Ban says settlements are ‘illegal’

by on March 21, 2010 13
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UN Secy’ General Ban Ki-moon is straightforward:

"Let us be clear: all settlement activity is illegal anywhere in occupied territory, and this must stop."

About Philip Weiss

Philip Weiss is Founder and Co-Editor of Mondoweiss.net.
Posted in Israel/Palestine

{ 13 comments... read them below or add one }

  1. geofgray says:
    March 21, 2010 at 1:36 pm

    The NY Times in their effort to sequester Americans from the truth avoid using the word illegal, although Isabel Kershner this morning seemed to express mock horror by putting quotes around “illegal.” Also, this morning Bronner called the new settlements in Jerusalem “problematic.” Thomas Friedman usually calls the settlements “disputed” and Ms.Clinton has called them “unhelpful.”
    However, as anyone who reads the European press knows: Every settler in every settlement in East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Golan Heights is illegal under Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention: “The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.”

    By all international standards—the U.N. Charter, the Fourth Geneva Convention, the rulings of the International Court of Justice—East Jerusalem has been indisputably recognized as occupied territory since the 1967 Six-Day War.

    U.N. Resolution 252 “considers that all legislative and administrative measures and actions taken by Israel, including expropriation of land and properties thereon, which tend to change the legal status of Jerusalem are invalid and cannot change that status.” It also reaffirms “… that acquisition of territory by military conquest is inadmissible.”

  2. potsherd says:
    March 21, 2010 at 1:41 pm

    Note that Ban is including Greater Jerusalem in “occupied territory” and the “suburbs” there as settlements.

    These days, Zionists keep defending the Jerusalem settlements with the argument that they’ve been building in those areas for 40 years. As if 40 years of wrong can create right.

    Just because Israel annexes 10% of the WB and calls it Jerusalem doesn’t meant that it is, just like calling a dog’s tail a leg doesn’t make it one.

    Zionists will argue that Jerusalem can’t be occupied territory because it was never Jordan’s, that it was always meant to be internationalized. Even if this were so, the Jerusalem in question is only the Jerusalem within the boundaries of 1947, not the Palestinian land annexed by Israel and folded into the Jerusalem city limits.

  3. Shmuel says:
    March 21, 2010 at 2:30 pm

    Ban also called on Israel to lift the Gaza blockade: link to haaretz.com

  4. braciole says:
    March 21, 2010 at 2:30 pm

    “Zionists will argue that Jerusalem can’t be occupied territory because it was never Jordan’s, that it was always meant to be internationalized.”

    <wittybait>Since when has “internationalized” meant placed under Israeli control? By the way, if Zionists want to use the 1947 boundaries to justify Israel taking over land that was retained by the Arabs in 1948, then perhaps the Israelis should withdraw to the 1947 boundaries themselves and then make their demand. Since Zionists want to occupy all the land between the river and the sea (and a lot more besides), they will never do that.</wittybait>

    • potsherd says:
      March 21, 2010 at 3:53 pm

      Israel claims (BYahoo claims) that the case of Jerusalem is “different.” That even if they were actually freezing settlement building in the WB, which they aren’t, it doesn’t apply to Jerusalem, which they have annexed. On apparently, the basis that anything Israel wants, Israel can take.

      This map link to en.wikipedia.org
      shows the extent of Greater Jerusalem, how far the annexation boundaries have expanded the area claimed from the WB.

      It’s interesting to do as the settler apologists say and look at the map to locate Ramat Shlomo. (“If we can’t build here, where can we build!?”) Except that it doesn’t show what the settlers claim it shows – that the settlement is well within the boundaries of Jewish Jerusalem. On the contrary, the map shows clearly that Ramat Shlomo was built on the Palestinian land in the WB.

