Salubrius Challenges Wikipedia's Entry on the Levy Report - Part II

by Sally Zahav



Read Part I here:

Synopsis:

Salubrius, a vigilant champion of Israel's rights to its land, objected to Wikipedia's text in the entry on the Levy Report which stated, "According to the Jewish Daily Forward, the report's claim, contradicting the world community's interpretation of the Fourth Geneva Convention, is based on 'an eccentric legal doctrine that's been circulating for years on the fringes of the far right'. Its advocates assert that the resolution of the post-World War I San Remo conference which called for 'the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people' retains its validity to the present day and constitutes a binding international commitment to make all of historic Palestine as under the British Mandate into a Jewish state."

Salubrius, who is a lawyer himself, first wrote a letter to Wikipedia, and afterward edited the entry with the aim of addressing the bias of the original authors. (The changes he added can be seen in the original post on this subject). However, his changes were quickly discarded and more biased material was added, ignoring the sound legal basis on which Salubrius's claims are made.

He tried again to edit the entry, but his changes were again discarded, further obfuscating the issue. Here is his letter to me, in which he details the steps he took and the response to his actions:

Dear Ms Zahav,

Last night I tried to edit Wikipedia's entry on what they initially call the Levi [sic] report to show the reaction of the US government more accurately than could the left wing editors.  ...  But in the morning my edit was gone.
When they said:

"The  American Administration disagrees with the findings of the report." They should have limited their statement to the Obama administration and that of Jimmy Carter.  Instead, they said: "As a spokesperson from the [[State Department]] said on the day the report was published: “Obviously, we've seen the reports that an Israeli Government appointed panel has recommended legalizing dozens of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, but we do not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlement activity and we oppose any effort to legalize settlement outposts... We’re concerned about it, obviously”. US displeased with Levy Report

My change showed that this was only the view of the current administration and that of Jimmy Carter who believes that Israel is running an apartheid government. All of the US Presidents in between Carter and Obama although finding the settlements legal under international law, disapproved of them as a matter of policy because they thought they would discourage settlement negotiation.

My change also showed:

"... the late Professor Julius Stone—considered one of the premier legal theorists on International Law—maintained that the effort to designate Israeli settlements as illegal was a "subversion. . . of basic international law principles."

Among the 27 books he authored was Israel and Palestine: An Assault on the Law of Nations which dealt with the legal aspects of the Arab-Israeli conflict. In it, Stone set forth the central principles of international law upon which Israel’s right to settle the West Bank is based and discussed the inapplicability of Article 49(6) of the Fourth Geneva Convention to the case of Israeli settlement.

Stone drew upon the writings of Professor Stephen Schwebel, former judge on the Hague’s International Court of Justice (1981-2000), who distinguished between territory acquired in an "aggressive conquest" (such as Japanese conquests during the 1930s and Nazi conquests during World War II) and territory taken in a war of self-defense (for example, Israel’s capture of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in 1967 war). He also distinguished between the taking of territory that is legally held by another nation (such as the Japanese occupation of Chinese territory and the Nazi Germany occupation of France, Holland, Belgium and other European lands) as opposed to the taking of territory illegally held. The latter applies to the West Bank and Gaza, which were not considered the legal territories of any High Contracting Party when Israel won control of them; their occupation after 1948 by Jordan and Egypt was illegal and neither country ever had lawful or recognized sovereignty. The last legal sovereignty over the territories was that of the League of Nations Palestine Mandate which encouraged Jewish settlement of the land.

Regarding Israel’s acquisition of territories in the 1967 war, Schwebel wrote:

    Where the prior holder of territory had seized that territory unlawfully, the state which subsequently takes that territory in the lawful exercise of self-defense has, against that prior holder, better title. ("What Weight to Conquest," American Journal of International Law, 64 (1970))

Proponents of the view that settlements are legal further argue that Article 49 was intended to outlaw the Nazi practice of forcibly transporting populations into or out of occupied territories to death and work camps  and thus cannot be applied to Israel because Arab residents were neither forcibly transferred, nor were Israelis intended to (nor do they) displace Arab residents of the territories. Arabs continue to live in these territories and their population continues to grow.

