What is the issue?

• The United States (US) Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that the US no longer thinks Israeli settlements in the West Bank violate the international law.
• The new US view is different from that of most countries’ on this issue.

What are the West Bank settlements?

• After the 1948 Arab-Israeli War the West Bank, a patch of a land about one and a half times the size of Goa, was captured by Jordan.
• Israel snatched it back during the Six Day War of 1967, and has occupied it ever since.
• It has built some 130 formal settlements in the West Bank, and a similar number of smaller, informal settlements have mushroomed over the last 20-25 years.
• Over 4 lakh Israeli settlers now live here, along with some 26 lakh Palestinians.
• These settlers are mostly religious Zionists who claim a Biblical birthright over this land.
• [Religious Zionists – People who follow the ideology that combines Zionism and Orthodox Judaism.]

Are these Israeli settlements illegal?

• To the vast majority of the world’s nations, yes.
• The United Nations General Assembly, the UN Security Council, and the International Court of Justice have said that the West Bank settlements are violative of the fourth Geneva Convention (1949).
• Under this Convention, an occupying power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.
• Under the Rome Statute that set up the International Criminal Court in 1998, such transfers constitute war crimes.
• This is so as the extensive destruction and appropriation of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly.
• Under the Oslo Accords of the 1990s, both Israel and the Palestinians agreed that the status of settlements would be decided by negotiations.
• But the negotiations process has been dead for several years now.
• Israel walked into East Jerusalem in 1967, and subsequently annexed it. For Israel, Jerusalem is non-negotiable.
• The Palestinians want East Jerusalem as the capital of their future state. Most of the world’s nations look at it as occupied territory.

What was the American stand earlier?

• In 1978, when Jimmy Carter was President, the State Department concluded that the Israeli settlements were inconsistent with international law.
• In 1981, President Ronald Reagan said that he do not agree - even though the establishment of new Israeli communities in Palestinian territory was indeed “unnecessarily provocative”.
• Thereafter, the US took the line that the settlements were illegitimate, not illegal and blocked UN resolutions condemning Israel for them.
• In 2016, President Barack Obama broke with this policy and the US did not veto a resolution that called for an end to Israeli settlements.
• In November 2019, Pompeo said that they had carefully studied all sides of the legal debate and their administration agrees with President Reagan.
• He also said that the establishment of Israeli civilian settlements in the West Bank is not per se inconsistent with international law.

What impact will the change have?

• Those who support the right of Israelis to settle in the West Bank are likely to see the decision as an endorsement.
• It will boost Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has promised sweeping annexations in the West Bank.
• However, Pompeo did not come out as directly backing the settlers.
• He said that there will never be a judicial resolution to this conflict and arguments about who is right and wrong as a matter of international law will not bring peace.
• He also said that this is a complex political problem that can only be solved by negotiations.

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Quick Facts

Oslo Accords 1993

• The Oslo Accords or Agreement is an agreement signed between the State of Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1993.
• It was meant to effectively bring the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to its end by means of territorial concessions and facilitating the creation of the Palestinian Authority.
• This accord is a milestone in Israeli-Palestinian relations as this is the first time they both formally recognized one another.