Matt, let's start with this resolution that was brought in front of the Security Council
I guess now close to, gosh, a week or so ago, a week and a half ago, two weeks almost.
Yeah.
Tell us what the resolution was specifically.
This is UN Security Council 2334.
What does the resolution say?
There's a few things.
First, and the most significant thing it does, is reiterate, and I think it's important to
note that it reiterates.
This is not new.
It reiterates and reaffirms the international consensus that Israeli settlements on land
occupied in the 1967 war, occupied territory, is a violation of international law and have
no legal validity.
Basically, a long way of saying, 'These settlements are illegal, and they are subject
to negotiations ultimately between Israelis and Palestinians.'
It also called on third countries to consider this illegality in relations, trade relations,
business relations, research university relations, with the state of Israel to differentiate
between pre-67 Israel and entities operated in the occupied territories.
That's going to prove to be very important as we go forward, but let's just stop for
a moment.
When we say that these settlements are illegal, just give us a little bit of history, A on
the settlements, but B a little bit of context for this illegality.
Why is it?
This is territory, 1967 war.
It is a war that's initiated not by the Israelis.
It is land that is taken from Jordan in this war and occupied.
Why are the settlements illegal?
Why isn't the occupation itself illegal, or is it?
The occupation itself is not.
Some have argued that it is, but I would say that the pretty strong consensus is that it
remains, given that the status of the territory has not been fully resolved, Israel still
controls it under the laws of military occupation, and it refers to those laws as it makes different
decisions about its operations and policies in the territories.
To back up, this comes out of a whole set of conventions and laws that were created
in the early part of the 20th century, specifically the Geneva Conventions.
The Fourth Geneva Convention is the relevant one here.
That has to do with the rights and protections of civilians in situations of war and military
occupation, and it very specifically states that occupying powers are prohibited from
transferring elements of their own population into the territories they have occupied.
This is because we have examples.
You know can reel off the examples of various countries conquering parts of other countries
and then moving their own citizens into those territories to retain control and prevent
having to ever have to return that territory.
That created all kinds of ongoing problems in these different communities.
The foreign communities that had been transferred and the longstanding communities were in a
constant state of conflict, so to avoid those types of situations in the future, that's
the reason for that convention.
The UN reiterated that Israel's policies do fall under that convention and for that reason
are illegal.
Okay.
I wanted to make that clear that this is not ... The UN Security Council did not come up
with a new designation for illegal.
It simply reiterated that this is what's being done here is illegal by international law.
Right.
Again, this is something that there had been a fairly strong international legal consensus
before this, but the UN itself had not specifically weighed in on this question until since I
believe the late 1970s.
There's actually one other quick point I want to make, is that Israel itself after the 67
war, after it had occupied the West Bank and Gaza, the Israeli foreign ministry itself
undertook a legal review of the possibility of creating settlements, whether such settlements
would be legal and permissible under international law, and the report that came back by a lawyer
named Theodore Meron stated unequivocally, 'Absolutely not.
Israel would be in complete violation of its international conventions obligations under
Geneva if we tried to do this.'
The Israeli government and subsequent Israeli governments decided to go ahead and do it
anyway.
Has this ever been tested in Israeli courts?
You've had different challenges on different bases in Israeli courts and the Israeli Supreme
Court, and you've had some successes.
You can name recent successes where private Palestinian landowners have filed suit against
lands that were taken by settlement organizations.
Usually what happens is that the Israeli government or the military will take over a piece of
land for "security purposes," and then all of a sudden within a few months or years that
land will come under the control of settlement councils, and you'll see a settlement there.
It's a pretty familiar process at this point.
One of the really challenging things about the occupied territories is that even though
all of the occupied territory, including Gaza and the West Bank, is officially governed
under Israeli military law rather than civilian law, there are also a whole set pre-existing
this.
There's Ottoman law.
There's British Mandate law.
There's a whole set of laws relating to the different powers that have controlled these
territories that have been used at various times and cited in order to achieve whatever
policy goal.
Interesting, okay.
The resolution reiterates the illegality of these settlements.
It demands that Israel stop building the settlements in West Bank and East Jerusalem.
Tell us about the relevance of this distinguishing between Israel and the settlements.
In some ways, this I guess is some protection for Israel, but it also is protection for
people and organizations and nations who want to make a distinction between Israel and the
West Bank.
Right, I think we saw over the past few years, particularly this is something coming out
of the European Union, where you've seen a whole set of moves and proposed moves for
the future where different EU bodies have said that the EU and EU member countries need
to, based on the EU's own laws with regard to occupations and occupied territory and
entities operating in those territories, according to the EU's own laws, the EU needs to differentiate
and not consider Israeli settlements to be part of Israel when they might enter into
business contracts or whatever with entities operating in the occupied territories.
This is a really interesting way to go about it, because on the one hand, it's affirming
in that it says, 'Listen, we have all these organizations, universities and others, who
are really interested in doing business with and cooperating and doing business with Israeli
companies and universities, etc., but we are constrained by our own laws and the requirement
that we observe international law from entering into contracts and engaging and working with
and cooperating with entities that operate across the 67 lines.'
This also, I would imagine, helps entities that want to do business with Israel proper.
They can cite their ability to continue to do that because of the way that international
law or at least the Security Council has cleaved these issues from each other, right?
Israel and the West Bank.
I think that becomes a bit more complicated, because you do have companies, for example,
Bank Hapoalim which is a very big Israeli bank.
It operates branches in the settlements.
It provides loans for settlement homes.
