May 20, 2002

A Very Brief Recent History of the West Bank Land

[Bethlehem, Palestine] Here is my super-summarized version of "A Very Brief Recent History of the West Bank Land".

1919 -- The British began to colonize Palestine in 1919 after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. They received a mandate over Palestine from the League of Nations in 1922. Trying to rid itself of a headache, Britain turned Palestine over to the United Nations in 1947. Up to this point the West Bank was just part of historic Palestine. It wasn't a separated area.

1948 -- The Arab-Israeli War of 1948 put this chunk of land now known as the West Bank into the hands of Jordan. Jordan annexed the property.

1967 -- The West Bank changed hands again in 1967 when Israel waged war against the Arabs. Now the area became under Israeli occupation. And that's the way it stands today.

So is the West Bank a part of Israel or not? Why does it have to be so complicated? If the West Bank is part of Israel, then give all the folks in the West Bank citizenship and let them be treated like ordinary citizens. If the West Bank is not part of Israel, then all the illegal Israeli settlers should move out, and Palestinians should have their own state.

The following information on the West Bank is taken from Alex Awad's book, "Through the Eyes of the Victims:"

The UN has repeated affirmed that the Geneva Convention of 1948, which forbids the occupying power from transferring parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies, is applicable to the West Bank. The Israeli government is a signatory party to the Geneva Convention, yet violates it with every housing unit it builds on Palestinian land. Since the Johnson administration the US has concurred that Israeli colonies are illegal. Nevertheless, Israel continues to receive ever-stronger support from the US. The United States has vetoed UN Security Council resolutions calling for the halting of colony construction. Furthermore, every year the United States gives three billion dollars of its taxpayers' money ($13-16 million a day) to Israel. This enormous influx of funds bloats the Israeli government's budget, freeing up funds for colonization. In addition to spending funds to build housing units in the colonies, Israel offers very attractive incentives and substantial subsidies to Jews from other countries to live in the Israeli colonies, which make this move as easy and inexpensive as possible.

In addition to the colonies, the Israeli authorities confiscate Palestinian land for roads to connect the colonies together and to Israel Proper. These roads are not built for Palestinian use and are in full control of the Israeli army which routinely closes them to Palestinian traffic.

What has developed in the West Bank is a system of segregation, not unlike the system of apartheid in South Africa, in which the Jewish colonists enjoy a higher standard of living, expropriate Palestinian land for their own use, and consume a disproportionate amount of water and other natural resources. At the same time that Israel built tens of thousands of houses for Jews in the West Bank, it launched a program of demolishing the houses of Palestinians. Since 1967 Israel's military government destroyed over 4,000 Palestinian homes in the West Bank. All these injustices are enforced by an enormous military regime and a legal system that applies different standards to Palestinians than to Israelis.