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No hiding place: Why Trump’s latest diktat on Palestine matters

By unilaterally recognising illegal Israeli settlements as ‘legal,’ the US President is casting aside international law, says HILARY WISE

SO once again Donald Trump has put up two fingers to the international community. 

By unilaterally recognising illegal Israeli settlements as “legal” he is again casually trashing international law. 

No surprise there. This is totally in line with his earlier recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.

The reaction of the international community has also been predictable: a flurry of indignant objections, but no suggestion of sanctions or any other concrete response.

Does it matter? Years ago commentators pointed out that Israel’s policy of continuing colonisation and annexation had already made a two-state solution impossible. 

The latest move simply makes Israel’s flagrant violation of international law more glaringly obvious to those who were clinging to the hope of some sort of land swap — even if this meant the Palestinians getting a chunk of desert in return for the remainder of their cultivable land.

Now the tattered remains of this figleaf of “sharing the land” have been removed. 

Leaders of all main Israeli parties have announced that what was Palestine is in fact Israel. The actual implementation of this credo will elicit approval from the US and cowed indifference from most other countries.  

In effect, the indigenous Palestinians have been labelled “squatters,” as one Israeli general put it, in their own land. 

They may or may not be tolerated in the remaining pockets of territory which constitute the larger concentrations of Palestinian population in the West Bank and Gaza.
 
The question remains: at a time when the human race is teetering on the brink of global catastrophe, should we really concern ourselves with an issue of seemingly minor importance?

The answer must be Yes. As land is made less habitable worldwide, territorial disputes will become much more acute. 

More than ever, we are in need of the protection afforded us by the laws governing relations between nations. 

The foundations of these laws were laid by two Jewish Polish lawyers, Hersch Lauterpacht and Rafael Lemkin, in the aftermath of the second world war. 

The spirit of the times was: “Never again — for anyone.” Israel itself is a signatory to the Fourth Geneva Convention, which strictly prohibits the colonisation of conquered territory — and which it violates on a daily basis.

Unless Israel is called to account, any regime will feel that much freer to ride roughshod over international legislation.  

In Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons, Sir Thomas More, executed by Henry VIII for failing to bend the law in compliance with his monarch’s wishes, has an impassioned argument with an idealistic young lawyer, who argues that the ends justify the means. 

The young man says he would “cut down every law in England to get after the Devil.” More says: “And if you cut them down, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?”

A chill wind is blowing, and we ignore it at our peril.

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