Friday 31 January 2014

Colin Rubenstein letter: 31/1 Bishop right on Israel

Bishop right on Israel
COMMENTS by Foreign Minister Julie Bishop in which she refrained from branding Israel's settlements as illegal have drawn considerable adverse reaction ("Israeli lawyers caution Bishop", 27/1). However, Ms Bishop was right, in law and as an expression of Australia's bipartisan support for a two-state resolution.
Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention -- the provision usually cited as supposedly making the settlements illegal -- prohibits a country from transferring its population to land it occupies. However, it is arguable both that this applies only to forced transfers or deportations, not voluntary ones, and that, in any case, by the plain text of the convention itself, it does not apply to the West Bank. This is because it applies only to land taken from another signatory country that had the legal right to it. Jordan's occupation of the West Bank prior to 1967 was illegal.
So when Ms Bishop says "I would like to see what international law has declared them illegal", she is on solid ground, backed by numerous eminent international law authorities.
But even more important than the legal argument is her policy one: "I don't think it's helpful to prejudge the settlement issue if you're trying to get a negotiated solution."
It is widely accepted, even by the Arab League, that there will be land swaps as part of any peace deal, and this can resolve the settlement issue.
However, peace will arrive only through genuine bilateral negotiations focusing on all contentious issues but also depends on the Palestinians genuinely tackling issues such as continued incitement to hatred and violence and the refusal to recognise Israel as a Jewish state.
Colin Rubenstein, executive director, Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council, South Melbourne, Vic

various interesting re Julie Bishop / Int Law / Israel

  1. Greg Sheridan was right! About Julie Bishop that is… | Crikey

    www.crikey.com.au/.../greg-sheridan-was-right-about-julie-bish...

    May 26, 2010 - Bishop: “It would be naive to think that Israel was the only country in the world that has used forged passports, including Australian passports, ...

  2. Australia is right to challenge the UN's anti-Israel bias - The Guardian

    www.theguardian.com/.../australia-is-right-to-challenge-the-uns-anti-isra...

    Nov 27, 2013 - When foreign minister Julie Bishop announced that Australia would once again support Israel at the United Nations general assembly in order ...

  1. Julie Bishop right on Israel | Zionist Council of NSW

    www.zionistcouncil.com.au/julie-bishop-right-on/
    5 days ago - We are proud Australians, especially on Australia Day – and Julie Bishophas done us particularly proud with her postive contribution regarding ...
  2. Israeli lawyers caution Bishop | The Australian

    www.theaustralian.com.au/.../israeli...bishop/story-fn59nm2j-122681085...
    4 days ago - A GROUP of eminent Israelis has urged Australia to continue to support... damage to the fundamental rights and wellbeing of the Palestinians.
  3. Bishop's troubling stance on legality of Israeli settlements - The Age

    www.theage.com.au/.../bishops-troubling-stance-on-legality-of-israeli-set...
    Jan 18, 2014 - Bishop's troubling stance on legality of Israeli settlements ... Given the delicacy of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations and Australia's considerable investment of blood and treasure in ... Right's dangerous habit of targeting Europe.
  4. Australia's FM Julie Bishop Encourages Illegal Israeli Settlements ...

    nsnbc.me/.../australias-fm-julie-bishop-encourages-illegal-israeli-settleme...
    Jan 17, 2014 - Australia's Foreign Minister, Julie Bishop, called on "The ... Bank as illegal, claiming that Israel has the right to build its settlements, reports the ...