It's operating all throughout the occupied territory, so the challenge will be, can we
do business with this bank which is known to be a major financier of all these operations
in occupied territory?
I think that's something we're going to see pick up steam in the future.
What are the effects of this resolution?
There's been literally dozens of resolutions calling on Israel to respect the rights of
Palestinians, multiple resolutions it seems to me on the status of the West Bank.
Are there going to be actual implications to this?
How different does this resolution make the playing field?
I think that's a really good question.
What is the tangible impact of something like this?
In the immediate term, I think the answer is very little.
It's not like settlements evaporated into thin air when this was passed.
It's not as if we've seen any kind of return of settlers to Israel.
In fact, many Israeli right-wing politicians have threatened that they want to move forward
even quicker with building more settlements, but it does a couple of things I think are
important.
One is just in reiterating and reaffirming this overwhelming international legal consensus
that the settlements are in fact illegal and illegitimate, and will be subject to final
status negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians.
There has been this really, really aggressive effort over the past few years, and even longer,
by very pro-settlement politicians in Israel.
This includes Netanyahu.
This includes many of Netanyahu's advocates and right-wing advocates here in the United
States, to chip away at this consensus, to treat this, to say that the territories, they're
not occupied.
They're disputed.
Who really knows whether the settlements are even illegal and blah blah blah.
No, now the international community, the UN Security Council, has spoken unanimously that
the international consensus remains very, very clear and strong on this point.
There's also something I think that we're just seeing today.
There was a report in El Monitor of a new Palestinian peace proposal.
It's being promulgated by a number of very pragmatic, moderate members of Fatah.
It's unclear how closely President Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian President, has been
involved in this, but they've offered a new and really interestingly specific set of ideas
for resolving the conflict, ending the occupation, and creating a Palestinian state.
It seems pretty clear to me that in delivering this pretty considerable diplomatic victory
for Palestinian diplomacy, these are things that moderate Palestinian politicians have
been saying for a long time and trying to get a resolution like this, telling the Palestinian
people, 'Listen, we are going to achieve our national goals through non-violence and
diplomacy.'
By delivering this diplomatic victory, I think you've created the political space in Palestinian
society and politics for some of these new, more pragmatic ideas.
I think you've seen criticisms from some here in the U.S. and certainly in Israel that this
UN Security Council resolution empowers extremists, but I think the opposite is actually true.
Yeah, this is an important dynamic that I think people need to understand about diplomacy,
is that rewarding a country or a nation or a group of people, you can see it from two
different perspectives.
You can see it from the perspective of the outside world, but the inside world is, are
you allowing the moderate faction in that group or country or whatnot to bring basically
some goodies home?
As they do, that empowers them, because it basically shows that they have the ability
to do that.
When you talk about this new peace proposal by members of Fatah and that you don't know
how closely Abbas is involved in it, is that basically because of the other side of that
coin, that the Palestinian people, like the Israeli people, are suspicious of getting
involved in negotiations with each other?
Politicians need to distance themselves in certain instances so that there's a sense
that they have room to maneuver.
No, I think that's right.
We've seen for the past 20 plus years of the Oslo Process moderate Palestinian leaders
saying to the Palestinian people, 'Listen, we are going to go into this process.
We are going to end terrorism.
We're going to embrace non-violence and diplomacy, and achieve our national liberation this way.'
Especially recently, it's been tough going because after 20 years you have arguments
by more extremist groups like Hamas and others who've said, 'This process is illegitimate.
They've achieved nothing.
There's only more settlements.
We have Gaza under blockade.
What has non-violence and diplomacy actually gotten you?'
This is a serious political challenge to Palestinian moderates, but now they can come back with
this resolution in hand and say, 'Listen, the international community has reaffirmed
our position,' and move with that.
We have about two minutes left.
Let's talk about John Kerry's speech where he basically said ... It sounded like to me,
broadly speaking, that he was saying he was giving a warning about the continued feasibility
of a two-state solution.
Many people argued that that train has left the station a long time ago, and offered a
warning too.
You can't promote a single-state solution if you want to maintain a Palestinian identity
or if you want to maintain a Jewish identity for whatever that state becomes.
Just give me a sense of what was going on there and who that was directed towards.
I think there were a couple of audiences, as is often the case with these diplomatic
speeches.
One I think was for the American people, Kerry laying out his and frankly Obama's vision
of why it's important for the U.S. to spend valuable diplomatic time and energy trying
to resolve this issue, but reiterating the view of successive administrations going back
to the Bush administration, Clinton, Bush, and Reagan, that getting this issue resolved
is in fact in the U.S. national interest.
It would be a benefit to our relationships in the region and our goals in the region,
but also yes, sounding the alarm on the threat that is posed to this ultimate resolution
by the settlement project.
The other audience was Israelis, just explaining why the U.S., making clear that Obama had
been hugely supportive of Israel's security over the past few years, but why they felt
it necessary to allow this resolution through.
I think one of the most important parts of the speech was the distinction that Kerry
articulated between support for Israel's security and legitimacy on the one hand, which remains
just completely uncontroversial and totally 100% supporting Israel's legitimate security
needs on the one hand, but not supporting the growth of settlements and occupation on
the other, and refusing to conflate these two things.
In fact, I think the argument is that they work against each other.
Matt Duss, we don't have time to go any further today, but I would love to have you back on
soon to talk about what we can anticipate with a radically different administration
coming in.
Any time.
I always love to.
All right.
Matt Duss, thank you so much for your time today.
Thanks a lot.
We got to take a quick break.
Sam Seder, Ring of Fire Radio.
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