Sir, – In her interview with Jack Power, the EU’s foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas equated Russia’s invasion of Crimea – part of the sovereign state of Ukraine – with the presence of Israeli settlements in the West Bank (Judea & Samaria) (“Kaja Kallas: EU ban on Israeli settlement trade would be ‘principled stance’”, Europe, September 10th).
She said, “When Crimea was occupied, then it was very clear – it’s illegal, we don’t recognise this, which means that we stop the trade with any products that come from Crimea.
“We should have the same principled stance – you know this is illegal, everybody agrees, so we should stop trading with Occupied [Palestinian] Territories.”
These are disputed lands but not occupied territories, however. History cannot be rewritten for convenience.
READ MORE
There was one invasion and one occupying country, from 1948 to 1967: the newly formed country of Jordan, which invaded immediately upon Israel’s independence.
This invasion was proof of concept, that this area formed part of the new state of Israel as the Arabs rejected the partition plan. The irony is that if the Arabs had accepted the West Bank, a construct solely of that plan, it could have become a recognised Arab (Palestinian) land.
Instead, in 1948 the state of Israel was created and the borders of this newly formed state were by legal default those of the British Mandate, the principle of utis possidetis juris.
There has been no international legal binding change since that time. Therefore, Israel cannot be occupying what remains her land – albeit disputed and, for their many critics, an impediment to a functioning independent Palestinian state.
Co-existence through negotiation and dialogue is the only way forward, as Israeli president Isaac Herzog said last week.
What must be unequivocally condemned, however (as the chief rabbi of the UK and Commonwealth has done this week), is the reprehensible, unacceptable violence being perpetrated by a small group of extremists upon Palestinians, which must be stopped.
The next months bring hope for change, with the memory of Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin a reminder of how close peace came despite all the historical obstacles, and how possible it can still be. - Yours, etc,
ED ABRAHAMSON,
St Ives,
United Kingdom.
