• DOI:10.2979/ISR.2004.9.3.115
• Corpus ID: 144282494

The Jewish Settlements in the West Bank: International Law and Israeli Jurisprudence

@article{Galchinsky2004TheJS,
  title={The Jewish Settlements in the West Bank: International Law and Israeli Jurisprudence},
  author={Michael Galchinsky},
  journal={Israel Studies},
  year={2004},
  volume={9},
  pages={115 - 136}
}

• M. Galchinsky
• Published 1 October 2004
• Sociology
• Israel Studies

MANY WHO CARE ABOUT ISRAEL have learned to stop caring about international law. After all, for forty years, Arab states, members of the Non-Aligned Movement and the former Soviet Union, have ceaselessly and atrociously manipulated international law so as to turn Israel into a pariah state among the nations. The UN's infamous resolutions equating Zionism with racism are only the best known examples.1 Each spring, when the UN Commission on Human Rights rolls out its allegations of Israeli human rights violations, this political body holds Israel to a far higher standard than it does states that have demonstrated far less commitment to the Geneva Conventions and the UN Charter.2 For good reasons, many who love Israel have honed their contempt for international law.3 It can be hard to remember how much energy and optimism Jewish leaders invested in the development of international law in the two decades immediately following the Shoah. Those leaders recalled all too well what had happened when the first international legal system, the League of Nations, had disintegrated and left Nazi Germany without check, to treat its citizens in its own way. Now, it is hard to remember that it was the American Jewish Committee that convinced the states' representatives at the San Francisco Conference in 1945 that human rights should become one of the pillars of the UN's mission. Or that it was Rend Cassin, president of the Alliance Isradlite Universelle, who drafted the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Or that a Polish Jew, Raphael Lemkin, coined the term "genocide" and pushed through the UN Genocide Convention. Or that two generations of American Jewish leaders saw international law as one of the cornerstones of their Never Forget/Never Again program, consistent with core Jewish values like tikkun olam, ger lo tilhaz, b'tselem elohim, kevod haberiyyoth, mippene darkhe shalom, and ben adam l'havero.