Sorry, what? By West Bank I’m assuming you mean…Samaria & Judea, which is what that chunk of ground was called before Jordan annexed it in 1948 making it their “West Bank” as in their (Jordan’s) chunk of land west of the River Jordan…that West Bank?
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Blah blah blah…let’s go back a step or two…
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…but maybe not that far back as many overlapping promises where made to many…
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Nope, not that one either, as that’s panned out a little toooo far….so I guess I was closer with the first map. Anyway…
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Then this got split into Arab & Jewish areas..
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But whoopsies…the British promised more than they had of the former Ottoman Empire. So they took what was left over and tried to partition that again which the Jews accepted & the Arab nationalists didn’t…
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…& that brings us to 1937-ish. Too much for Israel, not enough for the Arab nationalists….so…they proposed other partitions & none where good enough for the Arab nationalists…notice what’s now called the Golan Heights in each?
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Which eventually lead to the British bugging out of the area, followed by the Jews declaring pretty much immediately their independence & statehood, etc…leading to everyone & their dog ganging up on what’s now Israel in 1948.
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…& I’ve been interrupted eleventeen times in the last ten minutes as I’m trying to respond here, so I’ll have to come back to this another time….
Oh…maybe….ok, International Humanitarian Law (IHL) or the Laws of Armed Conflict (LOAC) prohibits the transfer of segments of the population of a state to the territory of another state which it has occupied as a result of the resort to armed force, like Jordan did in 1948, & Israel did taking the same territory from Jordan in 1967.
Quite apart from the question of whether the Fourth Geneva Convention applies de jure to territory such as the West Bank over which there was no previous legitimate sovereign, the case of Jews voluntarily establishing homes and communities in their ancient homeland, and alongside Palestinian communities, does not match the kind of forced population transfers contemplated by Article 49(6)???
As Professor Eugene Rostow, former US Under-Secretary of State for Political Affairs has written: "the Jewish right of settlement in the area is equivalent in every way to the right of the local population to live there" (AJIL, 1990, vol. 84, p.72). The provisions of Article 49(6) regarding forced population transfer to occupied sovereign territory should not be seen as prohibiting the voluntary return of individuals to the towns and villages from which they, or their ancestors, had been forcibly ousted. Nor does it prohibit the movement of individuals to land which was not under the legitimate sovereignty of any state and which is not subject to private ownership.
Yeah…this isn’t gonna happen tonight & I’ll have to come back to this.