formerly at Providence
University College, Canada) and author of Untangling
Popular Anti-Israel Arguments: Critical Thinking about the Israel-Hamas War
(paperback can be purchased at Amazon or pdf can be downloaded for free at
Hendrik’s blog APOLOGIA).
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