Israel has not only planned to annex West Bank territories of Palestine blatantly violating the international rules, but also it carries on its vile plan of annexing West Bank territories with full support from Washington.But the international community remains fiercely opposed to the unilateral move.
by Anwar A. Khan
Israel is still illegally annexing more of West Bank belongs to Palestine. It represents a violation of international law. But Israel should pull back from illegally annexing much of the West Bank, otherwise it will fail to deliver justice for Palestinians. Even this arrogant posture of Israel hasprovoked an international outcry. Let us now look back a trifle.
In 1947, the United Nations (UN) adopted a Partition Plan for Palestine recommending the creation of independent Arab and Jewish states and an internationalised Jerusalem. The plan was accepted by the Jewish Agency, and rejected by Arab leaders. The following year, the Jewish Agency declared the independence of the State of Israel, and the subsequent 1948 Arab–Israeli War saw Israel's establishment over most of the former Mandate territory, while the West Bank and Gaza were held by neighboring Arab states.
Israel has since fought several wars with Arab countries, and since the Six-Day War in June 1967 held occupied territories including the West Bank, Golan Heights and the Gaza Strip (still considered occupied after the 2005 disengagement, although some legal experts dispute this claim). It fully extended its laws to the Golan Heights and East Jerusalem, and partially to the West Bank via pipelining into Israeli settlements.
Israel's occupation of the Palestinian territories is internationally considered to be the world's longest military occupation in modern times. Efforts to resolve the Israeli–Palestinian conflict have not resulted in a final peace agreement, while Israel has signed peace treaties with both Egypt and Jordan.
In its Basic Laws, Israel defines itself as a Jewish and democratic state and the nation state of the Jewish people. The country has a parliamentary system, proportional representation, and universal suffrage. The prime minister is head of government and the Knesset is the legislature. With a population of around 9 million as of 2019, Israel is a developed country and an OECD member. It has the world's 31st-largest economy by nominal GDP, and is the most developed country currently in conflict. It has the highest standard of living in the Middle East, and ranks among the world's top countries by percentage of citizens with military training, percentage of citizens holding a tertiary education degree, research and development spending by GDP percentage, women's safety, life expectancy, innovativeness, and happiness.
The future of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip has been the focus of talks and negotiation for decades. There are various ways to approach this issue; a one-state solution and a two-state solution have been proposed. The one-state solution proposes the creation of a fully democratic state of Israel and the integration of all the people within its borders into one country. Integration of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank into the Jewish State of Israel is part of this plan; in other words, “Take the walls down and create one state.”
Many Palestinians support the one-state solution, but most of the Jewish population does not. Family size is much larger in the Palestinian side, so it would be only a matter of time before the Jewish population would be a minority population and would not have full political control with a democratic government. To have the Jewish State of Israel, the Jewish population needs to keep its status as the majority.
In a two-state solution, Palestinians would have their own nation-state, which would include the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. The rest of former Palestine would be included in the Jewish State of Israel. The two-nation concept i.e. Israel and a Palestinian state has been proposed and supported by a number of foreign governments. Implementation of a two-state solution is, of course, not without its own inherent problems. At the present time, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip are subjects forcefully under the Jewish State of Israel without full political or economic autonomy. The two-state solution would buy more time for the Jewish population with smaller families to retain power as a majority political voting bloc.
Parties to the negotiations have acknowledged that the most likely solution is to create an Israel state bordering Palestinian. However, it is not clear how to make this happen. Palestine is now divided between the Jewish State of Israel (with 7.3 million people) on one side and the Palestinians (with 4.0 million people) in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip on the other side.
About 75 percent of Israel’s population of 7.3 million people are Jewish, and about 25 percent are Arab. Travel between Israel and the Palestinian areas is heavily restricted and tightly controlled. A high concrete and barbed wire barrier separates the two sides for much of the border. The West Bank provides fresh water used on the Israeli side for agriculture and industrial processes. The industries also employ Palestinians and support them economically.
Jewish people from various parts of the world continue to migrate to Israel, and the Israeli government continues to build housing settlements to accommodate them illegally in the places belong to Palestine. Since the West Bank region is under the Israeli national jurisdiction, many of the new housing settlements have been built in the West Bankblatantly violating the international laws. The Palestinians who live there strongly oppose the settlements.
