Preoccupied with ‘occupation’

It is extremely disappointing to read that the Biden Administration United States Report on Global Human Rights Practices uses the language of “Israeli occupation of territory” (“US report reaffirms Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, speaks of occupation,” March 31).

This position of the Biden Administration contravenes a full century of international agreements, including the Charter of the United Nations:

• The San Remo Agreement (1920);

• The League of Nations (1922); and

• Article 80 of the United Nations Charter (1946) which supersedes any vote of the General Assembly or Security Council. Article 80 requires every member of the United Nations to obey the British Mandate, which declared what today is Israel – including Judea and Samaria – as the reconstituted homeland of the Jewish people and therefore is sovereign Jewish territory.

As Eugene Rostow, former dean of Yale Law School and undersecretary of state in a Democratic administration wrote in The New York Times in September 1983:

“Israel has an unassailable legal right to establish settlements in the West Bank. The West Bank is part of the British Mandate in Palestine, which included Israel and Jordan as well as certain other territories not yet generally recognized as belonging to either country. While Jewish settlement east of the Jordan River was suspended in 1922, such settlements remained legal in the West Bank.

All rights vesting under mandates were preserved by Article 80 of the United Nations Charter. And they survived the end of British administration in Palestine as a ‘’sacred trust’’ – exactly the legal posture for Namibia after South Africa ceased to be the mandatory power.

Simply put, Israel cannot “occupy” what for 100 years the international community has declared to be the sovereign reconstituted homeland of the Jewish