The Future of Israel’s Borders: International Law and Islamic Law. Part II

Jul 1, 2020 by Jill

by Denis MacEoin, Gatestone Institute:

In part one, we identified several ways in which international bodies, states, and individuals interpret the US-Israeli plan for Israel to extend Israeli law in the ancient Jewish homeland of Judaea and Samaria. There is widespread, and misguided, agreement that such a move would be illegal under international law, which regards occupation and “annexation of territory” in a negative sense.

However, as we have seen, much of this interpretation is based on confusion about the history of the region, the origins of the state of Israel, and the ongoing Palestinian rejection of a state for their own people. It is also a contradiction between Western-inspired international law and earlier Islamic law.

Let us start with a look at the original 1922 League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, a territory designed to be administered by Great Britain until it could emerge as an independent state. Even a brief glance at a map of the territory shows that the Mandate made the whole of Palestine, including Gaza and what is now the West Bank with Judea and Samaria, the region designated for the future Jewish homeland. Writing in Israel Hayom recently, Dr. Dore Gold, former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, argues that this original designation means that it is not appropriate to term Israel’s coming move to place the Jordan Valley of the West Bank an “annexation”. Aggressive annexation of territory through war is, he agrees, unacceptable and illegal — but Israel only entered the West Bank in 1967 during a defensive war.

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