[Prefatory Note: The post below has to do with the decision by the legislative bodies in Israel and the US to hereafter refer internationally to the West Bank by their biblical names, Judea and Samaria. An article by Kazim Aizaz Alam appears in TRT World on February 14 that quotes my responses to an interview he conducted with me on February 12. https://www.trtworld.com/magazine/why-us-israel-want-to-rename-occupied-west-bank-as-judea-and-samaria-18264875
I publish here a somewhat extended version of my response to the two questions put to me. The issue of language, as it with authoritative declarations of applicable law make nothing happen by themselves, but they have potentially great values in the symbolic domains where politics occurs.]
1. Isreal claims that the occupied West Bank — which they’re officially renaming as Judea and Samaria — is an integral part of Israel? Some Israelis cite Biblical references to say that Judea and Samaria form an “inseparable part of the historic homeland of the Jewish people”. What does history say? Do the Palestinians have a counter-argument?
The Biblical references, Judea and Samaria, has long been used in Hebrew discourse about the future of the West Bank, especially internally by Israeli leaders, but was not previously used internationally in deference to the broad consensus among state and at the UN on treating the areas of Palestine West of the Jordan River by English language names in the period of the British Mandate. Reference to the biblical names within
Israel conveyed to Israeli public that the governing leadership had not given up its resolve to incorporate the West Bank within the boundaries of its territorial sovereignty whenever political conditions were favorable to such an enlargement of Israel. although the claim, regardless its status in Jewish religious tradition had no modern legal or moral standing.
By using this kind of messaging adherents of Zionist Project had long been signaling to their adherents a rejection of the establishment of meaningful Palestinian statehood even if they appeared to go along for public relations reasons with the two-state approach. It was always was assumed in international circles that a Palestinian state would have its core reality by way of sovereign rights in the West Bank, as supplemented by a national capital in East Jerusalem and recovery of Gaza linked by corridor to the West Bank. This was the dominant contours of the idea underneath the almost universally promoted ‘two-state solution,’ and earlier provided the basis for the UN partition resolution of 1947 [GA 181, Nov 29, 1947] that was rejected by Palestinians at the time as a division of mandate Palestine decreed by the UN without any legitimating referendum determining the preferences of the residents of Palestine or through the participation on the part of authentic representatives of the Palestinian people in shaping the UN plan. Hence, from Palestinian and Arab perspectives this imposition of partition was regarded as an unacceptable denial of the inalienable Palestinian right of self-determination and by the Zionist Movement as a major victory on the road to Palestinian state, second in importance only to the Balfour Declaration pledging British support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine, an instance of colonial unilateralism.
The Palestinian argument rests on the legal and moral relation of the two peoples as regulated by international humanitarian law and the 4th Geneva Convention governing situations of belligerent occupation that commenced in the aftermath of the 1967 War. The UN has been ineffectual when it comes to addressing the repeated flagrant violations by Israel, which consistently evaded and defied it legal responsibilities as Occupier. This refusal to adhere to its obligation under international law was exhibited in various ways, above all by the establishment and expansion of Jewish settlements, the annexation of the whole of the formerly divided city of Jerusalem, and a reliance on multiple forms of collective punishment. These were the most prominent Israeli and consistent violations, aside from its failure to uphold its primary legal duties specified in the Geneva Convention to respect and leave unaltered the Occupied territory and unconditionally safeguard its inhabitants. Israel never fulfilled the initial widespread expectations on all sides that its occupation of the West Bank in 1967 would be temporary and short-lived. This was the authoritative expectation underpinning the widely heralded unanimous Security Council Resolution 242 adopted unanimously on Nov. 22, 1967. This UN resolution ambitiously and optimistically delimited the conditions for a durable peace: Israeli withdrawal of security forces; peace within secure and recognized boundaries; freedom of navigation; just resolution of ‘refugee problem,’ and security measures including within de facto demilitarized zones.. None of these conditions came to pass because the Israeli state managers of the Zionist Project were determined at some future opportune time to achieve sovereign control of the West Bank, and signaled this intention when comparative weak and insecure only in Hebrew to avoid an international pushback. The names of the West Bank embodied in Jewish traditions involving a return to the so-called ‘promised land’ were ways of keeping faith with dominant strains of Zionist ideology.
2/ What should the Palestinians, and the supporters of their cause in the rest of the world, do to stop the renaming effort?
The Israel overtness in renaming the West Bank as Judea and Samaria indicated an Israeli intention to make these territorial claims overt and to impart active coercive policies to satisfying its remaining territorial and sovereign claims to the West Bank. Such a move in defiance of the UN framework governing Occupation, which was as noted to be accompanied by an expectation of IDF withdrawal, dismantling of the settlements, protection of Palestinian rights.
Governments and media should refuse to follow this Israeli lead as was unfortunately done by the US Government. It is important in contrast to follow the lead of ICJ in its Advisory Opinion of July 19, 2024 in ordering an end to Israel’s prolonged belligerent occupation, not only by an Israel withdrawal of its forces, but also by repudiating any Israeli territorial sovereignty that occurred during its punitive and abusive occupation that has already lasted almost 58 years. Such perceptions of unlawful Israeli administration of the West Bank underlay the ICJ near unanimous and historically important Advisory Opinion that authoritatively set forth Israel’s violation of international norms of belligerent occupation, and placed Israel under a duty to bring to an immediate end its Occupation regime, putting the UN and member governments under a legal obligation to assure that this would happen.
By this internationalization of the Zionist renaming of the West Bank in accordance with its goals, but in opposition to the international consensus is indicative of the confrontation that seems to be the shared intention of Netanyahu and Trump, but if coercively implemented in a substantive manner will further inflame the dire situation facing the Palestinian people who have been subjected to a genocidal ordeal of the past 16 months, and left the Gaza Strip devastated and its people bare survivors of one of the great humanitarian and ecological disasters of modern times. .
Global Justice in the 21st Century 