{"id":164861,"date":"2020-07-13T12:00:18","date_gmt":"2020-07-13T11:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=164861"},"modified":"2024-06-12T21:25:11","modified_gmt":"2024-06-12T20:25:11","slug":"on-israels-bizarre-definitions-the-west-bank-is-already-annexed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2020\/07\/on-israels-bizarre-definitions-the-west-bank-is-already-annexed\/","title":{"rendered":"On Israel\u2019s Bizarre Definitions: The West Bank Is Already Annexed"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Thousands of Palestinians rally in the besieged Gaza Strip in protest of Israel’s annexation plan. (Photo: Fawzi Mahmoud, The Palestine Chronicle)<\/p><\/div>\n

8 Jul 2020 – <\/em>Wednesday, July 1, was meant to be the day on which the Israeli government officially annexed 30% of the occupied Palestinian West Bank and the Jordan Valley. This date, however, came and went and annexation was never actualized.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t know if there will be a declaration of sovereignty today,\u201d\u00a0said<\/a>\u00a0Israeli Foreign Minister, Gabi Ashkenazi, with reference to the self-imposed deadline declared earlier by Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. An alternative date was not immediately announced.<\/p>\n

But does it really matter?<\/p>\n

Whether Israel\u2019s illegal appropriation of Palestinian land takes place with massive media fanfare and a declaration of sovereignty, or whether it happens incrementally over the course of the coming days, weeks, and months, Israel has, in reality, already annexed the West Bank \u2013 not just 30% of it but, in fact, the whole area.<\/p>\n

It is critical that we understand such terms as \u2018annexation\u2019, \u2018illegal\u2019, \u2018military occupation\u2019, and so on, in their proper contexts.<\/p>\n

For example, international law\u00a0deems<\/a>\u00a0that all of Israel\u2019s Jewish settlements, constructed anywhere on Palestinian land occupied during the 1967 war, are illegal.<\/p>\n

Interestingly, Israel, too, uses the term \u2018illegal\u2019 with reference to settlements, but only to \u2018outposts<\/a>\u2019 that have been erected in the occupied territories without the permission of the Israeli government.<\/p>\n

In other words, while in the Israeli lexicon the vast majority of all settlement activities in occupied Palestine are \u2018legal\u2019, the rest can only be legalized through official channels. Indeed, many of today\u2019s \u2018legal\u2019 132 settlements in the West Bank and Jerusalem,\u00a0housing<\/a>\u00a0over half a million Israeli Jewish settlers, began as \u2018illegal outposts\u2019.<\/p>\n

Though this logic may satisfy the need of the Israeli government to ensure its relentless colonial project in Palestine follows a centralized blueprint, none of this matters in international law.<\/p>\n

Article 49<\/a>\u00a0of the Fourth Geneva Conventions states that \u201cIndividual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory to the territory of the Occupying Power or to that of any other country, occupied or not, are prohibited, regardless of their motive\u201d, adding that \u201cThe Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.\u201d<\/p>\n

Israel has violated its commitment to international law as an \u2018Occupying Power\u2019 on numerous occasions, rendering its very \u2018occupation\u2019 of Palestine, itself, a violation of how military occupations are conducted \u2013 which are meant to be temporary, anyway.<\/p>\n

Military occupation is different from annexation. The former is a temporary transition, at the end of which the \u2018Occupying Power\u2019 is expected, in fact, demanded, to relinquish its military hold on the occupied territory after a fixed length of time. Annexation, on the other hand, is a stark violation of the Geneva Conventions and the Hague Regulations. It is tantamount to a war crime, for the occupier is strictly prohibited from proclaiming unilateral sovereignty over occupied land.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0international uproar<\/a>\u00a0generated by Netanyahu\u2019s plan to annex a third of the West Bank is fully understandable. But the bigger issue at stake is that, in practice, Israel\u2019s violations of the terms of occupation have granted it a de facto annexation of the whole of the West Bank.<\/p>\n

So when the European Union, for example, demands that Israel abandons its annexation plans, it is merely asking Israel to re-embrace the status quo ante, that of de facto annexation. Both abhorring scenarios should be rejected.<\/p>\n

Israel began utilizing the occupied territories as if they are contiguous and permanent parts of so-called Israel proper, immediately following the June 1967 war. Within a few years, it erected illegal settlements, now thriving cities, eventually moving hundreds of thousands of its own citizens to populate the newly acquired areas.<\/p>\n

