This is the second time I’ve seen this book referenced in a comment on this blog. Apart from highlighting how political motivations can lead people to write some really stupid things, it doesn’t appear to be of any value. The book has been widely discredited by people who are actually experts in the field (unlike Mr. Sand), and from all accounts (even Tom Segev’s, who unsurprisingly supported the book) is an example of shooting the arrow and drawing the target around it.

I should preface my comments by saying that I don’t have any background in Israeli or international law either. You might be interested in the comments thread on this topic at the right-of-center American legal blog, the Volokh Conspiracy. In particular, this comment summarizes the argument made by the ICJ’s advisory opinion, which centers on the fact that GC4, by its own terms, applies to conflicts between High Contracting Parties (including the Six-Day War) and not just territory captured from an HCP by another HCP. There’s also plenty of criticism of that viewpoint.

The author of that comment also addresses the terra nullius line, pointing out that the ICJ, in its advisory opinion on Western Sahara, found that the concept (at least, as understood at the time the territory was colonized by Spain) was extremely narrow: it only applied to territories free from tribes or peoples who had social and political organization. Unfortunately, the opinion doesn’t cite any sources for its conclusion.

More to the point, your insistence on trying to find “the correct answer” independent of judicial glosses seems pretty formalistic; not only might it be the case that the other legal materials are simply indeterminate on this point, but it also ignores the judicial role in creating law. (A professor of mine liked to tell the story of how he was interviewed by a local news agency after the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which allowed states to place certain restrictions on abortion but not to ban it outright. After he had given his views, the cameraman wanted some stock footage and asked him to take a copy of the Constitution off the shelf, open it, and point to the abortion clause! Of course, American abortion jurisprudence is a bad example of the point I’m trying to make.)

That said, I have to say that I share your (since abandoned?) skepticism about the relevance of international law. I tend to agree with recent reductionist accounts of international law that see it as a special kind of politics. Can I ask what changed your mind?

I guess you hsve to decide if you are a Protestant Jew or a Catholic Jew after all.

Zak

It also doesn’t surprise me that you want to get rid of the Golan and oppose settlement there, but you don’t mention it much here at all, possibly because the pioneers in settling the area, were Leftists who are politically “kosher” in the eyes of “progressives”, even if wrong in this case, unlike those “Bible thumping, gun-toting, kippah-wearing extremist settlers” in Judea/Samaria who get the “progressives” so agitated. Apparently, settlement as such is not the problem, but what tribe one belongs to that makes all the difference.

You tend to attack Haim and I based on a two-dimensional cut-out of “progressives” that is not simplistic but anachronistic – quite similar to the way you attack Palestinians and Muslims.

I’m really sorry to disappoint you: I don’t live in an Arab house abandoned in 1948.

And to disappoint you again, I do condemn settlement in the Golan Heights.

It’s true that especially in the first years of the occupation, many members of parties of the old Israeli left, especially Ahdut Ha’avodah, supported settlement on the Golan. As a historian, I describe this in “Accidental Empire,” and explain how they came to this position. As a politically active Israeli, I believe they were deeply mistaken.