Housing prices in Israel, where we live, have risen by a large percentage this past year. It’s probably not just a local phenomenon. The COVID pandemic has resulted in prices for materials going up. Also labor costs have risen. The de facto failure of the Palestinian Authority to implement any unified vaccination program means that there are fewer Palestinian workers on Israeli construction sites. There are also fewer foreign workers from other countries that have been able to come to Israel . That affects construction as well as agriculture.
One part of a possible solution to the problem of demand for new housing being so much greater than the supply created by new construction is the recent approval of the Israeli government for several thousand new homes in towns and villages that have been termed “settlements” in the press. “Settlements is an emotionally charged word. It conjures pictures of “Jewish settlers” evicting Palestinian Arabs from the land where this construction is going to take place. American (and other) governmental opposition to the action has appeared in many international media outlets recently. Most of them term the “settlements” as “illegal under international law”. But is that really true?
The United Nations has condemned Israeli actions and even got an advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice to support that position. As with many other items in the headlines, there are underlying assumptions that may make the reported position either questionable, or outright false. Here are a few things to consider:
The advisory position from the court never took into consideration anything that occurred before 1967. The entire Israeli claim to sovereignty over the “West Bank” is based on International agreements dating before 1967. Specifically; The League of Nations Mandate to Great Britain and France to govern the former Turkish provinces that are now Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, and Israel stated specifically that what was then termed Palestine was to be a homeland for Jews. The British separated all of what is Jordan today, and some smaller tracts that became parts of Lebanon and Syria, and handed them over to the French without getting the required approval of the League of Nations. The section given to what is now Syria included the entire Golan Heights (now a part of Israel). This all occurred before the United Nations Resolution that called for separating the remainder of Palestine into a Jewish AND an Arab state. That resolution was NOT a mandatory resolution. It was advisory. I would also dd that the Arab side totally rejected it.
The war that followed in 1948-49 ended with a series of cease-fire agreements that established lines that did not have the standing of an international border. The intent was that they would be replaced by peace treaties between the various parties that would specify where the borders should be. This has happened in the cases of Israel and Egypt, and Israel and Jordan. No Arab state has ever been established for the Palestinian Arabs. Their territory was “annexed” by Jordan (and Gaza was “occupied” by Egypt). The partition between those area and Israel remained a cease-fie line, NOT a border.
The American position that calls the territory taken over by Israel in 1967 as “occupied” is, quite simply, wrong. Israel did not capture land that belonged to another country. Jordan backed away from her claim of annexation and today recognizes a border that does not include the areas under the control of Israel and the Palestinian Authority. The Israel-Egypt treaty leaves the Gaza strip outside Egyptian territory. There is , so far, no treaty between Israel and the Palestinians, That means there is no border defined between those two entities (even though both claim ALL the land, and both purport to support a “two state solution”).
This has already grown to be much too long, so I’ll continue examining this problem in another post.
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Wetherhorn 