This exploitation became more sophisticated with time, as Palestinians were subjected to slow, but irreversible, ethnic cleansing. As Palestinian homes\u00a0were destroyed<\/a>, farms\u00a0confiscated<\/a>, and entire regions\u00a0depopulated<\/a>, Jewish settlers moved in to take their place. The post-1967 scenario was a repeat of the post-1948 history, which led to the establishment of the State of Israel on the ruins of historic Palestine.<\/p>\n

Moshe Dayan, who served as Israel\u2019s Defense Minister during the 1967 war, explained the Israeli logic best in a historical address at Israel\u2019s Technion University in March 1969. \u201cWe came to this country which was already populated by Arabs, and we are establishing a Hebrew, that is a Jewish state here,\u201d he\u00a0said<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cJewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you, because these geography books no longer exist; not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there, either \u2026 There is no one place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n

The same colonial approach was applied to East Jerusalem and the West Bank after the war. While East Jerusalem\u00a0was formally annexed<\/a>\u00a0in 1980, the West Bank was annexed in practice, but not through a clear legal Israeli proclamation. Why? In one word: demographics.<\/p>\n

When Israel first occupied East Jerusalem, it went on a population transfer frenzy: moving its own population to the Palestinian city, strategically expanding the municipal boundaries of Jerusalem to include as many Jews and as few Palestinians as possible, slowly reducing the Palestinian population of Al Quds through numerous tactics, including the revocation of residency and outright ethnic cleansing.<\/p>\n

And, thus, Jerusalem\u2019s Palestinian population, which once constituted the absolute majority, has now been reduced to a dwindling minority.<\/p>\n

The same process was initiated in parts of the West Bank, but due to the relatively large size of the area and population, it was not possible to follow a similar annexation stratagem without jeopardizing Israel\u2019s drive to maintain Jewish majority.<\/p>\n

Dividing<\/a> the West Bank into Areas A, B, and C as a result of the disastrous Oslo accords has given Israel a lifeline, for this allowed it to increase settlement activities in Area C \u2013 nearly 60% of the West Bank \u2013 without stressing too much about demographic imbalances. Area C, where the current annexation plan is set to take place, is ideal for Israeli colonialism, for it includes Palestine\u2019s most arable, resource-rich, and sparsely populated lands.<\/p>\n

It matters little whether the annexation will have a set date or will take place progressively through Israel\u2019s declarations of sovereignty over smaller chunks of the West Bank in the future. The fact is, annexation is not a new Israeli political agenda dictated by political circumstances in Tel Aviv and Washington. Rather, annexation has been the ultimate Israeli colonial objective from the very onset.<\/p>\n

Let us not get entangled in Israel\u2019s bizarre definitions. The truth is that Israel rarely behaves as an \u2018Occupying Power\u2019, but as a sovereign in a country where racial discrimination and apartheid are not only tolerated or acceptable but are, in fact, \u2018legal\u2019 as well.<\/p>\n

__________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em>Dr. Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and editor of <\/em>The Palestine Chronicle. His last book is <\/em>The Last Earth: A Palestinian Story (Pluto Press, London) and his forthcoming book is <\/em>These Chains Will Be Broken: Palestinian Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons (Clarity Press, Atlanta). Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA), Istanbul Zaim University (IZU). His website is <\/em>www.ramzybaroud.net<\/a><\/em>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 ramzybaroud.net<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

8 Jul 2020 – The fact is, annexation is not a new Israeli political agenda dictated by political circumstances in Tel Aviv and Washington. Rather, annexation has been the ultimate Israeli colonial objective from the very onset.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":164862,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[120,1829,1030,87,267,1029,487,2395,88,771,1027,427,85,109,287,1572,985,880,292,70,126,1025,886],"class_list":["post-164861","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-palestine-israel-gaza-genocide","tag-conflict","tag-coronavirus","tag-fatah","tag-gaza","tag-geopolitics","tag-hamas","tag-human-rights","tag-international-criminal-court-icc","tag-israel","tag-nakba","tag-oslo-accords","tag-palestine","tag-palestine-israel","tag-politics","tag-power","tag-settlers","tag-social-justice","tag-state-terrorism","tag-un","tag-usa","tag-violence","tag-west-bank","tag-zionism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164861","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=164861"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164861\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":264267,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164861\/revisions\/264267"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/164862"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=164861"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=164861"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=164861"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}