The Oz: 31/1 Geneva's just another front in the stalemated Syrian civil war

Geneva's just another front in the stalemated Syrian civil war

UN-Arab League envoy for Syria Lakhdar Brahimi conceded the talks were likely to go nowhere this week.
UN-Arab League envoy for Syria Lakhdar Brahimi conceded the talks were likely to go nowhere this week.Source: AFP
SYRIAN peace talks - like the civil war itself - have hit a stalemate. Although Syrians and world powers had few illusions this conference would halt the country's warring parties, there was some optimism over the government and opposition sitting down together. A week into the diplomacy, however, divisions are persistent and deepening.
At times the warlike rhetoric emanating from the alabaster walls of the UN offices along the banks of Lake Geneva has reinforced animosities, disorienting even seasoned diplomats.
"Is it evening or afternoon?" UN mediator Lakhdar Brahimi said yesterday after hours of shuttling between the two sides. Even Mr Brahimi conceded the talks were likely to go nowhere this week. "To be blunt, I don't think we will achieve anything substantive," he said.
Officials said yesterday the talks would pause today and resume a week later, to give the sides time to reflect.
Meanwhile, the war raged on in Syria, with activists saying the government bombardment of Aleppo and Homs has intensified since the talks began.
The impasse stems from a disagreement over the talks' goal. Both sides signed on to this week's meetings by endorsing the 2012 Geneva I communique, which calls for the establishment of a transitional government by "mutual consent". The opposition is determined to use Geneva I as grounds to remove President Bashar al-Assad from office. That approach has been steadfastly dismissed by regime delegates, who have instead tried to focus on fighting terrorists - what they call the rebel forces.
The Assad delegates also are trumpeting plans to further enshrine his leadership by holding presidential elections in June.
With no progress in sight, both sides have resorted to using the conference as a public platform to criticise and isolate their adversaries on the diplomatic stage.
"They've been bluffing all along," said Syrian opposition coalition president Ahmad Jarba, referring to the regime. "Geneva ... was the moment of truth."
After days of posturing, Mr Brahimi this week finally turned the discussions to the main goal of the conference - political transition. But the government countered by submitting a "political communique" demanding the opposition and its Western backers commit to "restore all (Syria's) occupied territories" - a reference to the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights. The document defended Syria as a legitimate democracy, saying: "Syrians decide the future of their country through democratic means and the ballot box."
The regime's defence of Syria's political system has grated on the opposition and its Western backers. Assad's father, an air force pilot, seized power in a 1971 coup and after his death in 2000 power passed to his son Bashar. Both have suppressed any opposition to their rule.
Although the government amended the constitution in 2012 to allow for multi-party elections, the opposition boycotted that year's parliamentary polls, dismissing them as neither free nor fair. The Syrian parliament remained filled with Assad loyalists.
But Ayham Kamel, an analyst with the Eurasia Group think tank, said the opposition should not reject elections outright, provided the polls are monitored by international observers.
. The conference has also become a setting for each side to jockey for tactical advantages back on the battlefield. More than a week before the conference, the regime received a UN proposal to allow humanitarian convoys to enter the besieged parts of Homs, according to Western diplomats. The plan, diplomats said, was supposed to win quick approval and build momentum for the talks.
When the regime and opposition finally faced off last weekend from opposite ends of a U-shaped table, the Assad government's stone-faced delegate Bashar Ja'afari informed the room he was unaware of the plans to help Homs, according to diplomats.
Syrian officials swiftly characterised the humanitarian convoys as a trick aimed at helping besieged rebel forces rather than civilians. A counterproposal by the regime - to allow women and children to leave Homs's historical quarter - was rejected by opposition delegates who labelled it an attempt to lure rebels into deserting their positions. "The regime is trying to steer us away from the process," Louay Safi, a delegate for the opposition, said this week.
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

SAEB EREKAT ! - 24/1 SMH re Julie Bishop and Int. Law

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Julie Bishop reinvents international law in her support of Israeli settlements

