Same Old Same Old On Israeli Settlements

Several weeks ago, State Department deputy spokesperson Vedant Patel “slammed Israel on Tuesday over reports that the Israeli military Higher Planning Council for Judea and Samaria in the West Bank was set to advance plans for 5,300 new housing units.”

Patel, a Biden apparatchik currently serving as Principal Deputy Spokesperson for the State Department of State – is in need of a history lesson. He and his colleagues all continue to maintain that Israeli settlements in the West Bank “violate international law.” They – the settlements – do not. The entire West Bank forms part of the territory that, according to the League of Nations’ Mandate for Palestine, was to become the Jewish National Home. Article 6 of the Mandate expressly required the holder of the Mandate (Great Britain) to “encourage close settlement by Jews on the land.” What land? The land from the Golan Heights in the north to the Red Sea in the south, and from the Jordan River in the east to the Mediterranean in the west.

Patel and his colleagues should know that Article 80 of the U.N. Charter requires that body to honor the commitments of its predecessor, the League of Nations. Israel’s claim to the West Bank was not extinguished when Jordan held the territory from 1949 to 1967. Only two countries, the U.K. and Pakistan, recognized Jordan’s claim of sovereignty; for everyone else, Jordan was merely the “military occupier” of the West Bank. After the Six-Day War, when Israel came into possession of the West Bank, it was then able to enforce its preexisting claim, based on the Palestine Mandate, to the area.

The Biden administration also claims that these homes just approved by Israel are an “obstacle to peace.” They should be asked to consider the view that, far from being an “obstacle to peace,” Israel’s settlements in the West Bank strengthen the Jewish state’s hold on the area, and thus its deterrence posture, and thereby make “peace” – that is, the absence of major war – more rather than less likely.

The very phrase “two-state solution” that Israel’s critics, including Patel, insist upon, assumes in its wording that which remains to be proven: that the Arab war – the Jihad – against the Jewish state is susceptible of a “solution.” But Arab opposition to Israel’s existence is based on Islam, and will last as long as Islam itself endures. Instead of a “solution” to be “solved,” which implies finality, the Arab (and Muslim) war on Israel should be rightly considered a “situation to be managed.” And the way to manage it is through deterrence. Israel must be perceived by its enemies, present and potential, as overwhelmingly more powerful than they are. And in the judgement of most Israeli military men, that requires holding onto parts of the West Bank, including the Jordan Valley and the large settlement blocs.

Patel has not only ignored the Mandate for Palestine, but also overlooked U.N. Resolution 242, which gives Israel the right to “secure [i.e. defensible] and recognized boundaries,” which it would necessarily have to determine for itself. He needs to read the detailed discussion of Resolution 242’s significance, as set out by its main author, British Ambassador to the U.N., Lord Caradon, who flatly denies that Resolution 242 requires Israel to withdraw from “all the territories” it won in the Six Day War, but only “from territories.”

More homes for Jews in the West Bank do not prevent the recognition of a Palestinian state, but only of a Palestinian state that meets the maximalist demands of the Arabs, by squeezing Israel back within the 1949 armistice lines, and uprooting a half-million Jews from their homes in the West Bank.

It’s the same old same old. Israel announces it has approved a few thousand homes for Jews in Judea and Samaria. Then foreign governments, including someone from the State Department, rush to denounce the move, telling us that these homes for Jews, and all Israeli “settlements” (really, towns and cities) in the West Bank, constitute a “violation of international law” and an “obstacle to peace.” And then they are soberly answered, yet again: No, the Jewish homes in Judea and Samaria (which Jordan renamed as “the West Bank” in 1950 for obvious reasons) do not violate international law. The Palestine Mandate, just like the other Mandates that set up Arab states, has been incorporated into international law. These Jewish homes that have been, or are now being built, in Judea and Samaria, are on land that, according to the Mandate for Palestine, belongs entirely to the Jewish National Home – that is, to Israel. If Israel chooses, for reasons of its own, to transfer part of the “West Bank” to the Palestinian Arabs, that is its affair, but should not be taken as an admission that it is in the West Bank as some kind of “illegal occupier.”

No, yet again, must be said to those who claim these just-approved Jewish homes are an “obstacle to peace.” Instead, the larger and more rooted the Jewish presence in Judea and Samaria, the more control Israel will be able to exercise over the area, and the less likely that Israel will be squeezed back within the 1949 armistice lines, the “lines of Auschwitz” as Abba Eban called them, that would whet, not sate, Arab appetites, and tempt them to try once more to finish off the Jewish state. These settlements strengthen the Jewish presence in the West Bank. A half-million Israelis (almost all the adults among them served in the IDF and received military training, updated by service in the reserves, a point not lost on the Arabs) now live in the West Bank. Those who understand that what will keep the long-term peace between Israel and the Arabs is not treaties (treaties made with non-Muslims can be broken with impunity, on the model of Muhammad’s Treaty of Hudaibiyya that he made with the Meccans in 628 A.D.) but Israel’s power of deterrence, realize that more Jewish homes in the West Bank are not an obstacle to “peace,” as Vedant Patel reflexively claims, but a barrier to “war.”