US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Wednesday that Washington's backing for Israel's settlements in the occupied West Bank will advance Israeli-Palestinian peace, angering Palestinian leaders who seek the territory for a state.
In a reversal of four decades of US policy, Pompeo in November announced that the United States no longer viewed Israel's settlements on West Bank land it captured in the 1967 Middle East war as "inconsistent with international law".
This announcement was made during a conference hosted by the Kohelet Policy Forum, a Jerusalem think-tank. The conference was attended by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman.
Speaking by video link at a Jerusalem policy forum dubbed "The Pompeo Doctrine", Pompeo, in a pre-recorded statement, said the administration of US President Donald Trump returned to a "balanced and sober" approach to Middle East peace by changing its position.
The conference sought to build upon the new US stance by laying out legal arguments in defense of Israel's settlements and debating critics' defenses
It was part of Israel’s appreciation to the promise Pompeo had done to protect the Jewish settlement project in the West Bank and his announcement last November that the administration rejects the so-called Hansell Memorandum, which under president Jimmy Carter determined that Israel’s establishment of civilian settlements in the territories captured in 1967 is “inconsistent with international law.”
Netanyahu addressed the conference and said the US administration’s new position on settlements is “a historical revolution.”
This conference, Netanyahu stressed, “focuses on a great deal that destabilizes the old, brings new and creates change and liberation from old concepts on settlement.”
“Conceptions of illegal settlement prevailed over decades, denying the historical rights of the people of Israel to their land and country.”
Trump, Pompeo, and Friedman blasted these concepts and clearly stated that Jews in the settlements are indigenous people, they live in their homeland and are like the Belgians in the Congo or the Dutch in Suriname.
Friedman, for his part, said the “next step the US administration will take after recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and its sovereignty over the Syrian Golan Heights is the West Bank.”
“Since coming here (to Israel)I’ve worked to add one more item to a busy agenda: helping to find a fix to the issues that still linger from the Six-Day War.”
“But it didn’t make peace with everyone, and when we came into office the lingering issues included three of significant importance, which are the status of Jerusalem, the Golan Heights and Judea and Samaria,” he noted, adding that the administration has approached them in ascending order of complexity.
“With regard to Jerusalem, we were assisted by a 22-year-old statute passed overwhelmingly and reaffirmed in subsequent years, again overwhelmingly, by the Congress of the United States. From any and every vantage point, whether US law, biblical history or the facts on the ground, it was undeniably true that Jerusalem was the capital of Israel,” Friedman stressed.
The administration's recent decision to recognize Jewish towns in Judea and Samaria as legal, Friedman said, is “certainly the most complicated of the issues because of the large indigenous Palestinian population”.
