Legal Experts Debunk Netanyahu’s Golan Heights Claim: Annexation Can’t Be Excused by Defensive War
- “Another widely accepted Zionist myth … that in 1967 Israel faced an existential threat … countless books have been written … in Hebrew, English, Arabic …. documentaries have been filmed .. disproving this completely! The purpose of the war was conquest!”
– Miko Peled 5:50 onwards
– - For the record, the 1967, ‘6’ day war was not a defensive war. It was a war of aggression triggered by the Zionist state. NUTenyahu is spewing Zionist propaganda! See:
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The 1967, ‘6’ Day War: Zionist Israel’s Unprovoked War of Aggression And Greed for Land!
– - Legal Experts Debunk Netanyahu’s Golan Heights Claim: Annexation Can’t Be Excused by Defensive War
by Noa Landau, https://www.haaretz.com/
Trump and Netanyahu declared that the Golan could be annexed because Israel took it in a war of self-defense, but legal experts say this goes against international law – and that the West Bank is another story in any case.
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The Proclamation on Recognizing the Golan Heights as Part of the State of Israel, which U.S. President Donald Trump signed last week during a ceremony at the White House, states its reasoning as: “The State of Israel took control of the Golan Heights in 1967 to safeguard its security from external threats.”
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Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu underscored this argument during and after the proclamation was signed. In his speech at the ceremony, Netanyahu said: “Israel won the Golan Heights in a just war of self-defense.” Speaking to reporters at the airport in Washington before his return flight to Israel, he said: “There is a very important principle in international life — when you start wars of aggression, you lose territory; do not come and claim it afterwards. It belongs to us.”
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The argument that international law differentiates between area conquered in a war of self-defense and area that is not conquered in such a war is not new. Israeli officials mention it in international forums from time to time. For example, in a meeting in February 2018 in Warsaw, Dr. Dore Gold, former director general of the Foreign Ministry and now president of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, said that international law makes a clear distinction between land occupied during a war of aggression and land taken in the wake of a defensive war. According to Gold, the international community has realized that the Six-Day War was a war of self-defense and therefore international law is different with regard to the Golan Heights.
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To better understand how these statements reflect international law, Haaretz spoke with experts who agreed that even if it is possible to make a case for holding on to the territory of an aggressive entity, when it comes to annexing territory or extending sovereignty over it, the argument of self-defense does not apply to laws of occupation.
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Legal expert and former ambassador Alan Baker is the director of the Institute for Contemporary Affairs at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. The former legal adviser to and deputy director of the Foreign Ministry told Haaretz that contemporary international law does not distinguish between defensive and other wars.
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“There is no way to acquire land by force and it doesn’t matter whether it’s defensive or not defensive. Modern international [law] doesn’t recognize it. How can territory be acquired? By agreement and negotiation or takeover of a country that ceases to exist. But not by force. There is a certain flaw here in international law because in fact this is a prize to the aggressor. He does not lose the right to the territory.”
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