Mission & Justice

Isabel Kershner; 13/4/10

A recently amended military order that allows Israel to remove people from the occupied West Bank if it does not recognise their legal status could lead to the expulsion of thousands of Palestinians, Israeli human rights groups warn. The amendment – to a 1969 order on dealings with those judged to be West Bank infiltrators – was signed by military officials in October and is to take effect today. In the original document, issued two years after Israel captured the West Bank from Jordan in the 1967 war, ”infiltrator” was defined as a person who entered the area illegally from a neighbouring Arab country.

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1/4/10

Almost exactly 43 years since Israel occupied, through force, East Jerusalem and promptly, and illegally, annexed that half of the city to start a settlement programme, also illegal, that is only ever accelerating, the US has reportedly asked Israel for a four-month settlement construction freeze. Now, of course, there are ways of looking at it. First of all, the request may turn out to be media speculation. It may be a trial balloon. But if it isn’t, on the one hand, this is more than any other US administration has ever asked Israel to do. That is a good thing. It shows that Washington wants Israel to suffer some consequences for its brash behaviour. It shows that maybe the realisation is dawning in Washington, ever so slowly, that in fact, the real obstacle to a fair, just and peaceful resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is not Hamas, not Yasser Arafat, not stone-throwing children, not intransigent refugees, but Israel, its insatiable appetite for land and its inability to understand its own history and place in the region. But that is putting a very positive spin on developments.

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Eugene Rogan; 31/3/10

The colony issue is an old source of tension between America and Israel. For US President Barack Obama it has emerged as the greatest obstacle to his goal of resolving Israeli-Palestinian differences through meaningful negotiations. As the Obama administration ponders a new Middle East peace plan, it needs a new direction on colonies that both Israelis and Palestinians can live with. The international community is agreed that a solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict lies in a two-state land-for-peace settlement on the basis of the pre-1967 boundaries. Yet a fallacy persists, that somehow these two states should be ethnically pure: that Israel should be uniquely Jewish, and Palestine uniquely Arab. The truth is that the population of Israel and the Occupied Territories is highly intermixed. There are 1.2 million Palestinians of Israeli citizenship — nearly 20 per cent of the population of Israel. And there are nearly 400,000 Israeli citizens living in colonies in occupied east Jerusalem and the West Bank. When at some future date Israel and the Palestinian National Authority agree to a peace deal, there is no reason to expect this trend to reverse. Peace should accelerate exchanges of goods and people in the region.

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