Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs Website, accessed 13/08/2009


“Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, are illegal and an obstacle to peace and to economic and social development [... and] have been established in breach of international law.”

International Court of Justice Ruling, July 9, 2004

It’s difficult knowing who to believe, isn’t it? On one side we have Israel and the Anti-Defamation League; on the other we have, well, everybody else. Perhaps that statement leans slightly towards the hyperbolic, but the fact remains that no-one has fought a longer, harder or lonelier battle to prove that Israel’s occupation of Palestine is not in fact an occupation of Palestine, than Israel and those closest to her.

Even as Israel’s economic, scientific and cultural achievements are recognised around the world, her military presence in Palestine in unwaveringly and overwhelmingly characterised and defined as an occupation, and its settlements condemned. It is Israel’s unique interpretation of international law, and in particular of the Fourth Geneva Convention, that sees her arguing for the legality of settlements in the West Bank.

Yet according to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, “in the spirit of compromise and in an attempt to take constructive confidence building measures in the peace process, successive Israeli governments have expressly recognized the need for territorial compromise in West Bank and Gaza Strip territory and have voluntary adopted a freeze on the building of new settlements.”¹ What they fail to mention is that this spirit of compromise has a six month expiry date on it, and does not apply to building projects already underway. According to Haaretz, this means the construction of up to several thousand housing units will go ahead.² The expiry date, as it turns out, may have already come and gone – the international community, including the US, was unequivocal in its condemnation of the eviction of nine Palestinian families from their homes in East Jerusalem two weeks ago. Jewish families had moved into the building within hours.³ Is this how Israel will honour its pledge to build no new settlements?

The Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits an occupying power from transferring its civilian population into the occupied territory. Therefore based on customary international law, and according to the United Nations which has repeatedly defined and referred to the West Bank and Gaza as ‘The Occupied Palestinian Territories’, the settlements have no legal basis. This is a view shared by the European Union,⁴ the United Kingdom Government,⁵ the International Committee of the Red Cross,⁶ and according to the BBC, the international community as a whole.⁷

The arguments used by Israel to legitimise its settlements predominantly stem from their interpretation of the Geneva Conventions. It is the Fourth Geneva Convention, and two paragraphs contained within it that have been the primary focus of dispute. Article 2 states that “[t]he present Convention shall apply to all cases of declared war or of any other armed conflict which may arise between two or more of the High Contracting Parties” and “all cases of partial or total occupation of the territory of a High Contracting Party”. Israel denies this article applies to Gaza and The West Bank because the territories have not been part of a sovereign state since the defeat of the Ottoman Empire. They also maintain that Article 49, which deals with the transfer of a civilian population into the occupied area, only covers ‘forcible transfers’ (49(1)), and does not apply in the West Bank as Israeli settlers have moved there voluntarily. Article 49(6) however, plainly and unambiguously states that “The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies”. Despite their insistence on the precise wording of the Conventions in all other areas, here, with semantic avenues exhausted, they abandon their belief in the immutability of the text and talk instead about context: this passage apparently was only a response to the forcible migrations of World War II.