Additional information – In brief
► Israel is not an “occupier” in Judea and Samaria (aka the West Bank).
By definition, a state can only be an occupier when it moves into land over which another state has sovereignty. This was not the case with Judea and Samaria: There was no other state that had sovereignty. In 1967, Israel liberated this area from an illegal occupation by Jordan.
What is more, a state cannot “occupy” its own land, and Judea and Samaria belong to Israel because they are part of Mandate land. Israel does not “occupy” the Palestinian Arabs of Judea and Samaria, either. The majority of those Arabs are under the jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority.
► The Fourth Geneva Convention does not apply to Israeli presence in Judea and Samaria.
Article 49 of the Geneva Convention—which is the article in question—was drafted following the Second World War to prevent a repeat of what happened in Europe under the Nazis. Thus it speaks about a nation deporting or transferring parts of its own civilian population into territory it occupies; this was intended to address forced transfers. This has nothing to do with the voluntary movement of Jews into Judea and Samaria.
As has been shown above, Israel is not an “occupier” in Judea and Samaria, and so the convention is not applicable in this regard, either.
► The “Partition Plan” is completely dead.
In 1947, the UN General Assembly recommended that the area of the Mandate for Palestine be divided into a Jewish state and an Arab state. A recommendation, however, does not carry any weight in international law.
Even so, the Jews voluntarily said they would accept this if the Arabs also did. The Arabs rejected it. When independence was declared, Israel agreed to accept it if the UN implemented it. The UN did nothing.
► UN Security Council Resolution 242, passed after the Six Day War in 1967, did not require Israel to
withdraw from all territories it had taken during the war.
It says Israel must withdraw from “territories”: Not “the territories,” and not “all territories.” Israel has already withdrawn from substantial area taken during that war – all of the Sinai (as part of the peace treaty with Egypt in 1979), all of Gaza, and a small portion of Samaria.
The resolution says that the permanent boundary in Judea and Samaria will be set by negotiations. The negotiations were to be between Israel and Jordan, and that happened in 1994 (see immediately below).
Resolution 242 does not mention a Palestinian state or negotiations with Palestinian Arabs.
► There is no “1967 border.”
You have heard about it many times. This is the “border” to which the Palestinian Authority says Israel must return. This line, however, was only an armistice line, set by an armistice agreement between Israel and Jordan in 1949, at the end of Israel’s War of Independence. At the insistence of the Jordanians, the agreement said the line was only temporary (“dictated exclusively by military considerations”), and would not prejudice the claims of the parties with regard to a permanent border to be set by negotiations.
The Jordanian position reflected a joint position assumed by all of Israel’s neighboring countries – including Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt – with whom armistice agreements were signed.
A permanent border with Jordan was set in 1994, when a peace treaty between Israel and Jordan was signed. It says the border between the two states is the Mandate border.
►The Mandate for Palestine was not terminated when the League of Nations, which established it,
ceased to exist.
Article 80 of the UN Charter carried forward the Mandate system.
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