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[Previous entry: "Da svidanja"] [Main Index] [Next entry: "Meta-fiskage"] 04 April 2003: "The Stranger, Rachel Corrie and UNSC Resolution 242"
This week's issue of The Stranger carries an article by Eli Sanders on the Rachel Corrie incident, titled "Was This House Worth Her Life?" The second side to carry blame is our own soldiers. For crying out laud, you know these guys are provocative and probably a little insane - can't you get a hold of a couple of people!? Knock them all out if you need, arrest them and jail them, but don't let them run between your legs when you're working! For god sake, this whole thing could have been avoided if you were just a little harder on them!Diane made a similar observation on 30-Mar-2003 (see this page and look for "Last (really last) Words on Rachel Corrie"). Now, as I said, Civax is an IDF reservist, and he's probably pulled duty in the Territories; but I understand the situation in the Gaza Strip is rather different from that on the West Bank, and it is possible that Civax may never have been assigned to the buffer zone between the Strip and the Egyptian border. Sanders describes it as follows: After a time, an Israeli tank* will come out from behind the border wall and stop in front of us to take a look. I will look back at it, hoping to catch a glimpse of a soldier inside the armored turret, but there will be no hope in seeing a person behind the tank's armor. Neither will there be hope of seeing a person inside the towers, which are wrapped in black netting and camouflage. As with the Abu Holi checkpoint, the actual Israelis in Rafah are invisible. What people here see—what permeates their lives—are faceless, frightening machines and mammoth towers from which bullets sometimes fly.The Gaza Strip is, of course, the birthplace of Hamas, and it may be that the IDF judges it too dangerous for dismounted operations; this would make the restraining and removal of the ISM members rather difficult. Sanders also points out that ISM until recently has concentrated on operating in the West Bank rather than the Gaza Strip, which may have resulted in the IDF in the Strip not having learnt how to deal with ISM members; this combination of factors may explain why the first death of an "international" happened at Rafah. Had Rachel Corrie gone to Ramallah rather than Rafah, she might still be alive. (I appreciate that I'm speculating a lot here, but it seems the best analysis I can come up with, given the available information.) My criticism of Sanders' piece concerns this passage: In that war, Israel responded to an impending attack by Egypt, Syria, and Jordan by launching a preemptive attack of its own. When the war ended six days later, Israel had crushed the Arab armies and captured the Sinai Peninsula, the West Bank, the Golan Heights, and Jerusalem [and the Gaza Strip]. The 1967 war led to the famous UN Security Council Resolution 242, which called on Israel to withdraw to its pre-1967 borders. It was envisioned that an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza would lead to the formation of a Palestinian state. But in the more than 35 years since, Israel has never fully ceded control of the areas—hence the term "occupied territories."For all its alleged fame, Sanders' representation of the terms of SC resolution 242 is incorrect. This perhaps not surprising, since an amazing amount of people with an opinion on Israel do not actually have a clue what 242 says, but I had expected a little better from Sanders, considering how much work he put into researching the rest of the article. The resolution actually reads: The Security Council,The resolution does not call upon Israel to unilaterally cede its gains; this is conditional upon the Arab states involved acknowledging Israel's right to exist, and to make peace with it; or, to use the popular phrase, "land for peace." But for the first twelve years of its existence, the implementation of 242 didn't get anywhere because the Arab states (and the PLO) refused to acknowledge Israel's right to exist. In 1977, Anwar Sadat, then president of Egypt, broke ranks and made a deal with Israel, which resulted in Israel returning the Sinai peninsula to Egypt in 1979 (and Sadat getting assassinated in 1981). In 2000, Ehud Barak, then prime minister of Israel, made overtures to Syria, offering to return 95% of the Golan Heights in exchange for peace, but the negotiations broke down over water rights to Lake Tiberias (which supplies 40% of Israel's drinking water). But here we come to the problematical part, which is the absence of a definite article preceding the phrase "territories occupied† in the recent conflict." The Sinai and Golan are relatively clear-cut; these were part of the sovereign territories of Egypt and Syria, respectively, until Israel occupied them in the Six-Day War. The status of the West Bank ("Judea and Samaria" and East Jerusalem) and Gaza Strip is somewhat more complicated. The West Bank and Gaza Strip did not exist as distinct territories before 1949; prior to the declaration of the State of Israel, they had been undemarcated stretches of the Mandate Territory of Palestine. On 14-May-1948, the State of Israel was declared; the British government had previously announced the Mandate would be terminated on 15-May-1948, and on that day five Arab armies (all four neighbouring countries—Egypt, Transjordan, Syria and Lebanon—plus elements of the army of Iraq, proving that attempted genocide predates Saddam Hussein where the Iraqi army is concerned) invaded what had been the Mandate Territory. By the time Israel was admitted to the UN (General Assembly Resolution 273 (III) of 11-May-1949), the Gaza Strip and the West Bank were not de facto Israeli territory, but only because they had been occupied by Egypt and Transjordan, respectively. It may be—in my opinion, convincingly—argued on this basis that the Territories are not Israeli territory, but since the Security Council emphasised in resolution 242 "the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war," it follows most definitely that the Gaza Strip was never Egyptian territory, nor the West Bank the territory of Transjordan‡, lest resolution 242 be taken to be merely a sick joke. From the Israeli perspective, it might well be argued that the Territories rightfully belonged to Israel to begin with by default, since they clearly were not within the boundaries of the territories of Lebanon, Syria, Transjordan or Egypt prior to 15-May-1948. Under the circumstances, the official Israeli position that the Territories are "disputed," rather than "occupied," should probably be seen as a concession on the Israelis' part. Certainly, the term "occupied territories" should not be accepted unquestioningly; as a result, one should not accept without question the claim that the Israeli settlement policy is "illegal." This claim is based on a passage from Article 49 of the Geneva Convention (IV): The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.Since the status of the Territories is not undisputed (unlike the Territories themselves, a-ha), it is not a given that Israel is in violation of international law. That said, in my personal opinion, the settlement policy is an obstacle to peace, and Israel will have to abandon it—and remove the settlers—at some stage if this conflict is ever to be resolved. That said, the settlement policy is not the only obstacle; Palestinian violence is going to have cease as well. The phrase "land [in exchange] for peace" does not rule out "peace [in exchange] for land." * - Note that Sanders uses the term "tank" indiscriminately; for instance, this photo is captioned "Israeli tank patrolling the 'buffer zone' near Rafah" whereas the vehicle is a Nagmachon armoured personnel carrier. Sorry, anorak moment there. † - The UN has two primary working languages, French and English. It has been argued that the French version—"Retrait des forces armées israéliennes des territoires occupés lors du récent conflit"—does not lack this definite article, but unfortunately, this is disputable because French grammar is highly ambivalent in this instance. And in instances where one working language leaves room for ambiguities, the best one can do is to compare the version in the other working language. All one can say is that it is a good thing that Russian—which has no articles, definite or indefinite, at all—is only a secondary working language of the UN. ‡ - Compare "Transjordan" to "Gallia Transalpina"—"Gaul on the far side of the Alps" (from Rome)—and it is clear that the name was coined by some British ex-public schoolboy civil servant at the Foreign and Colonial Office during or directly after World War I for "the territory on the far (i.e. east) side of the Jordan." Ergo, the West Bank is by definition not Jordanian territory. Classical education cuts both ways. |
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