by Tovah Lazaroff
"This has been the longstanding position of previous administrations of both parties over the course of many decades," Price said.
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View of the Jewish settlement of Efrat and the surrounding fields, in Gush Etzion, West Bank, on December 1, 2020.
(photo credit: GERSHON ELINSON/FLASH90)
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The Biden administration on Wednesday clarified that it considers
the West Bank to be occupied territory, but ducked a question as to
whether it held that settlements were illegal.
"It
is a historical fact that Israel occupied the West Bank, Gaza, and the
Golan Heights after the 1967 War," US State Department spokesman Ned
Price told reporters in Washington on Wednesday.
The issue was raised after the Biden administration published on
Tuesday the 2020 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices. It is the
first of the annual reports released since US President Joe Biden took
office in January 2021.
The report affirmed steps
taken by the previous Trump administration, which had both recognized
Jerusalem as Israel's capital and Israeli sovereignty over the Golan
Heights.
It also kept in place a description change made
to the report by former US president Donald Trump, in which he replaced
the phrase "Israel and the occupied Palestinian Territories" with
"Israel, West Bank and Gaza."
But
within the report, the Biden administration reintroduced the word
"occupied" to describe Israel's seizure of territory during the 1967 Six
Day War.
When quizzed by a reporter as to whether the US considered that Israel occupied the West Bank, Price affirmed that it did.
"In
fact, the 2020 Human Rights Report does use the term 'occupation' in
the context of the current status of the West Bank," Price said. "This
has been the longstanding position of previous administrations of both
parties over the course of many decades."
Israel
has long argued that the West Bank does not meet the standard of
occupied territory, because it captured the area from Jordan, whose
sovereignty there from 1948-1967 was not recognized legally and which
itself was considered to be occupying it.
Prior
to the 1948 War of Independence, the territory was held by Great
Britain; prior World War I, it was part of the Ottoman Empire.
The
Trump administration believed that Israel had historic and religious
rights to portions of that territory and did not refer to it as
occupied. Its top officials agreed with the Israeli Right, that the
proper term was Judea and Samaria and not the West Bank, terminology
linked to the time when the territory was under Jordanian rule.
Trump
also changed US policy toward Israeli West Bank settlements. It
rejected a 1978 memo by then US State Department legal advisor Herbert
J. Hansell declaring that the settlements were illegal, declaring
instead that they were not inconsistent with Israeli law.
The United Nations holds that Israel's settlements are illegal and that the West Bank is occupied Palestinian territory.
The
Biden administration has yet to clarify its stance on the settlements,
even though it is presumed to support a two-state solution at the
pre-1967 lines.
At
Wednesday's press conference, a reporter asked Price: "Does the US
consider, for example, Israeli settlements in the occupied territories
to be illegal as a result of this stance?"
Price responded that the US position had not changed, but he clarified that stance in his own way.
"We
– as you have heard me say before – we continue to encourage all sides
to avoid actions – both sides, I should say – to avoid actions that
would put the two-state solution further out of reach.
"Again,
our ultimate goal here is to facilitate – to help bring about – a
two-state solution because it is the best path to preserve Israel’s
identity as a Jewish and democratic state while bestowing on the
Palestinians their legitimate aspirations of sovereignty and dignity in a
state of their own," he said.
These lines are often his and other Biden official's standard response to many questions about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Tovah Lazaroff
Source: https://www.jpost.com/arab-israeli-conflict/us-its-our-long-standing-position-that-the-west-bank-is-occupied-663778
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