Annexing the West Bank is a "most serious violation" - but only when done by Jews ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Tuesday, January 21, 2025

Annexing the West Bank is a "most serious violation" - but only when done by Jews

Yesterday, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres told a Security Council meeting on the Middle East that any annexation of part or all of Judea and Samaria "would constitute a most serious violation of international law."

For international law to have any meaning, it must be applied equally to all. Luckily, we have a case where a country did indeed annex the exact same territory, in 1950, when Jordan illegally annexed what they call the West Bank.

Who condemned it? Only the Arab League, which was concerned that Jordan was about to implement a plan to make itself the leader of a Greater Syria that would encompass Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and "Palestine."

I looked for any UN resolutions condemning this "most serious violation of international law." There aren't any.

The world largely knew the annexation was illegal. Almost no one recognized it (outside Great Britain, Iraq and maybe Pakistan.) Most other countries and the media accepted the west bank of the Jordan as de facto Jordanian territory, if not de jure.

That includes the UN.

In November 1966, a Fatah terrorist cell exploded a mine under an Israeli jeep, killing three. Israel responded with an reprisal invasion aimed at Fatah cells in the village of Samu, near Hebron which resulted in a large battle with Jordanian forces.

Naturally the UN Security Council condemned the response but not the initial attack. However, the wording of UNSC resolution 228 is most interesting. It called Israel's action "a largescale and carefully planned military action on the territory of Jordan by the armed forces of Israel."

This indicates that the UN accepted the West Bank as being fully Jordanian territory, not occupied or illegally annexed.

There are some annexations the UN has condemned (Israel/east Jerusalem, Israel/Golan, Iraq/Kuwait, Russia/Crimea, South Africa/Namibia) and others they didn't at the time (China/Tibet, Indonesia/East Timor, India/Goa, Morocco/Western Sahara.) If annexation is a most serious violation of international law, why wouldn't the UN condemn all of them? What makes some terrible and others, like Jordan's, acceptable?

It doesn't take too much to realize that politics trumps international law, and the UN is far more political than it is a neutral arbiter of what is right and wrong.

(h/t (((JyrkiWahlstedt))) )