In 1977, only about five thousand Jews lived in the West Bank settlements. As of 2010 there were more than two hundred thousand. The Palestinians argue that if they were to have their own nation-state, then the Jewish settlements would be in their country and would have to be either resettled or absorbed. Israel responds by indicating that the two-state solution is indefensible because the Jewish settlements in the West Bank cannot be protected if the West Bank is separated from Israel.
The issues in Israel are generally complicated. After a series of wars and considerable negotiations, the central problems remain: Jews and Palestinians both want the same land, both groups want Jerusalem (originally belong to Palestine) to be their capital city, and neither group can find a compromise. Support for the Jewish State of Israel has primarily come from the United States and from Jewish groups external to Israel.
There are more Jews in the United States than there are in Israel, and the US Jewish lobby is powerful. Israel has been the top recipient of US foreign aid for most of the years since 1948. Through charitable donations, US groups provide Israel additional billions of dollars annually. Foreign aid has given the Jewish population in Israel a standard of living that is higher than the standard of living of many European countries.
In the past decade, most of the PLO’s operating budget has come from external sources. Arab neighbours provide millions of dollars annually. Iran has provided aid to the Palestinian cause in support of fellow Muslims against the Jewish State of Israel. The PLO has received the bulk of its funding from the European Union. Russia has also provided millions of dollars in aid.
The Gaza Strip is one of the most densely populated regions on Earth, and it is located in a desert. There are few jobs and no real methods of gaining wealth. Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip or the West Bank need to rely on outside support to survive. These are small areas with lots of people. The West Bank is only about thirty miles wide by seventy-five miles long, yet more than 2.5 million people call it home. The Gaza Strip is a desert region about six miles wide by twenty-three miles long and is home to more than 1.5 million people.
In 2010, family size in the West Bank was about 3.2, and in the Gaza Strip, it was about 5.0. Unemployment rates averaged about 40 percent in the Gaza Strip and over 20 percent in the West Bank. Underemployment is also a major issue in that there may be few employment opportunities for professionals with specialised skills or a university degree in a specific field of interest.
In 2006, both Israel and the PLO held democratic elections for their leaders. In 2006, a candidate from the Hamas party won the election for the leadership of the PLO, which concerned many of the PLO’s external financial supporters. The Israeli government characterises Hamas as a terrorist organization, though Israel itself is a terrorist state which is well known across the world. Hamas has advocated for suicide bombers to blow themselves up on populated Jewish streets. The Jewish State of Israel has been fighting a low-level war against Palestinian resistance groups, such as, Hamas since 1948.
In 2008, the leaders of the Fatah party, which are more prominent in the West Bank region, took matters to the PLO Central Council, which chose Mahmoud Abbas as president of the State of Palestine.
The problems between Israel and Palestinians are far from settled. The region has plenty of interconnected concerns. The biggest supporter of Israel, the United States, invaded Iraq in 2003, an invasion that raised the concern level of Islamic groups in the Middle East, including the Islamic leaders that control the government of Iran. Israel has nuclear weapons, and Iran has worked at developing nuclear weapons. US involvement in the region has heightened tensions between Iran and Israel.
Oil revenues are driving the economies of most of the Arab countries that support the Palestinians. Oil is an important export of the region, with the United States as a major market. The difficulties between Israel and the Palestinians continue to fuel the conflict between Islamic fundamentalists and Islamic reformers. Some Islamic groups have accepted Israel’s status as a country and others have not. The Israel-Palestinian problem drives the geopolitics of the Middle East. The US war in Iraq has complicated the situation. The situation in Palestine is predicted to continue long after the problems in Iraq have stabilised.
When Palestine was divided by the UNone-sidedly onlyto create the State of Israel, the region of Jordan received more than a million Palestinian refugees from the West Bank and Israel. Refugees make up a large portion of the more than six million people who live in Jordan today; about a half million refugees from the US war in Iraq are included in that total.
Israel has not only planned to annex West Bank territories of Palestine blatantly violating the international rules, but also it carries on its vile plan of annexing West Bank territories with full support from Washington.But the international community remains fiercely opposed to the unilateral move.
Palestinian leader Abbas has slammed Trump's peace plan at UN. The Palestinian state envisioned by the Trump-backed peace plan looks like "Swiss cheese," Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said, decrying the initiative at the UN and saying it sides with Israel on nearly all issues.
The only way it can be achieved is for both sides to return to the negotiating table. That must be goal for both Israel and Palestine. Annexation would only take the two countries further away from achieving peace for both the nations.
-The End –
The writer is an independent political observer based in Dhaka, Bangladesh who writes on politics, political and human-centred figures, current and international affairs.
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