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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: boris_a who wrote (35020)	7/25/2002 6:26:22 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

So what country is Israel "occupying" according to the Geneva Conventions? Irrelevant. I think that you can hardly quote Geneva Convention statutes that lay out rules for conflicts and occupations between signatory parties, and then claim it is irrelevant that you cannot identify the parties in the conflict! For the statutes to apply, you must identify the parties. So we agree GC having been applicable in 1967 Yes, if it had been an aggressive war on Israel's part, which it wasn't. The GC certainly stopped being applicable to Egypt and Jordan (if it ever had been) when they renounced their claims. The basic problem here is similar to Kashmir, there is a border dispute with a truce line, rather than an agreed border, between the parties. Also, the disputed territory (which in Kashmir, for some reason, no one ever calls occupied) might wind up as an autonomous or independent entity some day. Dore Gold lays out the Israeli position and notes that the US State Department has come down on both sides of the argument at various times. jcpa.org As I said, among known experts for international law you don't find too many defending Israels position. Actually, many legal authorities, including the US authors of UN 242, sided with Israel. UN 242 speaks of "territories occupied by Israel", without demanding the return of "all" the territories, and it calls for secure and recognized borders for all the countries in the region. This is why the Arab countries opposed it bitterly at the time. It is the difference between saying that you need to negotiate a border somewhere inside the territories (the position of UN 242), and that you are a foreign occupier with no right to an inch (the Arab position). The US has never supported the latter position; if it had, it would not have proposed negotiated settlements that left some territory in Israeli hands. There is a semantic distinction that needs to be kept in mind here, between "occupied territories" as a legal term, which I say do not apply, and "occupied territories" as a political term, which Israel allowed to be used under Oslo, very foolishly in my opinion, since it undercut the Israeli position that the conflict is a border dispute.