1/29/2020 Top 5 ways Trump plan for Palestinians is a Crimeagainst Humanity - Juan Cole Juan Cole

https://www.juancole.com/2020/01/palestinians-against-humanity.html

The Trump Plan is full of measures that constitute War Crimes in international law, and a systematic pattern of War Crimes is categorized as a Crime against Humanity. The latter term is the one appropriate to the Trump Plan. Here are the War Crimes the Plan proposes:

1. Israel has flooded 400,000 of its citizens into the Occupied Palestinian West Bank, where they have stolen Palestinian land and built squatter-only settlements on it, where Palestinians are not allowed to live. These Israeli squatters are often armed and some of them routinely stage attacks on Palestinian villages or commit sabotage against Palestinian orchards and agriculture.

This squatting on Palestinian land contravenes the Fourth Geneva Accord of 1949 on Occupied Territories, which forbids transferring populations from the Occupying Power into the occupied lands.

"The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies."

This rule was to prevent the repetition of the war crimes committed by Nazi Germany, which occupied other lands and sent Germans in to settle them.

The Trump plan rewards Israel's illegal activities, saying "Approximately 97% of Israelis in the West Bank will be incorporated into contiguous Israeli territory."

2. The Trump Plan allows Israel to annex about a third of the Occupied West Bank, on which Israeli squatters have squatted. Annexation is an act of aggression, forbidden by international law. By the Fourth Geneva Convention, Israel cannot actually deprive Occupied Palestinians of their land rights by simply declaring those lands "annexed."

3. The Plan envisages depriving many Israeli citizens of Palestinian heritage of their Israeli citizenship, which amounts to denaturalization. Since they would be instead given "citizenship" in a "state" that no one will recognize and which is a Bantustan rather than a state, in which they will enjoy no actual rights over their own property because Israel won't permit the Bantustan to so guarantee them, that would amount de facto to forcing these Israeli citizens into statelessness, which contravenes the UN Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, signed by 75 member states.

4. The Plan envisages that the Palestinian Bantustan will be disarmed, which means that Palestinians will be deprived of the right of self-defense. The Right of Self-defense is recognized in Chapter 7 of the United Nations Charter:

"Article 51. "Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations, until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security."

Palestine was in 2012 granted by the UN General Assembly non-member observer state status, like the Vatican, which puts it under the authority of the Charter.

5. The enclaves to which the Palestinians would be consigned give them no control over their lives, as B'Tselem pointed out.. The Israeli human rights organization pointed out,

"With no territorial contiguity, Palestinians will not be able to exercise their right to self-determination and will continue to be completely dependent on Israel's goodwill for their daily life, with no political rights and no way to influence their future. They will continue to be at the mercy of Israel's draconian permit regime and need its consent for any construction or development. In this sense, not only does the plan fail to improve their predicament in any way, but, in fact, it leaves them worse off as it perpetuates the situation and gives it recognition."

Article 12 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights puts the right to freedom of movement into treaty law: "(1) Everyone lawfully within the territory of a State shall, within that territory, have the right to liberty of movement and freedom to choose his residence."

Since the over-all rubric is Apartheid, and Apartheid is a War Crime in the Rome Statute that underpins the International Criminal Court, the whole plan is a series of War Crimes, which amount in the aggregate to a crime against humanity.

 

Posted by Judith Ferster, AIME member