It is 107 pages of tendentious and one-sided arguments all intended to declare Israeli actions since 1967 to be illegal. There are counterarguments to each of their arguments - but they don't let the readers know that.
However, the entire basis of the paper is bogus. Turn to page 18, which declares its "methodology.":
The study takes it as a starting point that the Palestinian territory – i.e., the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip – was occupied by Israel in 1967, in the course of an international armed conflict.
Setting aside Gaza for now, the question is - when did that territory become "Palestinian?"
Looking at newspaper articles in the years after the Six Day War, the West Bank was usually described as "occupied Jordan."
Here are two articles from 1972, the first about how militant Arabs threatened fellow Arabs running for office in the first elections in the West Bank after the war:
When, exactly, did the territory turn from "occupied Jordan" into "occupied Palestinian territory"?
It never happened. The world just went along with Palestinian propaganda and eventually believed it.
The question gets starker when we realize that Jordan's annexation of the West Bank in 1949 was illegal, and almost no nations recognized it. It was never legally Jordanian territory.
So the West Bank was never "occupied Jordan." It was part of the British Mandate of Palestine, the same mandate that promised the land to be the Jewish state. Not a Palestinian homeland - only a Jewish homeland.
This is international law, that has never been abrogated. Israel has a superior legal right to Judea and Samaria than anyone else. Israel's characterization of the territory as "disputed" was probably a mistake - it should have always claimed it all. But "disputed" is accurate, "occupied" is not.
Which is why the Mandate is never mentioned, and the "methodology" deliberately omits it, pretending that the territory is "occupied Palestinian territory" without ever saying when, legally, it became "Palestinian."
The paper spends a lot of time on the argument that the Mandate system provided a "sacred trust" for the rights of self-determination of the peoples in the territories. But as the Palestine Mandate document above shows, only the Jewish people were given that right under the Palestine Mandate. And the reason is as simple as it is unpalatable to the UN's legal "experts" - in 1920, no one considered that there existed an Arab "Palestinian people." The Arabs of Palestine who were speaking of nationalism wanted to become part of Syria, their interest in an independent state only arose (with very few exceptions) after the West drew the borders of British Mandate Palestine and unity with Syria was no longer an option.
To apply the League of Nations Mandate language to apply to the self determination of a people who didn't exist as a people at the time - who didn't even consider themselves a people - is the height of deception.
The next part of the "methodology" is even more absurd:n"The study also takes it as a starting point that Israel continues to occupy the Gaza Strip."
Before Israel's withdrawal from Gaza, no legal expert had ever said that an occupation is possible without soldiers physically on the ground controlling the territory.
For example, see the definition in the 1972 Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms:
Military occupiers are obligated, under international law, to set up a court system, to ensure that cities are governed and continue to run, to set up an entire bureaucracy to run the territory. That is impossible without "boots on the ground," the informal definition of occupation for over a hundred years.
The second sentence makes it quite clear that Area A in the West Bank is not "occupied" even if one accepts that somehow the West Bank is "Palestinian territory."
As with all other legal analyses when it comes to Israel, this paper was intended from the outset to determine that Israel's actions and "occupation" are illegal. It set the ground rules to ensure that pesky arguments like the League of Nations Mandate or the accepted definitions of occupation pre-2005 not even be brought up. (When JFK blockaded Cuba, did the US "occupy" Cuba?)
This isn't international law. It is twisting international law against only one state - coincidentally, the only Jewish state.
And that is only the beginning of the problems with this document. But since the methodology itself is based on lies, that ensures that the rest of the document built on this foundation of lies is invalid as well.
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