International Law

On June 28 and 29, 2009, the Goldstone Commission recorded Palestinian statements at the UNRWA headquarters in Gaza City. This study is an analysis of the four main statements, the way the commission interpreted them, and reports from other Palestinian sources which contradict the testimony presented to the commission.

The E-1 area, part of the city of Maale Adumim located immediately adjacent to Jerusalem, is largely uninhabited, state-owned land. A construction plan supported by every Israeli prime minister since Yitzhak Rabin would link Maale Adumim and its 36,000 residents to Jerusalem.
Without control of E-1, a Palestinian belt of construction will threaten Jerusalem from the east and undermine Israel’s control of the Jerusalem-Jericho road, a major artery of paramount strategic importance in time of w

An imbalanced EU position paper on Jerusalem written in December 2008, and recently leaked to the media, completely ignores Israel’s historical and legal rights to its capital. The EU attack refers primarily to the City of David, located just beyond Jerusalem’s Old City walls, an area identified by archaeologists and historians as the location of King David’s capital some 3,000 years ago.

NGOs that are supported financially by special interest groups or even states for the benefit of their own agendas have been instrumental in the implementation of universal jurisdiction against Israeli officials. Universal jurisdiction and the International Criminal Court are applied when a country does not or cannot act to prosecute. Yet Israel is a democracy with a well-developed judicial system and does not need external intervention to conduct any investigation.

The charge that Israel uses disproportionate force keeps resurfacing whenever it has to defend its citizens from non-state terrorist organizations and the rocket attacks they perpetuate. From a purely legal perspective, Israel’s current military actions in Gaza are on solid ground. According to international law, Israel is not required to calibrate its use of force precisely according to the size and range of the weaponry used against it.

By exchanging prisoners with the proxy organizations as if they were law-abiding states, Israel can be seen as upgrading the status of the organizations’ unlawful combatants from terrorists and war criminals. Such exchanges afford them the same rights as lawful soldiers, without demanding from their leaders the reciprocal obligations. At the same time, Israel downgrades the rights of its own captured soldiers by overlooking the organizations’ systematic depravation of POW rights.

International law does not require Israel to supply Gaza with fuel or electricity, or, indeed, with any other materials, goods, or services. Dependence on foreign supply does not create a legal duty to continue the supply. Absent specific treaty requirements, countries may cut off oil sales to other countries at any time.

In the summer of 2007, the Muslim Waqf in Jerusalem requested authorization to dig a ditch dozens of meters long to replace power lines on the Temple Mount. Subsequently, the Israel Antiquities Authority issued details about the uncovering of a “sealed stratum of human activity,” a layer of earth with pottery shards found broken in situ, where they had remained without change since the days of the First Temple.