29 May Discussing Legal Discourse in the Israeli-Palestinian Context
We’re regularly plugging international law conferences here at Opinio Juris. Most of them, however, are in the United States. So, for a change of pace, I want to call attention to any of our readers in Israel of a conference there next week, entitled “Forty Years after 1967: Reappraising the Role and Limits of Legal Discourse on Occupation in the Israeli-Palestinian Context.” It’s being organized in part by Dr. Aeyal Gross of Tel-Aviv University (who, if you can read Hebrew has his own international law blog), and co-sponsored by the ICRC, Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, and the Minerva Center for Human Rights. The line-up of presenters and discussants looks very impressive, and I’m hoping I can persuade Dr. Gross to give a read-out of the conference proceedings after the fact for those of us who can’t attend.
With all due respect to all relevant parties, it would have been better had the conference been titled “Sixty Years after 1947: Reappraising the Role and Limits of Legal Discourse on Occupation in the Israeli-Palestinian Context.” Why? Well, for any number of reasons, but most recently because of Ilan Pappe’s very important book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oxford, England: Oneworld Publ. Ltd., 2006). [To be sure, the narrative of ethnic cleansing begins in 1948, but Zionism provided its ideological rationale and cause.]
If you go back as far as Mr. O’Donnell suggested, you encounter the problem of Israel not being a member of the UN, and having not thereby relinquished the Right of Conquest.
Then you’d be stuck with the 1949 Armistice borders.
1967 and the end of the Six-day War brought the UN to the forefront of the issue, and thus with it, international law.
Mr. Gross might note the fact that the UN was at the forefront as far back as February 1947, as the British “gave up the attempt to find a solution for the looming conflict and…transferred the question of Palestine to the United Nations.” The future of Palestine’s fate was then placed “into the hands of a Special Committee for Palestine, UNSCOP, none of whose members turned out to have any prior experience in solving conflicts or knew much about Palestine’s history.” It was UNSCOP that “recommended to the UN General Assembly to partition Palestine into two states, bound together federation-like by economic unity. It further recommended that the City of Jerusalem would be established as corpus separatum under an international regime administered by the UN. [….] On 29 November 1947 this became General Assembly Resolution 181. It is clear that by accepting the Partition Resolution, the UN totally ignored the ethnic composition of the country’s population. Had the UN decided to make the territory the Jews has settled on in Palestine correspond with the size of their future state, they would have entitled them to no more than ten per cent of the land. But the UN accepted the nationalist… Read more »
erratum: “the territory the Jews had settled on”
Mr. Gross might note the fact that the UN was at the forefront as far back as February 1947, as the British “gave up the attempt to find a solution for the looming conflict and…transferred the question of Palestine to the United Nations.”
I am aware of UN activities at the time, but it’s hard to say they were particularly authoritative as both parties to the actual conflict essentially ignored them. It wasn’t until after that conflict that we saw Israel join the UN. The divisions at the time proposed have since been superceded.
It’s simply not true that both parties ignored the UN, and there’s plenty from that time that has not been superseded, which is why I brought it up in the first instance.
It’s simply not true that both parties ignored the UN, and there’s plenty from that time that has not been superseded, which is why I brought it up in the first instance.
Care to elaborate on what?