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From
Tablet:
Last week, the Australian government caused a stir when it issued a statement declaring that it would no longer refer to East Jerusalem as “Occupied East Jerusalem.” The announcement drew immediate protest from Palestinian representatives, but Australia has shown no signs of backing down. On the contrary, in an interview with Tablet, Australia’s Ambassador to Israel Dave Sharma not only defended the rationale behind the controversial move, but said that the same reasoning also informed his government’s outlook towards the West Bank, though it has not taken an official position on the matter. “The statement that came out that was issued in Canberra last week didn’t make reference to this,” he told me, but “I think we just call the West Bank, ‘the West Bank,’ as a geographical entity without adding any adjectives to it, whether ‘occupied’ [the Palestinian position] or ‘disputed’ [the Israeli position]. We’ll just call it what it is, which is ‘the West Bank.’”
Though some of Israel’s critics and supporters have characterized this move as adopting the Israeli position, Sharma explains that the policy is actually designed to ensure that Australia is not taking sides in the conflict at all. “Our position on this is that all the final status issues as identified by Oslo—and that includes the status of Jerusalem, borders, right of return—are all amenable only to political negotiations and a political solution,” he said. “And so a third country taking positions on the legal merits of each party’s plans, if you like, is not helpful and not constructive and ultimately not what’s needed. So we took the view that the term ‘occupied East Jerusalem’ implied a legal view of the respective claims of the parties and we didn’t think it was helpful to be doing that, and as a result, we just said that we won’t be using that term any longer.”
In other words, Australia’s policy is not intended to endorse one side over the other, but rather to maintain neutrality and avoid prejudging the outcome of negotiations. As Israel considers Jerusalem to be sovereign Israeli territory annexed in 1967, while the Palestinians consider East Jerusalem to be occupied Palestinian territory, Australia is opting to employ language that endorses neither party’s claim. Similarly, by avoiding adjectives when it comes to the West Bank, Australia sidesteps the question of whether the area is “disputed” or “occupied” territory. In fact, the country maintains a similar policy in other territorial conflicts like those over Western Sahara and East Timor.
Naturally, dropping “occupied” from the lexicon has upset Palestinian leaders, who often benefit from the traditional diplomatic language being freighted towards their position, rather than being agnostic. But Sharma, a career foreign service official who has held his post in Israel since 2013, maintained that Australia’s policy of eschewing “occupied” is not new, but rather a codification of what the country has been doing in practice for many years. “In truth, we haven’t really used that term for some time,” he said. “As a government, we’ve certainly signed up for certain [U.N.] General Assembly resolutions where that term is used, but it’s not a common term that we would use in respect to East Jerusalem.”
It may have been Palestinian Arab protests over Australia's earlier actions that prompted this move:
Last month, Sharma himself met with an Israeli official in East Jerusalem, eliciting a sharp public condemnation from Palestinian chief negotiator Saeb Erekat, who protested the envoy’s actions in “occupied East Jerusalem,” and wrote that “Australia’s actions are tantamount to complicity in ongoing Israeli violations of international laws of war.” Sharma does not apologize for the incident. “My meeting in East Jerusalem wasn’t intended to be a provocative act, and the truth is, a lot of ambassadors do meetings in East Jerusalem,” he said. “As it is now, everyone just tries to keep it quiet. It’s one of those well-kept secrets within the diplomatic community.” But rather than papering over Sharma’s conduct, the Australian government doubled down and chose to concretize the spirit underlying it as official policy. From now on, it insisted, it would not take sides on a final status issue by using loaded language to describe Jerusalem. “The description of East Jerusalem as ‘Occupied East Jerusalem’ is a term freighted with pejorative implications, which is neither appropriate nor useful,” read the June 5 statement subsequently issued by Attorney General George Brandis.
As the
Jerusalem Post wrote yesterday:
As the rest of the world seemed to be losing its moral compass, the Aussies were keeping themselves on course, pointing out the unique nature of the territorial conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.
Bishop and Brandis were articulating a position long held by Israel and by numerous legal experts who recognize that the West Bank cannot be considered “occupied” for the simple reason that said territory did not belong to any sovereign power at the time that Israel took control of it.
The 1947 UN partition resolution set aside the West Bank and other areas of Israel for the creation of a Palestinian state. But the Palestinian political leadership rejected the partition plan and launched a war against Israel, which they lost.
Transjordan annexed the area in 1949 and renamed it Jordan after murdering or expelling all the Jews who lived there. Only Britain and Pakistan recognized Jordan’s “occupation” of the West Bank. In any event, the newly created Jordanian state – essentially a British construction – had no historical ties to Judea and Samaria, while for Jews it is the cradle of Jewish civilization and statehood from the biblical era.
Israel cannot, therefore, be considered in the strictest sense an “occupier” of another people’s land. Article 49(6) of the Fourth Geneva Convention states that an occupying military power “shall not deport or transfer part of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.”
But since Israel is not an “occupier,” it cannot be said to be in violation of this clause. Also, this clause, written after World War II, referred principally to the huge forced population transfers perpetrated by the Nazis and other totalitarian powers.
Even UN Resolution 242, which introduced the “land for peace” formula, calls on Israel to withdraw from “territories” – not all territories – in exchange for peace with its neighbors. It was clear to the international community immediately after the Six Day War that Israel would retain an undetermined portion of Judea, Samaria and Gaza
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