As we first reported here on Israellycool last week, a French court has confirmed some aspects of the legal situation regarding Israel and the hills of Judea and Samaria, especially around Jerusalem.
Now the larger news outlets have had time to think about this and get the opinion of greater legal minds than this humble blogger.
And the answer seems to be, it is a victory, but only if you didn’t know anything about international law and the specifics of Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Conventions.
Well I’d say that’s just about everyone on earth and doubly so for everyone who is deluded by BDS campaign lies!
As Alan Baker is quoted in the Times of Israel:
“I don’t know if you can call it a big victory or a small victory or a victory at all: it’s just confirmation of what Israel has been saying all the time, that there’s nothing inherently illegal about the fact that it’s administering the territory,” Baker told The Times of Israel. “This in itself is something that goes against a lot of the statements coming out of the Palestinians, who say that the occupation itself is an illegal occupation.”
A former Israeli ambassador to Canada, Baker is the co-author of the controversial Levy report, which asserts that the settlements are legal under international law and that Israel’s actions in the West Bank should thus not be considered an occupation.
“Why should I be surprised?” he asked, referring to the Versailles ruling. “I wouldn’t have expected anything else from a French court or any other court.”
As we’ve seen in the long running back and forth of the Karsenty trial concerning the Pallywood fraud around Mohammad Al Durah, justice in France can’t be assumed completely free of political bias.
So I’ll stand by my original pronouncement for now: whatever the technical details it is very helpful when a French court of good standing says, effectively, carry on everything is legal. We’re talking about the court of public opinion here, not just the hallowed halls of international legal conferences.
Companies can continue to build useful infrastructure for Jews and Arabs and the task of making Jerusalem a better city for everyone can continue. And the PA are caught in a barefaced lie so large they ran with it and embellished it all the way to a defeat at the hands of a French court!
And this is France remember, nobody is routinely saying some mythical “Jewish/ Zionist Lobby” in France is running the show (as they seem to be saying of the USA in Finland right now).
As to one point mentioned in the Times of Israel: the ruling says nothing much on the legality of settlements in the territory liberated from illegal Jordanian occupation. That is correct: so many of the so called settlers were just returning to areas they’d been thrown out of when Jordan invaded as Yisrael Medad says in a comment on the Times piece:
As regards Jewish communities, the whole point left-wingers and Arabs ignore, from a legal perspective, is that historically “settlements” already existed before 1967, well, prior to 1948, at which time it was the Arabs who commited crimes of ethnic cleansing and expelling Jews from Gaza, Shchem(Nablus), Jenin, Hebron, Gush Etzion, Neveh Yaakov, Bet HaAravah, Atarot and Jerusalem’s Old City and environs like Shimon HaTzadik neighborhood. Jews have not been “transferred in”; they were expelled and are returning to their former resisdential locations as part of the indigenous Jewish population over the past centuries.
So there. And for another opinion here is Eliyahu m’Tsiyon of Emet m’Tsiyon:
The author of the article, Raphael Ahren, fails to bring out that the Levy Report which Alan Baker was coauthor of states that Judea and Samaria are not occupied.
Frances Raday misses that point too and then speaks foolishly about the length of time of time of an occupation rendering it “illegal.” Actually, if it weren’t Israel involved, your “int’l legal experts” would argue that the length of time that Israel has held Judea-Samaria dissolve the “occupation.”
That is, that the longer time passes, the less the area can be called occupied. Ahren is also rather thick on Geneva IV:49. As an article or report, Ahren’s work is poor, leaving out significant facts as well as the actual positions of those whom he interviewed.
And if you’re in the mood for 45 mins of legal explanation, here are a few truths about the legalities of Israel and the liberated territories that many could do with listening to and internalising.
http://youtu.be/ub2x5UvjUs4
