By Jeremy Salt
Through genocide, is Israel now very close to the ultimate fulfillment of the Zionist dream – all Palestine just for us – as Netanyahu and his even more openly fascistic, racist, and exterminatory ministers believe?
What is Israel? The question is not as silly as it might seem. There is Israel on the map, but even then this is a state that has never defined its international borders except for those with Egypt and Jordan.
Apart from the map, what can Israel legitimately claim as its own? Stripping the answer down to its basics, examining the history in some detail, not very much. The territories occupied in 1967 – east Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Syria’s Golan Heights – can be ruled out straight away.
On July 19, 2024, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) finally ruled that Israel’s presence in the 1967 occupied Palestinian territories (the West Bank and East Jerusalem) is unlawful, and as a UN member bound by the charter and the rules of the organization, it was obliged to withdraw.
This was augmented by the declaration of the court’s president, Nawaf Salam, that all UN member states should take “concrete and effective measures” against Israel’s violations of the law.
These would imply not just diplomatic protests but the withholding of “any unconditional financial, economic, military or technological aid to the state of Israel” and the punishment of such violations “where appropriate and in accordance with the relevant treaties to which they are parties.”
The court’s ruling was underpinned by the 1907 Hague regulations on the conduct of war and the 4th Geneva Convention of 1949. Both state that occupation of conquered territory must be temporary, and that there can be no sovereignty over it. This was violated by the Israeli government in 1980 when under the ‘Jerusalem Law’ it declared a ‘unified’ Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.
The Hague Rules and the 4th Geneva Convention also prohibit the transfer of a civilian population into occupied territory, which Israel has been doing ever since 1967. The same conventions would also apply to that part of the Golan Heights occupied by Israel in 1967, placed under Israeli laws and administration on December 14, 1981, and now heavily settled by Israelis.
On December 17, 1981, the UN Security Council, in resolution 497, declared that Israel’s Golan Heights Law was “null and void and without legal effect.” Ignoring this and other UN resolutions, Israel used the downfall of the Syrian government in late 2024 to seize all of the Golan Heights and more territory below. Overall, Israel now occupies more than 400 square kilometers of Syria.
It must be borne in mind that 1967 was no ‘preemptive strike’ as Israel claimed but a war of calculated aggression, with territorial expansion as the most important of its long-term objectives.
Robert Wright, chairman of the UN War Crimes Commission in 1945, described a war of aggression as not only an international crime “but the supreme international crime,” a phrase repeated at the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal.
Thus, the West Bank, east Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, and the rest of occupied Syria have to be separated from what Israel ‘is’ under international law and UN/ICJ rulings, but the quest still has to go much further for the question to be settled, beginning with the status of west Jerusalem.
There is no ICJ ruling here, only the general assumption within the western collective that it is part of Israel. However, government unease on the subject is reflected in the fact that only half a dozen countries have moved their embassies to west Jerusalem, preferring to stay in Tel Aviv.
Under the (non-binding) partition plan of 1947, the whole of Jerusalem was to be a corpus separatum place under international supervision. Having used the partition plan to give the semblance of legitimacy to a Jewish state, Israel then totally violated it.
1948 was its first war of aggression, aimed at taking over all of Palestine and driving out all its people. International intervention prevented these goals from being fully achieved, but the intentions were clear, because without the Palestinians being driven out, a Jewish state would not have been feasible.
While the territory allocated for an ‘Arab’ state under the partition plan had a population almost wholly Palestinian Muslim or Christian, the territory set aside for the Jewish state was divided almost equally between indigenous Palestinians and Jewish settlers: 498,000 Jews and 495,000 ‘Arabs.’ This could only be corrected by driving the Palestinians out, and that could only be done militarily.
Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, was very clear about this. In early 1948, he spoke of expelling the ‘Arabs’ so “our people can replace them.” The opportunity had finally arrived to achieve what he had always wanted. “The war will give us the land,” he remarked. “Concepts of ‘ours’ and ‘not ours’ are peacetime concepts only and they lose their meaning in war.”
Accordingly, Israel seized as much as it could, trampling the partition plan (UN General Assembly resolution 181 of 1947) underfoot. The Palmach commander Yigal Allon regretted that “mistaken political considerations” had prevented the Israeli military from conquering all of Palestine. It had more territory than it was given under the partition plan, “much less than it was within her military capacity to achieve.”
Israel had the full support of President Truman who declared in October 1948 that “modifications” to the partition plan should be made “only if fully acceptable to the state of Israel.” He certainly did not have in mind the ”modifications” Israel had already made through the seizure of territory set aside for an ‘Arab’ state.