Those who believe settlements are legal also maintain that it is not the existence of settlements that have an impact on Palestinians’ standard of living, right to self-determination, equality, property, and freedom of movement. Rather, the impact upon their freedom of movement and standard of living is directly a result of the threat they pose to their Israeli neighbors and their governance by the Palestinian Authority.

Most U.S. governments have held the view that the settlements are not illegal and that the extent of Israeli withdrawal from the territories is subject to negotiation.
The Carter administration viewed the settlements as illegal, relying on the opinion (April 21, 1978) of the State Department's legal adviser Herbert J. Hansell.   It is noteworthy that  Hansell based his opinion, at least in part, on  an earlier, more general work by Professor Julius Stone – a 1959 analysis entitled Legal Controls of International Conflict," which he cited in his memo. But his interpretation of Stone's intent is clearly contradicted by the scholar's subsequent defense specifically of the legality of settlements, as noted above.

The Reagan administration, however, reversed Carter’s position, saying: "As to the West Bank, I believe the settlements there — I disagreed when the previous Administration referred to them as illegal, they're not illegal" (New York Times, Feb. 3, 1981). Subsequent U.S. administrations held similar views; while they may have disapproved on political grounds of building new settlements in the disputed territories before negotiations, they did not label settlements as "illegal."

Former U.S. Undersecretary of State Eugene Rostow wrote several articles explaining why settlements are legal and arguing that United Nations Resolution 242 stipulates that Israel withdraw from some of the disputed territory, but not necessarily all. It should be remembered that Rostow was one of the drafters of Resolution 242, the very resolution relied upon by Palestinians and their supporters to demand Israel’s complete withdrawal from all of the West Bank and Gaza and the dismantlement of all of the Jewish settlements.

Proponents of the view that settlements are illegal often cite numerous U.N. resolutions criticizing Israel’s presence in the West Bank and Gaza.

Those who maintain settlements are legal indicate that  U.N. General Assembly Resolutions carry no legal weight, even if one ignores the U.N.’s history of bias against Israel, evidenced by the infamous "Zionism is Racism" resolution and the partisan, anti-Israel  indictments by special U.N. bodies set up exclusively to report on Israel's practices.

The United States routinely abstains or votes against Security Council resolutions unfairly condemning Israel for building settlements. One exception–under former President Carter, the United States initially voted for U.N. Security Council Resolution 465 which was passed on March 1, 1980. This resolution stating that Israeli settlements in the territories have no "legal validity" is often quoted to bolster the "illegality of settlements" argument. However, the American vote for this resolution was subsequently retracted, with the United States claiming that it had intended to abstain and blaming a communications failure as responsible for the vote.

Finally, those who maintain settlements are legal indicate that although Article 25 of the U.N. Charter says: "The Members of the United Nations agree to accept and carry out the decisions of the Security Council in accordance with the present Charter," this cannot invalidate Article 80 which says that:

nothing in the [U.N. Charter's chapter on the administration of Mandate territory] shall be construed . . . to alter in any manner the rights whatsoever of any states or peoples or the terms of existing international instruments. (This updated version of the quote corrects an earlier typographical error.)

This would include the British Mandate’s granting the right to the Jewish people to settle in the whole of the Mandated territory. Article 6 of the Mandate encouraged "close settlement by Jews on the land, including State lands not required for public use."

So what do you think of the left wing views as an accurate entry to an encyclopedia? [For information from the other side of the debate, see] Committee on the Accuracy of Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA)  


Regards,


Wallace Brand (Salubrius)

Sally Zahav

Source: Original Post at Middle East and Terrorism

Copyright  - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.