Barry Shaw – The Security Council vote was not about settlements.
The UNSC vote was not about “settlements.” That was an Arab subterfuge, a trap into which the United States, the UK, New Zealand and other naive or cynical diplomats fell. It was all smoke and mirrors, a con trick holding the settlement issue in one hand to dazzle the voters while the real intent was to disown Israel of “disputed” territories and turn them into “illegally occupied Palestinian territory.”
The crime of UNSC was that only the Palestinian/Arab voice was heard and written into the resolution. Israel’s voice and words, its legitimate rights and claims to all or parts of the territory, were ignored.
Instead we got a false resolution that wrongly claims “settlements in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, including east Jerusalem has no legal validity and constitutes a flagrant violation under international law.”
This is blatantly incorrect.
It obliterated UN Resolution 242 of 1967. Resolution 242 called on Israel armed forces to withdraw from territory. It deliberately did not call on Israel to withdraw from all the territory as does the recent UNSC resolution.
Resolution 242 acknowledges Israel’s right to protect itself and live in peace within secure and recognised borders. The UNSC resolution ignores these essential prerequisites. It also ignores the ongoing Palestinian belligerency (terror) and their absolute lack of respect for and acknowledgement of the sovereignty, territorial claims and political independence of every State in the area to live in peace, particularly Israel as demanded in UN Resolution 242. Formally, this UN Resolution 242 was sent to and approved by the Security Council which has now ignored its provisions.
Instead the UNSC Resolution blankets Israel as the sole perpetrator of international lawlessness overlooking ongoing Palestinian belligerency.
Furthermore, there are established rulings on states that acquire territory in wars inflicted on them by aggressive enemies, as is the case of Israel acquiring territory in defensive wars against invading Arab armies. This gives international legitimacy to Israel’s claims to territories gained not in one war of aggression against the Jewish state (1948) but two (1948 and 1967).
All this was ignored by a Security Council determined to plough its way by legal impositions against Israel to establish a Palestinian entity on land on which Israel has longstanding and legal claims.
The United Nations brushes aside the fact that this Palestine they crave to establish is and will remain a dysfunctional, divided, violent, undemocratic society that refuses to recognise Israel’s right to exist as the Jewish state. Both sides of the Palestinian political divide have permanent agendas to eradicate the Jewish state at some convenient future time. As proof, the charters of both the PLO and Hamas call for the eventual destruction of Israel and the murder of Jews.
This was not addressed by the UNSC. It is not called unlawful. It is ignored, irrelevant to their sole ambition to create this monster and leave the parties to sort out the consequences.
The UNSC vote also obliterated the Oslo Accords signed on the White House lawn between Yasser Arafat and Yizhak Rabin in the presence of President Bill Clinton and witnessed by the EU and Russia.
In this agreement the territories known as Judea & Samaria or the West Bank were divided into three zones. Area A was put under the civil and security administration of the Palestinian Authority. Area B was given to the PA for their civil rule while the security elements were agreed to be a joint Israeli-PA project. Area C was designated to be under complete Israel civil and security control until some future permanent peace agreement depending on the terms and conditions of such an agreement.
Currently in Area C there are over 500,000 Jews and just under 100,000 Arabs residing there although the Palestinian Authority with the physical and financial assistant of European countries and the EU are creating facts on the ground by transferring Bedouin Arabs into Area C. These people live in buildings provided by the EU in defiance of the provisions of Area C.
Area C will be negotiated in the permanent status negotiations which have not taken place because the Palestinian Authority, and certainly not Palestinian Hamas, has any inclination to sit with the Israeli leadership to negotiate mutual recognition, borders, or any other final status provisions.
The wording of new UNSC vote would have us believe that this Oslo Accord provision is null and void, replacing Area C with the status of “illegally occupied Palestinian territory.” Not so.
What was most abhorrent in the wording of the unanimously approved UNSC resolution was the removal of all Israeli claims to the most holy Jewish sites placing them at the feet of the Palestinians.
When the United Nations Security Council calls the Jewish Quarter in the Old City with its synagogues, yeshivot, Jewish population and businesses, the Jewish Temple Mount and the Western Wall and all its antiquities, and the Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives, the Hadassah Hospital and other profoundly Jewish/Israeli institutions and heritage as “Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem” it is a surrender that no Israeli government is prepared to accept.
I doubt that many Jews in the global community would permit the United Nations to dispense so glibly with three thousand years of Jewish history.
Barry Shaw is the Senior Associate for Public Diplomacy at the Israel Institute for Strategic Studies and the author of the upcoming and timely book ‘1917. From Palestine to the Land of Israel.’
