Jews Down Under An online magazine for Australian Jews
Press release from the ECAJ – Executive Council of Australian Jewry.
Press Release from the Department of Culture and Information of the PLO Executive Committee. The document contains several false assertions about international law by Professor of English literature, Dr Hanan Ashrawi.
PLO Executive Committee Department of Culture and Information
January 19, 2014
Dr. Ashrawi condemns recent statements by Australian Foreign Minister,Julie Bishop.
Today PLO Executive Committee member and head of the PLO Department of Culture and Information, Dr. Hanan Ashrawi, strongly denounced Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop’s statements that questioned the illegality of settlements and called for the international community to refrain from labeling settlements illegal under international law:
“I would like to remind the Australian government that in accordance with international human rights law and international humanitarian law, all settlements are illegal. Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention and Article 43 of the Hague Regulations, among other international conventions, explicitly state that Israel is in direct violation of international law with its illegal settlement activities.”
“Moreover, in March 2013, a United Nations Human Rights Council fact finding mission concluded that Israel has an obligation under international law not to transfer its own population into Palestine. The report explicitly stated that ‘the Rome Statute establishes the ICC’s jurisdiction over the deportation or transfer, directly or indirectly, by the occupying power of parts of its own population into the territory it occupies, or the deportation or transfer of all or parts of the population of the occupied territory within or outside this territory.'”
Dr. Ashrawi stressed,
“Such dangerous shifts in Australian foreign policy positions and Australia’s willful defiance of international consensus send a clear message to both the international community and to the Palestinians that Australia is more committed to supporting Israel’s annexation of Palestinian land than backing any peace resolution that ends the military occupation of Palestine and calls for the creation of an independent Palestinian state on 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital.”
“We strongly urge the government of Australia to clarify its official position regarding settlements and to act in accordance with the global rule of law and international consensus. Australia should join the international community in upholding international law and human rights and in observing 2014 as the International Year of Solidarity with the Palestinian People,” concluded Dr. Ashrawi.
Clarification by the ECAJ
“Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention and Article 43 of the Hague Regulations, among other international conventions, explicitly state that Israel is in direct violation of international law with its illegal settlement activities.”
In fact, neither the Fourth Geneva Convention nor the Hague Regulations make any explicit or other reference to Israel at all. The Hague Regulations date back to 1907, more than 40 years before the State of Israel was established. The PLO statement is a disingenuous way of making a contentious claim about the legality of the settlements appear to be an incontrovertible truth.
Even among eminent international lawyers, there are numerous, diverse opinions about the legality of the settlements, but there has never been a definitive determination of the issue by a court. The ICJ Advisory Opinion in 2004 was just that, a non-binding “opinion”, and not legally determinative.
Because the term “settlements” is used loosely to describe a number of different situations (including unauthorised “outposts” which Israel itself characterises as illegal under Israeli law), it is possible that different settlements have a different status in international law (see 2 below).
Under agreements entered into between Israel and the PLO, the issue of Israeli settlements in the West Bank will be resolved by the delimitation of a final border in a negotiated agreement. According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (August 2009), the territory lying between Israel’s security barrier and the pre-1967 “Green Line” accounts for only 8.5% of the total area of the West Bank (including East Jerusalem).
Approximately 85% of Israeli ‘settlers’ live within that 8.5% area, and all settlement construction activity, authorized by Israel, takes place there. In 2008, Israel’s then Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, presented the Palestinians with a comprehensive peace proposal including a map with a proposed border which, including land within pre-1967 Israel, would have granted a Palestinian state land the equivalent of 100% of the West Bank and Gaza. There has never been a similarly definitive counter-proposal from the Palestinian side. It is the Palestinian refusal to recognise Israel as a Jewish state, as expressly endorsed by the UN partition resolution in 1947 and the entre architecture of international diplomacy ever since – which is based on the principle of ‘two States for two peoples’ – rather than the settlements issue, that is the real obstacle to peace.
”all (sic) settlements are illegal”
Professor James Crawford, who is one of Australia’s (and the world’s) most eminent international lawyers and is generally critical of Israeli policies, published a legal Opinion in 2012 in which he concluded that some of the settlements, such as the Nahal settlements, are “probably lawful”.
“A United Nations Human Rights Council fact finding mission…“
The UN Human Rights Council has forfeited any claim to impartiality and objectivity with regard to Israel. The Council’s obsessive bias against Israel has been publicly condemned by both Ban Ki Moon and his predecessor as UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan.
For many years, the UN General Assembly has annually and routinely passed approximately 20 one-sided resolutions condemning Israel for alleged violations of international law in the West Bank. No other country in the world is singled out in any comparable way. This shameful process occurs both in the plenary session of the General Assembly and in five of its main committees which are supposed to deal respectively with Disarmament and International Security, Economic and Financial questions, Social, Humanitarian and Cultural issues, Special Political and Decolonization subjects and Administrative and Budgetary issues.
