Reply #49: A Legal Opinion By A Court With Jurisdiction, Ma'am, Is The State Of The Law On The Matter [View All]

[The Magistrate]

Whether one agrees with it or not is of no consequence. Any future court proceeding, certainly any international court proceeding, touching on this question, will commence by consulting this opinion, and will take it as precedent regarding the applicability of the Geneva Conventions to the areas over-run in '67, and Israeli actions in administering them.

None of the points you raise, and we are in agreement over many of them, has any applicability to the question of whether the Geneva Accords apply to Israeli administration of the area and people over-run in '67. Israel has every right to exercise a military occupation of that area and people, but it has an obligation in doing so to abide by the laws governing military occupation, and there is now in existence a court ruling that defines the extent of these laws, that removes much legal question over which were applicable.

Your statement that Israel can annex these areas if it chooses to is simply wrong as a matter of law. That annexations were engaged in as recently as 1945 under conditions of force majeur does not alter this: the state of internation law today, and at the time of the '67 fighting, forbids acquisition of territory in war, and contains no exemption for territory over-run in the course of a war conducted in legitimate self-defense.

The borders of Israel between '49 and '67 received de facto recognition when Israel was accepted as a member state of the United Nations in 1949. This unavoidably recognized Israeli sovereignty over signifigant areas of land originally envisioned as part of the Arab Zone in the '47 Partition, and to question the standing of the borders at that time is to open a debate you probably would rather not see treated seriously, namely the legitimacy of Israeli rule in those portions of that country. But if you raise the notion of Israel's borders not being quite fixed with an eye to expanding them further, you necessarily put into play the view that they could be contracted to no more than those areas designated as the Jewish Zone by the '47 Partition of the Palestine Mandate, on the same ground.

In the portions of the originally envisioned Arab Zone that remain outside the boundaries of Israel in place on its admission to the U.N., it is hard to see that anyone has a right to exercise sovereignty other than what political leadership the people of Arab Palestine should choose, however foolishly or well and by what whatever means, to accept at its head. That was certainly the intention of the United Nations when it partitioned the territory that was its to dispose of as it saw fit in '47. Claims by Jordan and Egypt to sovereignty over portions of the original Arab Zone were roundly rejected in the period between '49 and '67. Rightful military occupation does not convey sovereign title to the occupier.