Date
Category
Opinion

Saeb Erekat

Illustration: Andrew Dyson
Illustration: Andrew Dyson
International law does not allow acquiring land through the use of force. The Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits Israel, as an occupying power, from directly or indirectly transferring its citizens into occupied Palestinian territory. The International Court of Justice ruled in 2004 that Israel's settlement policy violates that convention. The Rome statute of the International Criminal Court makes Israel's illegal settlement policy a war crime.
But Australia's Foreign Minister, Julie Bishop, wants to reinvent international law and call Israeli settlements legal. Or what else was Bishop trying to accomplish by showing her support to Israeli settlements?
Authorities must respect the commitments of their countries before the international community. Australia has thus far been a responsible member of that community. It ratified the Fourth Geneva Convention, the Rome statute and various other human rights conventions that Israel systemically violates by occupying Palestine.
If Bishop wanted to show solidarity with an occupation that harms the rights of an occupied population, she did well. I would be unsurprised if her next step was a cup of coffee with her Israeli counterpart, Avigdor Lieberman, in the illegal settlement of Nokdim, where he lives, in land stolen from Bethlehem.
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If Bishop wanted to make Australia a stronger voice within the international community, she certainly did wrong. The latest votes in the United Nations show that Australia, Canada and the US, joined by Micronesia, Tuvalu and Marshall Islands, are the only countries that would not favour a resolution declaring settlements illegal. Regardless of the vote, Australia is now the only country, other than Israel, to state publicly that settlements are not illegal. Bishop's statement came 15 days after the European Union began to apply its guidelines on Israeli settlements, preventing those colonies in occupied Palestinian land from benefiting from EU-Israeli relations.
If Bishop wanted to enhance Australia's international standing, she did wrong. International civil society organisations, including those in Australia, continue to advance campaigns to disinvest from the Israeli occupation, something we Palestinians fully support and encourage. At a time when companies, churches and other organisations around the world are disengaging from the Israeli occupation, Australia is engaging with this illegal enterprise.
If Bishop wanted to support the negotiations process, she did the opposite. It is precisely due to Israeli settlement expansion that most of the Arab world doubts that negotiations will succeed. The terms of reference for negotiations do not include legitimising illegal Israeli settlements, but ending the Israeli occupation that began in 1967. As the International Court of Justice has ruled, the Israeli settlement regime - including the wall that de facto annexes most of the settlements to Israel - denies the Palestinian people its inalienable right to self-determination. Let me be very clear: there is no room for a two-state solution in the presence of Israeli settlements.
The same day that Bishop made her comment, Israeli settlers burnt a mosque near Salfit. In occupied Palestine, Palestinians continue to be denied their right to access their churches and mosques, their land and natural resources, their schools, hospitals and places of work due to the Israeli settlement enterprise. Thousands of families have been divided, been evicted, had their land confiscated or houses demolished under policies that Australian diplomats continue to report back to Canberra, all of which are part of Israel's settlement enterprise.
Israeli settlements are not leading to a two-state solution but to a two-system, one-state reality, where a minority of Israeli Jews control the lives of a majority of Palestinian Christians and Muslims. One wonders how Bishop will explain her statement to the thousands of Australian-Palestinians who have been personally affected by Israel's colonisation policies. She can be assured that the victims of that colonisation, the residents of Bil'in, Sheikh Jarrah, Khirbet Makhoul, Silwan, Hebron, Bethlehem, Beit Jala, Nablus, Salfit, Huwara and countless other Palestinian cities and villages, are wondering when the international community will muster the determination to end Israel's impunity and give peace a chance. The answer, clearly, won't come from those who support apartheid over peace.
Dr Saeb Erekat is Palestine's main negotiator and a member of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation's executive committee.


Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/comment/julie-bishop-reinvents-international-law-in-her-support-of-israeli-settlements-20140123-31be0.html#ixzz2rvBhrxUl


