The prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, is planning to annex parts of the West Bank on July 1 to extend Israeli sovereignty to new areas. This is a controversial and illegal move according to U.N. experts and much of the international community but comes with the support of the Trump administration.
According to 47 experts appointed by the U.N. Human Rights Council, "The annexation of occupied territory is a serious violation of the Charter of the United Nations and the Geneva Conventions, and contrary to the fundamental rule affirmed many times by the United Nations Security Council and General Assembly that the acquisition of territory by war or force is inadmissible. These experts also deemed Israel’s annexation plan “a vision of 21st century apartheid.”"
Palestinians, Palestinian leaders, and leaders of the Arab world have largely condemned this plan. In the first attempt of its kind, the United Arab Emirates’ ambassador to the United States, Yousef Al Otaiba, wrote in an Israeli newspaper to appeal “directly to Israelis in Hebrew to deter Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from following through on his promise to annex occupied territory as early as next month,” says The New York Times. The article was a refutation of Netanyahu’s assertion that Arab countries gain too much from Israel to continue supporting Palestinians. In addition to those concerns, many former Israeli defense officials argue that the annexation plan could increase violence within the West Bank, where Palestinians are facing an increase in unemployment. “Imposing Israeli sovereignty on territory the Palestinians have counted on for a future state,” Israeli experts say, “could ignite a new uprising on the West Bank. Neighboring Jordan could be destabilized.”
The news of an annexation plan has brought about new pleas from the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement (BDS), created in 2005 by Palestinians to end international support for Israel’s actions in the West Bank . In May 2020, various Palestinian civil rights groups, human rights organizations, and unions “called on governments to adopt ‘effective countermeasures, including sanctions’ to ‘stop Israel’s illegal annexation of the occupied West Bank and grave violations of human rights.’”
The BDS movement saw a huge victory on June 11 when the European Court of Human Rights shut down France’s attempt to criminalize BDS activists in a 2015 case. At the time of the arrests, the activists were said to be inciting discrimination against a group of people for their origins, race or religion. In the end “the European judges ruled that as citizens these activists had the right to express their political opinions, which are in no sense discriminatory against a race or a religion.” Netanyahu’s expeditious plan to annex is likely to bring about more condemnations from the international community and increase support for the BDS movement, but it is unclear whether these actions will actually halt his plan.
Hanna Ditinsky
is a sophomore at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and is majoring in English and minoring in Economics. She was born and raised in New York City and is passionate about human rights and the future of progressivism