ANY
confusion about Israel’s settlements in the West Bank can be easily resolved.
There is a file in the office of the Israeli Prime Minister that will do
it.
The file would be handy for John Kerry
as he attempts to broker a peace. It would help Julie Bishop, who told The Times
of Israel on January 15 she’d like to see advice that says settlements are
illegal.
It was this advice that an Israeli prime
minister asked for in 1967. Israel had just conquered what is now the West Bank.
Prime minister Levi Eshkol asked Israel’s top authority on international law,
Theodor Meron, whether Israel could settle civilians
there.
Meron was a child survivor of the
Holocaust and has since become one of the world’s leading authorities on the
laws of war and a judge on the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former
Yugoslavia.
His advice was unequivocal, and today he
sticks to it. He said: “Civilian settlement in the administered territories
contravenes explicit provisions of the Fourth Geneva
Convention.”
When General Moshe Dayan in 1968
proposed building Israeli towns on the West Bank he blithely conceded: “Settling
Israelis in administered territories, as is known, contravenes international
conventions ... “
Indeed, the Fourth Geneva Convention
would appear to leave no room for argument. It states: “The occupying power
shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the
territory it occupies.”
Apologists for settlements try to argue
that Article 49 bars the occupier only from “forced transfer” (my emphasis) of
its civilians. This is not the interpretation accepted by the International
Court of Justice or anyone else. The adjective “forced” does not appear in the
convention.
I think I recognise a killer argument
when I see one. The killer argument here is that Israel’s own legal authority,
at the very start, told its government that settlements were illegal under
international law.
It’s curious that supporters of Israel
would choose to fight on this ground - their weakest.
When I was foreign minister the
Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council directed a furious effort at
trying to block even routine criticism of settlements, as if this were more
vital than advocating a two-state solution or opposing boycotts of Israel.
Settlers themselves shatter all sympathy, as on the ABC’s Four Corners on Monday
when Daniella Weiss stated they deliberately had occupied land to block the
creation of a Palestinian state because “this land was promised to the Jewish
nation by God”.
In Louis Theroux’s BBC documentary The
Ultra Zionists, religious settlers declared Palestinians an inferior race. “This
is the Jewish homeland and there’s never been a Palestinian people,” declared
one, standing on a property formerly occupied by Palestinians. In one blast they
defied centuries of priceless Jewish liberal and humanitarian
instinct.
No one from the centre-Left of European
politics is going to do anything other than repudiate this ultra-religious
vision. “The kibbutz used to be the symbol of Israel,” a British Labour MP told
me. “Now it’s the settlement bloc.” American Jewry is increasingly detaching
itself from what it sees as a chauvinist, illiberal strain in Israeli
politics.
Kerry warned Israel last month of the
danger of delegitimisation, especially after the EU announced any economic
treaties with Israel would carefully exclude - one may say boycott - business
activity in Israeli settlements.
I know some supporters of Israel would
want to point out that there are a range of settlement categories. My response
is to quote Israeli prime minister Golda Meir, who once said: “If you’ve got to
explain, you’ve lost already.”
In any case, there is available a far
more intelligent defence of Israel. Concede that the settlement mission is
controversial within Israel. Point out many Israelis are opposed to the settler
vision of a greater Israel indefinitely governing a majority Arab population.
Give up any argument that settlements are legal under international law and move
on to more fruitful territory.
Insist that liberal democracy and
shining economic success - even with constant threat of war - are the chief
virtues of Israel, a state where six former heads of its security agency, Shin
Bet, can appear in a documentary (The Gatekeepers) and criticise Israel’s
occupation of the West Bank, a state where its own Supreme Court can overrule
its government on use of torture or the direction of a wall opposed by
Palestinian villagers, where historians freely challenge their country’s own
foundation myth. Where, as Four Corners showed, its military personnel can speak
out against the occupation.
In all these respects, Israel presents a
benchmark of pluralism and democracy - a formidable one - for a future
Palestinian entity. If Palestinians achieved it, they would set off a challenge
to Arab dictatorship and theocracy everywhere and realise their own
greatness.
Bob Carr
was Australia’s foreign minister from March 2012 to September last year and was
NSW premier from 1995 to
2005.