SMH _ 24/1 Attacks on Julie Bishop unwarranted


Comment

Attacks on Julie Bishop unwarranted

Date

Peter Wertheim, Alex Ryvchin

With her Israeli settlements comments, Julie Bishop has tried to avoid acting as judge and jury on the issue.
Foreign Affairs Minister Julie Bishop addresses the media during a press conference at Parlaiment House in Canberra on Monday 11 November 2013. Photo: Alex Ellinghausen
Foreign Affairs Minister Julie Bishop. Photo: Alex Ellinghausen
It comes as little surprise that Foreign Minister Julie Bishop's refusal to condemn Israeli settlements in an interview with The Times of Israel was met with unreserved hostility by her predecessor Bob Carr, the Australian Palestine Advocacy Network and, of course, the Palestine Liberation Organisation's Hanan Ashrawi.
All three have consistently perpetuated the falsehood that Jews living beyond the defunct Israeli-Jordanian armistice line of 1949 are the predominant cause of a conflict that has raged since well before the first West Bank settlement was built.
At a time when Israeli-Palestinian peace talks are ongoing and delicately poised, Bishop's actual statement was reasonable, indeed innocuous: ''I don't want to prejudge the fundamental issues in the peace negotiations. I think it's appropriate we give those negotiations every chance of succeeding.''
Significantly, Canada's Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, has now adopted Bishop's position of neutrality on the settlement question as a means of advancing the prospects of a negotiated peace. Bishop's comments in no way constituted ''uncritically siding with Israel … on the issue of settlements'', as one critic alleged. Nor did the Foreign Minister diminish the significance of the settlement issue. On the contrary, she noted that ''the issue of settlements is absolutely and utterly fundamental to the negotiations that are under way''.
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Instead, Bishop prudently sought to avoid acting as judge and jury on a bitterly contested and unresolved legal question. After all, Israel and the Palestinians have themselves agreed that the question of settlements is one of the core issues to be resolved by the delimitation of a final border in the course of final status negotiations between the parties.
The attacks on Bishop also contained the sorts of distortions of international law that have become the hallmark of the anti-Israel movement. Ashrawi falsely asserted that ''Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention and Article 43 of The Hague Regulations … explicitly state that Israel is in direct violation of international law with its illegal settlement activities''. The Fourth Geneva Convention and The Hague Regulations make no reference to Israel whatsoever, explicit or otherwise. However, their application to Israeli settlements in the West Bank is a serious legal question that is hotly disputed. There has never been a definitive legal determination of this question. The oft-cited International Court of Justice opinion in 2004, which APAN's George Browning (The Age, 18/1) falsely calls a ''ruling'', was delivered as a non-binding advisory opinion and is not legally determinative.
Professor James Crawford, who is one of Australia's (and the world's) most eminent international lawyers and is generally critical of Israeli settlements, published a legal opinion in 2012 in which he concluded that some of the settlements, such as the Nahal settlements, are ''probably lawful''.
A preponderance of opinion, one way or another, by legal experts does not decide the issue. Mere opinions about the legality of the settlements do not harden into established norms simply because large numbers of eminent lawyers support those opinions, especially if other equally eminent lawyers have a contrary opinion.
Therefore, Ashrawi's accusation that Bishop ''wilfully defied international consensus'' on settlements is utterly baseless. There is no such consensus. A majority is not a consensus. Australia is a sovereign nation with a democratically elected government which makes decisions according to its own assessment of Australia's national interests. Ashrawi's crude attempt to bully Australia with the spectre of a non-existent ''international consensus'' should be ignored.
On the same day as Bishop delivered her remarks in Jerusalem, her former political adversary, Julia Gillard, was speaking in another Middle-Eastern capital, Abu Dhabi. She did not refer to the settlements. Instead, she urged the Palestinian leadership to recognise Israel as the state of the Jewish people and live in peace with it. The ''key to peace'', she said, is ''that they accept Israel as a Jewish state. Once that is stipulated, then virtually everything can be successfully negotiated.''
Both Julie Bishop and Julia Gillard have eschewed the standard approach of Western bureaucrats to the Israel-Palestinian conflict, which is ''to go along to get along'' with the rest of the herd and reflexively side against Israel. Both deserve praise for rejecting such an approach as weak and wrong.
Peter Wertheim, AM, is the executive director and Alex Ryvchin is the public affairs officer of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry.


Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/comment/attacks-on-julie-bishop-unwarranted-20140123-31big.html#ixzz2rv9jC6fs