'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Olmert pokes finger in Annapolis's eye

In a clear challenge to the agreements reached in Annapolis, the Israeli government yesterday announced its plan to build more than 300 new homes in the east Jerusalem settlement of Har Homa. At Annapolis, the two parties reaffirmed their agreement to comply with the steps laid out by the 2002 Road Map while they negotiate their final peace agreement. One of the provisions of the Road Map is a halt to building in the Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

According to that AP news report linked to there Olmert's spokesman, Mark Regev, said yesterday,

"Israel makes a clear distinction between the West Bank and Jerusalem... Israel has never made a commitment to limit our sovereignty in Jerusalem. Implementation of the first phase of the road map does not apply to Jerusalem."

Well, Israel may make a "clear distinction" between the West Bank and Jerusalem, but the rest of the world does not. The rest of the world considers East Jerusalem to be part of the West Bank and, like the rest of the West Bank, to be occupied territory.

Therefore, the moves that successive Israeli governments have taken over the years to (1) unilaterally expand the boundaries of Jerusalem; (2) implant hundreds of thousands of Israeli settlers-- and because of the role of various all-Jewish Quangos in this process, these settlers are only Jewish Israelis-- into new housing developments built exclusively for them there; (3) implant several headquarters complexes for Israeli government bodies; and (4) re-define the Jews-only settlements in East Jerusalem as merely "neighborhoods", like any other neighborhoods in a city-- all these steps have been illegal under the Fourth Geneva Convention.

In the context of a peace settlement the base-line position in international law is that all these steps should be reversed. If Israel wants to not reverse any of them, it should negotiate that non-reversal with the Palestinians and any other interested parties.

(In the UN Partition Plan of 1947, the whole of an even larger Jerusalem-- east and west-- was supposed to have been a special international zone, being administered as a "separate body" from both the Jewish state and the Arab state planned for Mandate Palestine.)

The US government's position on the status of East Jerusalem has become increasingly slippery over the years. Several recent US presidents, including Bill Clinton, have said they don't necessarily see settlement-building in East Jerusalem as illegal, though US presidential and State Department spokespeople usually bend themselves into pretzels rather than give a definitive answer on this question. And of course, in his infamous April 2004 letter, Pres. G.W. Bush told PM Sharon that he thought the large existing settlement blocs in the West Bank should stay under Israeli control. (And by extension that could be thought to apply also to the E. Jerusalem settlements.)

In taking these increasingly pro-Israeli positions on Jerusalem, US presidents have nearly always been under strong pressure from the US Congress, where AIPAC and its associated group of pro-Israeli lobbying groups have had great success in "selling" the idea that the expanded Greater Jerusalem should remain under Israeli control forever. As, too, that the US administration should move its embassy in Israel which, like the embassies of nearly all the other governments in the world has always been "diplomatically" been located in Tel Aviv, to a site in East Jerusalem.

But the last time I checked, neither the US Congress nor the US administration had any mandate from the rest of the international community to be able to issue authoritative judgments on the status of Jerusalem. Am I wrong?

... And in related news, President Bush has announced that he will make a trip to the Middle East in January, and he is highly likely to visit both Israel and Palestine while he is there... And the Israeli military has announced it has completed the planning for a "large offensive" in Gaza.

Will all these things be happening at the same time? Will the Israelis stage a repeat in Gaza of their stunningly "successful" (irony alert there, folks!) July 2006 assault against Hizbullah in Lebanon? Will Bush use his visit to the region to urge the international community, as Rice did in July 2006, to "give Israel the time it needs to complete the job"?

God help the people of Gaza and God help all of us if this is what is planned. An all-out Israeli assault on Gaza would sink the few remaining hopes any of us has that the "two-state" outcome aimed for at Annapolis will ever come to pass.