FROM JANUARY 2010: SETTLEMENTS ARE NOT ILLEGAL OR COLONIAL
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A Reader’s Perspective
Israeli settlements: Neither ‘colonial’ nor ‘illegal’
West Bank Jewish settlers in ancestral homeland
By Dr. Jack L. Schwartzwald
In Nina Tannenwald’s latest epistle (“Palestinians aren’t grateful…,†The Voice & Herald’s Dec. 25th issue), she asserts that Israel’s West Bank settlements rest on “land confiscated from Palestinians,†and are, therefore, “illegal†and “colonial.†She is wrong on all counts.
Tannenwald compares Jewish West Bank settlers to “the white settlers in America†who “displaced the Indians.†But if she put shovel to ground beneath her Brown University office, which, technically speaking, sits atop confiscated Indian land, she could dig clear to China without uncovering evidence of her own heritage pre-dating the European colonial experience in America.
In contrast, Jews can dig almost anywhere on the West Bank with a reasonable likelihood of unearthing some Jewish artifact or other from ancient Judea and Samaria that not only predates the modern Jewish presence in these lands, but predates the Arab conquest of 637 CE. Such archeological evidence proves that Jewish settlers in the West Bank have returned to their ancestral homeland. No “colonist†can make that claim. This doesn’t mean that settlements are the best idea from an international relations standpoint or that Israel should claim eternal sovereignty over the whole of the West Bank. But it does mean that Israel’s West Bank presence differs from any “colonial†venture in history, a good indication that Tannenwald’s adjective does not apply.
Likewise, Jewish settlers do not “confiscate Palestinian land†and do not “displace†Palestinians from their homes. To the contrary, many Jewish “settlements†are built on sites from which Arabs expelled Jews during or before the 1948 War (for example, Kfar Etzion and Hebron). During the 1970s, some privately owned Palestinian land was requisitioned for Israeli settlements on security grounds. But this led immediately to court cases, and, in 1979, the practice ceased. Apart from this exception, all Jewish settlements, which, taken together, comprise 1.7 percent of the West Bank, have been built on uncultivated, unregistered land or, in rare cases, on land purchased from willing Arab sellers.
Nor are Israeli settlements “illegal.†The 1922 League of Nations Mandate Charter, which calls for “close Jewish settlement on the land†(including what is now the West Bank), remains the last legally binding document that specifically addresses the subject. It is frequently argued that the settlements violate Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. Paragraph 6 states that an “occupying power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.†Written after World War II, the text was intended to clearly state, in writing, that it was illegal for Adolph Hitler to have transferred Jews from Germany to the ghettos and death camps of Poland during the Holocaust. Comparing voluntary Jewish settlement in the West Bank to the deportations of the Holocaust is not only inappropriate, but in bad taste.
On April 14, 2004, George W. Bush wrote a letter to Ariel Sharon declaring that, in any foreseeable final status negotiation, Israel should and would emerge with defensible borders encompassing the major West Bank settlement blocs.
On June 23, 2004, the U.S. House of Representatives approved these assurances by a vote of 407 to 9, and on the 24th, the United States Senate approved them by a vote of 95 to 3. Israel’s pre-1967 borders were militarily indefensible. A return to them now will not bring peace. It will invite further anti-Israel aggression. If peace is the goal, secure borders for Israel are no less integral to the solution than is sovereignty for the Palestinians.
Dr. Jack Schwartzwald, a North Kingstown resident, is a clinical assistant professor of medicine at Brown University’s Warren Alpert Medical School.
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