Un Resolution 242

Palestinians need Irish support for crucial UN vote

HIKMAT AJJURI

Backing at September’s general assembly would put the necessary pressure on Israel

OPINION  : SINCE 1967, Israel has forcibly controlled all the Palestinian lands outside the 1948 Israeli borders. In the name of self- defence, Israel has maimed and killed tens of thousands of defenceless Palestinians under its occupation; demolished more than 20,000 houses; and divided Palestinian farms with the Israeli “security wall”. Israel has confiscated more than half the land destined for the Palestinian state, and transferred that land to more than 500,000 Jewish settlers to establish illegal colonies.

Palestinians have been negotiating, over the past 20 years, to bring to an end to Israel’s military dictatorship. However, Israel has not respected any of the agreements, from the 1993 Oslo accords, which stated that a Palestinian state would be established in May 1999, to the 1994 Paris protocol and the 1998 Wye River memorandum, to mention just a few that, if implemented by Israel, would have brought lasting peace to the Middle East.

Regrettably, not only Israel but also the powers that witnessed and guaranteed these agreements have failed to uphold their obligations, thereby portraying western democracy as a hypocritical concept. The hypocrisy was reinforced by Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu when he expressed enthusiastic support for the spread of democracy in the Middle East. Speaking in Washington last month, he said: “What the people of Israel want is for the people of the Middle East to have what you have in America, what we have in Israel: democracy.”

We Palestinians living under Israeli military dictatorship for the past 44 years are perplexed by this duplicity and deceit.

If dictatorship is unacceptable in the Arab states today, it is equally unacceptable in the occupied Palestinian territories.

In November 1988, the Palestinian Liberation Organisation declared the establishment of a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders, ie the West Bank, including East Jerusalem and Gaza. Palestinians accepted the objective of a sovereign state on just 22 per cent of their historic homeland, with Israel remaining on the other 78 per cent. Thus the way has been open for a “two-state solution”.

This has been rejected by the Israelis over the past 23 years, most vociferously by Netanyahu when challenged by US president Barack Obama in Washington last month.

Israpundit » Blog Archive » 'Palestine' In The Land Of Israel?

By Jerold S. Auerbach, Jewish Press

Would the creation of a Palestinian state by vote of the United Nations General Assembly, expected in September, be illegal?

Yes, according to a recent letter to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon. Signed by an array of lawyers, law professors and international law experts, it asks him to block the forthcoming resolution, promoted by the Palestinian Authority, for recognition of a Palestinian state within the 1949 Armistice lines.

The letter was drafted by lawyers affiliated with the Legal Forum for the Land of Israel, a non-profit organization founded in 2004 to find “fair and equitable solutions” for Israelis then about to be evacuated from Gaza. Among its distinguished signers were Alan Baker, former legal adviser for the Israeli Foreign Ministry and ambassador to Canada, and Meir Rosenne, another former legal adviser for the Foreign Ministry and ambassador to the United States. They claim that UN recognition would be “contrary to international law, UN resolutions and existing agreements.”

Their letter, in effect a legal brief, argues that such a resolution would contravene UN Security Council Resolutions adopted after the Six-Day and Yom Kippur wars. It would be “in stark violation” of existing agreements between Israel and the Palestinians.

Indeed, “the legal basis for the establishment of the State of Israel,” they indicate, goes back to 1922 when the League of Nations affirmed “the establishment of a national home for the Jewish People in the historical area of the Land of Israel.”

Empowered to enact international law for the new postwar world order, the League conferred on Great Britain a Mandate for Palestine. “Palestine” was defined as the land east and west of the Jordan River, now comprising Jordan, the West Bank and Israel.

But in what became the first partition of Palestine, now long forgotten or ignored (even by Israeli government officials), the British government lopped off all the land east of the Jordan River, three-quarters of the designated Mandatory territory, and bestowed it upon Abdullah, son of the Sharif of Mecca, for his own kingdom of Trans-Jordan.

The entire remainder, west of the Jordan to the Mediterranean, was redefined as “Palestine” and designated for the “Jewish National Home,” a phrase borrowed from Lord Balfour’s famous letter of November 2, 1917. But the League went beyond that vague and indeterminate assurance. Article 6 of the Palestine Mandate explicitly protected “close settlement by Jews” in the shrunken land to be called Palestine.

U.N. resolution 242, origin, meaning, and significance

UN resolution 242, a common denominator

UN Security Council resolution 242, the building block of peacemaking : on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of UN resolution 242

U.S. official statements regarding UN resolution 242

Encyclopedia of the United Nations