Palestinian Territories lose ‘occupied’ status in latest blow from US
The US State Department has released its annual human rights report, with one notable omission: any mention of the word “occupied” in relation to the Palestinian Territories, a change that further signals the Trump administration’s shifting lines on the conflict.
The department changed the section of the report that used to be listed as “Israel and the Occupied Territories” to “Israel, Golan Heights, West Bank, and Gaza”, altering decades of US foreign policy.
The document, which covers last year, was released on Friday and details human rights abuses by the Israeli military, Palestinian militant group Hamas and the Palestinian Authority that presides over the West Bank. Much of it is the same as previous years.
But the choice of words is reflective of the US government’s new thinking in regard to Israel’s presence in Gaza and the West Bank.
Ahmad Majdalani, an executive member of the Palestine Liberation Organisation said the State Department was “attempting to abolish the depiction of occupation from these territories, which affirms US complicity with the occupation”. He said the US decision, with other moves in favour of Israel, “discredit it and its team for the political process”.
The use of language comes at a time when Israel is facing international censure for its shooting and killing of Palestinians participating in weekly rounds of protests in Gaza ahead of next month’s Nakba Day, the commemoration of the national day of disaster.
On Friday, Israeli forces shot and killed four Palestinians protesting along the enclave’s shared border with Israel, including a teenage boy, Mohammed Ayyoub, who officials said was 15 years old. Palestinian photographer Abed Alhakeem Abu Rish told the Associated Press that Ayyoub was 150 meters from the border fence and unarmed when he was shot and killed.
Israel blamed Hamas – which presides over Gaza – for his death, alleging he was being used as a “human shield”. It said many of the 32 people killed in the past four weeks were members of Palestinian militant groups trying to breach the border fence. Hamas had called for the weekly rallies, but rights groups said many of those killed and injured were unarmed civilian protesters.
The European Union and Nikolay Mladenov, the UN envoy on the Middle East peace
process, called for a full investigation into Friday’s shootings. The Palestinians said they would request the UN Human Rights Council establish a commission to independently examine the killings. They said any investigation carried out by Israel would lack credibility and transparency. Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said yesterday that “it’s time for the International Criminal Court to begin a serious judicial investigation into these crimes committed against the Palestinian people”.
The US earlier this month blocked a draft UN resolution that would have condemned Israel for the killing of protesters. A Palestinian spokesperson accused the US government of siding with “the Israeli occupation army against our defenceless people”.
So the new terminology in the annual human rights report is but one of many blows the Palestinians have suffered from Washington in their push to gain national independence.
The document includes just two mentions of the word “occupied”, one in reference to the Golan Heights, a territory that Israel captured from Syria in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, and the other in a quote.
The previous year’s report included 19 mentions of the word, many of them in reference to the Palestinian Territories.
The international community regards East Jerusalem and the West Bank to be occupied territories. Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, but maintains a blockade of the enclave.
Observers say the language removal points to another embrace of Israeli positions by the Trump administration that has announced it will move the US embassy to Jerusalem in defiance of Arab protests; has allowed Israel to build its first new settlement for two decades; and that has remained silent on wider settlement building.
“The decision by the US State Department to remove the term ‘occupied territory’ from its 2017 human rights report is yet one more example of the Trump administration’s backsliding on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” said Hugh Lovatt, Middle East and North Africa policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations in London.
“Since assuming office, President [Donald] Trump and his administration have distanced themselves from the twostate solution, rolled back US commitment on Palestinian statehood on the 1967 lines as the ultimate outcome of peace negotiations, and largely turned a blind eye to Israeli settlement building,” he said. “Such measures only push farther away any lasting resolution to the conflict”.
The change comes after Mr Trump’s ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, reportedly told the State Department in December to refrain from referring to the West Bank as occupied. The report indicates the first public acceptance of that demand.
Mr Friedman, an architect of the US embassy move to Jerusalem, announced in December, is viewed in Washington as the most pro-Israel envoy
President Trump and his administration have distanced themselves from the two-state solution HUGH LOVATT Mena policy fellow
the country has yet had. He has funded projects in the hardline West Bank settlement of Beit El and is a vocal supporter of the outposts deemed illegal by the majority of the international community.
In September, he said he believed “the settlements are part of Israel”, a comment that went against official US government policy on the issue. Right-wing, nationalist Jews believe the settlements are built on ancient, biblical lands. The Palestinians say it is their ancestral land.
A section of the report also listed alleged offences by Israeli authorities and forces, including home demolitions, improper interrogation techniques and restrictions on Palestinian freedom of protest.
On Jerusalem, the report says “problems primarily related to Palestinian residents of Jerusalem” are dealt with in the “West Bank and Gaza” section of the report.
