US aids and abets a government that does not abide by the rule of law

United Nations head Ban Ki-moon issued a strong statement against Israel’s expanding settlement policy in answer to its Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s arrogant declaration that those who oppose settlement policy are calling for “ethnic cleansing of Jews” from the West Bank.

Due to the Eid Al Adha holidays, neither Arab officials nor the media gave his heroic stand the attention and support it deserves.

According to the Israeli minister of housing, Uri Ariel, around 777,000 settlers were living in the West Bank in 2014, the Haaretz newspaper was saying in May of that year.

There are 131 main settlements, in addition to 109 smaller outposts on various hills and mountains. The main funding for those settlements, according to Israeli investigative researcher Uri Blau, comes from American NGOs.

In his report, Blau says: “The settlements are massively funded by private tax-exempt US NGOs, to the tune of $220 million for the period 2009-2013 alone. That support is due to their strong belief in the apocalyptic return of the Messiah, the prerequisite of which is gathering of Jews around Jerusalem.” In the same article published by Haaretz in May 2014, Ariel was quoted as stating that settlers in the West Bank were to increase by 50 per cent in the course of the following five years.

The Fourth Geneva Convention considers the building of settlements on occupied territories as a violation of international law. 

The United Nations has repeatedly condemned, through five Security Council resolutions, the construction of settlements, and labeled them “illegal”.

The International Court of Justice, in a 2004 advisory opinion, stated categorically that the settlements on occupied Palestinian territory are “illegal”.

UN chief Ban Ki-moon said in April 2012 that all settlement activity is illegal and runs counter to Israel’s obligations under the United Nations Charter. 

Moreover, the United States and the European Union criticised the building of those settlements. Russia, the United Kingdom and France strongly condemned the construction of those settlements.

But the Israeli government does not care for the world public opinion or the international community, as long as it is sure of the special relationship with Washington.

The US is the only country in the entire world that can coerce Netanyahu to stop the settlement activity and the usurpation of more Palestinian territories.

It was Washington that forced Israel to attend the Madrid peace conference in the 1990s when president George Bush, Sr. phoned prime minister Yitzhak Shamir and asked him to attend or all subsidies and donations will be cut off.

It was Washington that forced Israel to withdraw from occupied Egyptian territories, following the tripartite invasion of Britain, France and Israel in 1956. 

But Washington signed this week a memorandum of understanding to grant, over a 10-year period, $38 billion in aid to a government that does not abide by the rule of law, international legitimacy or the basic criteria for a civil behaviour.