Apart from the rank hypocrisy of the situation in which gross human rights offenders such as Sudan, North Korea, Iran and Syria lead the charge in castigating the open and democratic State of Israel for alleged human rights violations, there is a very real problem with the one-sidedness of the resolutions themselves, and their failure to demand reciprocity from the Palestinians and their leaders.
The terms of the resolutions in question have barely altered from year to year and Australia’s objections to them, as recorded in previous years, remain valid. The one-sided and non-reciprocal nature of the resolutions in effect rewards and encourages the Palestinians’ non-compliance with the various agreements to which they have subscribed. It also encourages elements within the UN and EU which are openly hostile to Israel to continue their one-sided, out-of-context criticisms of the Israeli government. These resolutions therefore also make it more difficult to secure public support among Israelis and Palestinians for the painful concessions that peace will ultimately require from both sides.
These resolutions ostensibly seek to promote the international rule of law but because their terms are unmistakeably polemical and one-sided, the effect is the opposite. As Australian representatives have observed in providing the government’s Explanations of Vote at previous Committee sessions, these resolutions pre-empt, and thus impede the achievement of, a negotiated two-state solution to the conflict, and thus do nothing to advance or enhance the prospects of a just and lasting peace.
“Australia’s wilful defiance of international consensus”.
There is no such consensus. A majority is not a consensus, especially if it is an automatic, unthinking majority that includes the 56 states of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference and other States which are dependent on them for oil or financially. A consensus can only exist if there are no dissenters. The UN Human Rights Council’s annual ritual of passing anti-Israel resolutions is so repellent that each resolution attracts ‘no’ votes from several democratic countries each year. Australia is a sovereign nation with a democratically elected government that makes its own decisions according to its own assessment of Australia’s national interests. Ashrawi’s attempt to bully Australia with the spectre of a non-existent “international consensus” can and should be treated with the contempt it deserves.
Her boyfriend, Bob, probably had a hand in this. We all know what a great friend of Israel he is.
No doubt. He probably rubbed his hands with glee like the other leftists on the death of Sharon
…And we care what Dr Ashrawi thinks? I don’t think so.
Julia, actually the recent pronouncements by PLO officials, including Ashrawi, Abbas et al have been so almost explicit in expressing what amounts to their rejection of “the two-state solution” that even the most naïve , moronic or posturing Jewish sympathiser would have to start tearing his/her hair out in despair .
The PLO has become very unguarded in its public comments because, given international sympathy for its cause ( Israel’s phased dissolution), it thinks it has Israel on the ropes.
Hamas thinks Israel has only eight years of life left.
In Yiddish there is an expression which is applicable to Israel’s enemies: in translation to New Yorkese it goes ” They should live so long.”
To be ….fair I think that the palestinian sympathy camp is shrinking internationally quite seriously. In Australia, for example, is seen only among the VERY fringes of politics. The Greens chant their mantra only as a tired reflex, Labor would criticise ANYTHING the Gov. does or says. The so called “popular” support for any causes with the slightest ME association which relate to any kind of violence, aggressiveness, public disply of attachment to bellicose causes in the ME, such as Syria, Irak etc. is received by the fair minded Australian with the disgust they deserve. The street marches manned by the ME mobs we have seen and last we have NOT seen , were cancelled after displays of what is called extremme UNAUSTRALIAN behaviour.
The faint echoes of some Sydney Uni. schlemil of solidarity with a lost cause are but the ONLY issue we would “debate” on sites such as this one.
SBS and ABC news still hark to their traditional unballanced presentations all to an audience at least indifferent.
To be honest, there is no much meat left on the bones of pro-palestinian contentions locally.
IT IS, of course, their persistence in fronting up some of the most absurd arguments, some of the most unrealistic and vile claims, the propensity for falsehood in EVERYTHING they put together. Ashrawi has not changed her tone/ deaf tune in decades. Like ALL her cohorts, she is vastly irrelevant and ignored.
Under these circumstances it is only natural, logical and VERY smart for Israel to continue her policy of positive Jewish stands on solid bases both historical and currently strategic.
Sure the word “settlement” has been painted in the most horrific colours by the sworn enemies of ANYTHING Jewish, but decent folk, like 99.99% of Australians, have learnt from ASSOCIATED events, such as the incredible aggressiveness, propensity vor violent behaviour in the same camp as the oponenets of the settelements, that the cardinal purpose of the anti-settlement “movement” has NOTHING to do with rights and the violation of them by the Jews, but with the much grander plan of universal domination by a philosophy and associated political/terrorist strategy of changing our way of life to the standards represented by the RUINS in which their world is crumbling under our very own eyes.Each night we are presented with images of terrible destruction in the lands where Ashrawi’s real army functions. Syria, Irak, Afganistan are theatres of human tragedy carried out by fanatics with REAL connections right here, in our own subburban sites. This is the dependable audience Ashrawi is addressing. These are the people incited by her rhetoric and some brainless so called Federal opposition falls for it !!!
The choice is clear for any realistic, decent observer and they can see that the palestinian activists of hate are sinking lower by the day in their own infinite existential misery.