But the report maintained that the final status of the holy city was still to be decided in talks between both sides. Palestinians seek East Jerusalem as the capital of any future state, while Israel believes Jerusalem to be its undivided capital.
“On December 6, 2017, the United States recognised Jerusalem as the capital of Israel,” the report reads. “It is the position of the United States that the specific boundaries of Israeli sovereignty in Jerusalem are subject to final status negotiations between the parties.”
For years, Washington’s standing as a mediator between Israel and the Palestinians has steadily eroded, most recently by the unilateral recognition of Jerusalem as “the capital of Israel”. Now comes another massive blow to US credibility with the State Department’s annual human rights reports, which effectively denies that Israel is an occupying power.
Since the first of such reports was issued in 1977, they have always included a section on “Israel and the occupied territories”. But the document released on Friday instead refers simply to “the West Bank and Gaza”.
That’s not all.
The phrase “Israeli-occupied Golan Heights” has also disappeared. Instead there is one section about “Israel, the Golan Heights and problems related to Israeli residents of Jerusalem”.
Another section deals with “the West Bank and Gaza” and “Palestinian residents of Jerusalem”.
So not only is the Trump administration relieving Israel of the burden of having to act as an occupying power in a formal and legal sense, as every single UN Security Council and all other relevant international legal documents affirm, but it is effectively imposing the logic of the Clinton Parameters onto Israeli-Palestinian affairs, especially in Jerusalem, with anywhere and anything involving Jewish Israelis rendered “Israel” and everywhere else left an undefined nebula.
This satire of reality is so absurd that if a Jewish Israeli and a Palestinian Arab lived in adjacent apartments, this formula would categorise only the Jewish home as being “in Israel”.
In effect, wherever a Jewish Israeli sets foot is, by the logic of this document, “Israel” by virtue of his or her presence there.
There is also every effort to avoid the term “settlers” in favour of “Israelis living in West Bank settlements”.
The illogical ethnic bias shot through the report reaches a crescendo in its reference to a July 14, 2016 incident when “three Israeli-Arab attackers shot and killed two Israeli national police officers” at a holy site in the old city of East Jerusalem. All five of these individuals were Israeli and it took place in Jerusalem. Yet the incident is cited several pages deep into the section dealing with “the West Bank and Gaza”.
One might be relieved the report includes an East Jerusalem incident in “the West Bank and Gaza”, where it indeed belongs, even if none are acknowledged as occupied.
But by the logic of the report, the Israeli Arab attackers are being denaturalised and the event transferred out of Israel because of the ethnicity of the attackers rather than the location of the attack or anything else.
These linguistic games are significant because Israel’s status as an occupying power in East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza confer upon it a very specific set of rights and responsibilities and protections towards the occupied population.
The status of “occupying power” is regularly cited by the Israeli military as the justification for most of what it has done in order to control the occupied territories, including establishing checkpoints, military zones, firing areas, seizing territory and, of course, systematically discriminating between Jews and non-Jews.
But when it comes to settlement activity, which is absolutely prohibited in occupied areas by the Fourth Geneva Convention, Israel likes to muddy the issue.
That’s what gave rise to this ludicrous model of a free-floating Israel that emerges wherever a settler happens to be standing at any given moment, surrounded by an undefined and unnamed other reality.
Israel and the Trump administration want to have it both ways, whenever that’s convenient for Israel.
The problem is, if these areas are not occupied, then most of what the Israeli military has done to the land is an outrageous abuse, not to mention the disenfranchisement and virtual apartheid inflicted on the people. But if there is an occupation, then settlement activity is a massive human rights violation.
Settlements are prohibited by the Geneva Convention because establishing them is an obvious human rights abuse against the occupied people, who have a right not to have their land colonised by invaders.
So to see the words and concept of “occupation” and “occupied territories” excised from the State Department report renders the document wilfully blind, morally bankrupt and intellectually indefensible.
But it was also predictable. The most senior person in the State Department who is interested in these issues is the US ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, who is ardently opposed to a two-state solution and denies there is any Israeli occupation, precisely for that reason.
However, the State Department clearly managed to salvage some references to actual reality, including at least two references to Palestinians from the occupied territories being detained “extraterritorially in Israel”.
But this term only makes sense if the detained Palestinians came from a place that was, categorically, not part of Israel at all, so that bringing them to Israel would under those circumstances be considered an extraterritorial move.
There are many other honest and rational sections, as well as a lot of Israeli rightwing and government propaganda that was never included in the past.
One of the biggest affronts to human rights in the whole report comes, sadly, from its own cynical and utterly dishonest move in stripping from Palestinians the protection of being an occupied people without granting them the rights of citizenship and relieving Israel of the responsibilities of occupation without imposing any additional burdens whatsoever.
To see the words and concept of ‘occupation’ and ‘occupied territories’ excised from the US State Department report renders the document wilfully blind and intellectually indefensible