UN-Truth

Col (Res) Shaul Arieli, adviser to Israel’s Former Prime Minister (now Defense Minister) Ehud Barak during the Camp David-and-after negotiations in 2000-2001, who continued along the same line when the government faltered by participating in working on drafting the still-limping Geneva Accord/Iniitiative, has written recently in Haaretz that “Benjamin Netanyahu’s promise – that Israel will neither build new settlements nor expropriate land for the benefit of the settlements – is nothing more than an effort to throw sand in the public’s eyes”.

Arieli argues that “Customary international law gives occupied nations an absolute right to the ownership of their land, so land cannot be expropriated. Israel’s practice of expropriating land in accordance with Jordanian law is permissible only if the land is taken for a purpose that serves the public. Only once has Israel expropriated land for the sake of establishing a settlement – 30,000 dunams (some 7,500 acres) for Ma’aleh Adumim. But after applying Israeli law to East Jerusalem, Israel expropriated one-third of the 70,000 dunams it annexed for the sake of building new Jewish neighborhoods. An occupying power is entitled to seize land temporarily for defined security needs, after paying compensation to the owners, but this does not give it any property rights to the land. Once the security need has passed, the land must be returned to its owners. Israel made use of this loophole between 1967 and 1979, issuing ‘military seizure orders’ for some 50,000 dunams for ’security needs’. It then established settlements on this land, such as Kiryat Arba and Beit El. But the High Court of Justice’s ruling in the Elon Moreh case, which overturned a military seizure order and ordered 5,000 dunams returned to the village of Rujib, closed this loophole … After that, Menachem Begin’s government decided that settlements would henceforth be built only on ’state lands’. Israel’s initial land reserve, through 1979, stemmed from its declaration as state lands – in an order issued immediately after the Six-Day War – of some 700,000 dunams that had been registered as belonging to the government of Jordan. Between 1980 and 1984, Israel declared another 800,000 dunams as state lands, bringing the total amount of land at its disposal to about 25 percent of the West Bank. Most of the settlements were established on these lands”.

Arieli then goes on to write (if I understand it correctly) that that is enough, and that Israel’s leadership can quite happily continue its settlement policy without any further expropriation

Ariel Sharon’s promise to evacuate outpost established after March 2001 affects only 24 out of the 100 Israeli outposts in the West Bank. If I understand correctly what Arieli has written, most of the rest “were built wholly or partially on private Palestinian land” — but I can’t understand, through Arieli’s writing which I think is often intended to be ironic, if Arieli means by this that the other 76 settlements can stay, or whether he means they must go?

Arieli wrote that “In negotiations on a final-status agreement, it would be possible to reach understandings with the United States and the Palestinians on the completion of projects that are almost finished – for instance, in Ma’aleh Adumim – and new construction within the built-up areas of certain settlements, mainly Modi’in Ilit and Betar Ilit, which abut the Green Line. But to demand more than that in exchange for Netanyahu’s speech at Bar-Ilan University – for instance, the trick of relocating Migron settlers to Adam or ‘high-rise construction’ – looks like an attempt to put one over on the Americans. And the Americans are quite familiar with the Sasson and Spiegel reports on the settlements and outposts”.

A trick is a trick is a trick, and of course it is an attempt to “put one over on the Americans” — who are of course free to decide if they want to go along with such a trick, or not.

But, I am totally confident that Arieli is quite familiar with the Palestinian continued refusal to “give” Ma’aleh Adumim to Israel in a final-negotiations trade-off. He surely doesn’t think that the Palestinians will let themselves be fooled by any “trick” .. even at a swap ratio of 1 to 1, or even better.

So, I’m not quite sure what policy Arieli is advocating.

Arieli’s article was published in Haaretz here.

Filed under: Boundaries & Borders, International Humanitarian Law, International Law, Israel, Middle East Peace Process, Negotiators and negotiations, Palestine & Palestinians