Biden must get Security Council to rescind Resolution 2334

The reasons for rescinding Resolution 2334 are found in this letter published in the New York Times on September 19, 1983 – authored by Eugene Rostow--former US Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs (1966-1969):

“In a recent news analysis, ''The West Bank and the Emperor's Clothes,'' Bernard Gwertzman accurately portrays the mindset of the officials who condescendingly dismiss President Reagan's statement that Israeli settlements in the West Bank are ''not illegal.'' But these officials and not the President are wearing the Emperor's gossamer suit.

Israel has an unassailable legal right to establish settlements in the West Bank. The West Bank is part of the British Mandate in Palestine which included Israel and Jordan as well as certain other territories not yet generally recognized as belonging to either country. While Jewish settlement east of the Jordan River was suspended in 1922, such settlements remained legal in the West Bank.

All rights vesting under mandates were preserved by Article 80 of the United Nations Charter. And they survived the end of British administration in Palestine as a ''sacred trust'' - exactly the legal posture for Namibia after South Africa ceased to be the mandatory power. Recognizing the legal force of these facts, those who are seeking to sabotage the President's position fall back on a provision of the Geneva Convention of 1949 forbidding occupying powers to transfer their own populations to occupied territories. This article of the Convention was a reaction to Nazi policy in Czechoslovakia after the invasion of 1938. But Israel is not in the West Bank only as an occupying power, because the West Bank has never been widely recognized as Jordanian.

Israel's claims to the territory are at least as good as those of Jordan, since Jordan held the territory for 19 years after a war of aggression, whereas Israel took the area in the course of a war of self-defense, so far as Jordan was concerned. As a matter of convenience, Israel applies the Geneva Convention generally in its administration of the West Bank, but does not admit it is legally obliged to do so. Jordan is not the reversioner in the West Bank and therefore the protective provisions of the Geneva Convention do not apply. Whether Israel's right to settle the West Bank should be exercised at a particular time is thus a matter of prudence, not of law. It is conventional wisdom that such settlements are an obstacle to peace. But the absence of such settlements between 1948 and 1967 did not encourage Jordan to make peace. The thesis, often mechanically repeated by our Government spokesmen, does not do justice to the principles of the Arab position: that the Balfour Declaration, the Mandate, and all that flowed from them were beyond the powers of the victorious Allies of 1914-18, the League, and the United Nations, and that the existence of Israel is itself an aggression against the Arab nation. Perhaps the realization that their continuing refusal to make peace with Israel is bound to have territorial consequences will help to persuade the Arabs that 35 years of intransigence is enough.”

President Biden: Atone for your sin in giving birth to Resolution 2334 by rescinding it.

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Author’s note: The cartoon--commissioned exclusively for this article--is by Yaakov Kirschen aka “Dry Bones”- one of Israel’s foremost political and social commentators--whose cartoons have graced the columns of Israeli and international media publications for decades.