Count Folke Bernadotte, the UN mediator, had made many recommendations Israel would not accept. They were based on adherence to the partition plan, including international administration of Jerusalem through the UN.
When US Secretary of State George Marshall indicated his support for Bernadotte, Truman instructed White House counsel Clark Clifford to write to Marshall “completely disavowing” the statement he had made. Later he would only agree to the Bernadotte proposals – in line with the partition plan – forming the “basis” for discussions.
The Zionists were furious. They refused to cooperate with Bernadotte and on September 17, he and his driver were assassinated by Lehi terrorists. Formally condemned by the Israeli government for the Bernadotte assassination, Lehi had in fact served the state well by removing this obstacle in its path.
Lehi commander Yitzhak Shamir was elected Israel’s prime minister in the 1970s, while a decade later the state conferred the ‘Lehi ribbon’ on former members who had fought for Israel’s ‘independence.’
Intrinsically, Israel’s occupation of east Jerusalem in 1967 was no different from the occupation of west Jerusalem in 1948. Both parts of the city were taken by military force and both ended annexed under Israeli law, in clear violation of international law and the 1947 partition resolution.
The assumption or ‘international consensus’ that west Jerusalem somehow belongs to Israel is no more legally valid than the annexation of the eastern part of the city in 1967. Accordingly, Jerusalem east and west cannot be regarded as a legitimate part of what Israel ‘is.’
The validity of the partition plan itself is more than questionable. It was passed only after bullying of vulnerable delegations by the US. As a State Department Policy Planning Staff paper of January 1948 made clear, more circumspectly, “without US leadership and the pressures which developed during UN consideration of the question, the necessary two-thirds majority in the General Assembly could not have been obtained.”
In adopting the partition resolution, the GA “had left unanswered certain questions regarding the legality of the plan as the means for its implementation.” Furthermore, US support of the principles of self-determination “was a basic factor in the creation of the Arab states out of the Ottoman Empire after World War 1,” thus accounting for Arab disillusionment “as to US objectives and ideals” in 1947/48.
The partition plan also violated the principle of self-determination as written into the UN Charter, as affirmed in numerous UN General Assembly resolutions and as upheld internationally since 1918.
Apart from the questionable legality of the plan, and the shady means by which the UN General Assembly was pressured into recommending it, it contained nothing that would have authorized the ‘transfer’ of the Palestinians and the ‘expropriation’ (theft) of their property, which apart from a few percent was all of Palestine, owned individually by Palestinians and, as their historic homeland, belonging to them collectively as of right.
The further transgression by Israel was the occupation of 24 more percent of Palestine than was assigned to the Jewish state in 1947. There was not even the dubious cover of the partition plan for this violent, opportunistic seizure of the land and possessions belonging to someone else and according to the law – international not occupier’s – still belonging to them.
Considering all of this, to finally answer the question, what is Israel? Not a great deal that can legitimately be regarded as Israel’s. Only the 5-6 percent that was bought by Zionist land purchasing agencies before 1947 would fall under this heading. The rest is stolen, the “miraculous simplification of our task” as Chaim Weizmann remarked, with a framework of shady, illicit dealings behind closed doors creating a façade of legality.
The ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948 fitted the terms of the genocide convention to the letter. The convention was passed (December 1948) even as genocide was being committed in Palestine. Western governments did nothing to stop it. They allowed it, just as they have allowed the continuation of the genocide in Gaza since October 2023.
A vulgar, ignorant, bullying US president is now relieving the Israelis of ethnically cleansing Gaza. He says he will do the job himself by paying off governments to take the Palestinians in. When they say they won’t, he says they will. He will threaten them the same way the US did in 1947 to secure passage of the UN partition resolution. His intervention is so gross that it is already backfiring.
Through genocide, is Israel now very close to the ultimate fulfillment of the Zionist dream – all Palestine just for us – as Netanyahu and his even more openly fascistic, racist, and exterminatory ministers believe?
Or is every bomb dropped, every missile launched, every bullet fired at children by Israel’s snipers, every threat to commit even greater crimes and every cheer from every Israeli as another Palestine apartment block, university or school is obliterated, only moving Israel further along the road to perdition?
– Jeremy Salt taught at the University of Melbourne, at Bosporus University in Istanbul and Bilkent University in Ankara for many years, specializing in the modern history of the Middle East. Among his recent publications is his 2008 book, The Unmaking of the Middle East. A History of Western Disorder in Arab Lands (University of California Press) and The Last Ottoman Wars. The Human Cost 1877-1923 (University of Utah Press, 2019). He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.