      • Citizen says:
        March 21, 2010 at 5:35 pm

        Christian fundys say that Israel has a right to all it has and controls because they won it in war. I’ve heard that a lot from everyday fundy types. It’s like they never heard of Nuremberg or the international laws set up afterward under it basic principles. They never heard of Nuremberg; they think the UN is an anti-American agency. Go to any bowling alley and get in a conversation, and bring up the issue.

        • Avi says:
          March 21, 2010 at 7:55 pm

          If might makes right in the mind of many intellectual midgets, then why do they complain when they are met with the same violence they espouse?

          So does that mean if someone punished them in the face and took their wallet, they won’t file a complaint with the police?

          This isn’t the old wild west anymore, and it sure as heck ain’t 1850.

          Besides, what does “won it in a war” mean, anyway? The underlying assumption seems to be that Israel was attacked and due to military prowess managed to fend off those attacks and gain territory in the process, which is a false assumption on both counts. First, Israel was the one to have initiated the 1956 and 1967 wars and second, without the help of Britain and France in 1956 and the last minute intervention of the US in 1967, Israel would have lost both wars.

        • Avi says:
          March 21, 2010 at 7:56 pm

          Correction: punished > punched..

  5. pabelmont says:
    March 21, 2010 at 3:02 pm

    braciole — good points. As I see it, Israel could claim (this wouldn’t make it true, of course) that 1948 was a civil war for control of all of Mandatory Palestine (because the 1948 war began in 1947, or 1945, or 1939, or whatever) while the Palestine Mandate with its post-separation-from-TransJordan borders was still in effect) and that, THEREFORE (Israel might claim) 1967 merely rejoined a territory divided by foreign invasion. If Israel were to make this claim, it would have to explain why it had not allowed readmission to the refugees of 1948 and the vote (and other incidents of full citizenship) to the people living in the (pardon me) occupied territories. Or, in the alternative, why it persisted in calling itself a “democracy”. (I mean, “democracy” as a term of art is flexible but not so flexible as to permit exclusion of more than 1/2 of the population from citizenship. Or am I missing something? Slavery in the USA perhaps?

    • Hostage says:
      March 21, 2010 at 9:36 pm

      Transjordan was only characterized as a “neighboring state” when it was convenient for Israel to do so. When Great Britain announced plans for Transjordanian independence, the Jewish Agency claimed that Transjordan was an integral part of the mandate, and that the Jewish people had a secured interest in settling its territory. The Agency said that the British could not unilaterally alter the terms of the mandate and managed to use the United States (and the Anglo-American Palestine Mandate Convention of 1925) to prevent international recognition of Transjordan “until the future status of Palestine as a whole was determined”.

      During the General Assembly deliberations on Palestine, there were suggestions that it would be desirable to incorporate part of the territory of Transjordan into the proposed Jewish state. For example, the “Foreign Relations of the United States” reveals that a few days before the November 29, 1947 decision on partition, U.S. Secretary of State Marshall noted that frequent references had been made by the Ad Hoc Committee regarding the desirability of the Jewish State having both the Negev and an “outlet to the Red Sea and the Port of Aqaba.” See the Statehood and termination of the Mandate” section of the Wikipedia article on Transjordan.

      The Foreign Minister of Transjordan complained that the US Government had not recognized the state of Transjordan, despite the fact that for two years it had been in a position to satisfy all of the conditions, yet the US had recognized Israel within a few hours, despite the fact that its qualifications were still lacking. See the cable that was sent to the Security Council

  6. Hostage says:
    March 21, 2010 at 3:42 pm

    It would be refreshing if the Secretary-General would plainly state that settlement activity gives rise to criminal responsibility. After all, the UN’s International Law Commission wrote the drafts of the Rome Statute and the the United Nations Diplomatic Conference of Plenipotentiaries adopted Article 8, which provides that the “transfer, directly or indirectly, by the Occupying Power of parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies, or the deportation or transfer of all or parts of the population of the occupied territory within or outside this territory” amounts to a war crime. That is obviously applicable to Israeli settlement activities in the Occupied Arab Territories, including East Jerusalem.

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