Peloni: Last November, in an open letter to the late Senator Lindsey Graham, I noted that “as is always true with the Jews, what is best relied upon is a fair and equitable application of the law, and the law, as defined in international treaties and agreements, supports our claim to lands reconstituted in the state of Israel… and those who would deny the property rights of the Jews by claiming their land belongs to the savage Arab Palestinians, should in turn be understood to be textbook examples of antisemites.” Natasha Hausdorff provides a similar argument below, while explaining the international legal frameworks which undermine the basis on which Israeli lands are Israeli, and the property rights of Jews must be held to no different standard from those of other ethnicities and territories.
There are few phrases in international affairs repeated with greater confidence or subjected to less scrutiny than ‘illegal Israeli settlements’.
By Natasha Hausdorff | Behind the News in Israel | September 14, 2026
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There are few phrases in international affairs repeated with greater confidence or subjected to less scrutiny than ‘illegal Israeli settlements’. It appears in UN resolutions, government statements, NGO reports and news bulletins as though it were an established fact. Add the words ‘under international law’ and apparently further discussion becomes unnecessary.
The trouble is not just that this is political rhetoric masquerading as law, but that it is in fact contrary to real international law, properly applied. The claim rests upon a series of propositions about Israel’s borders, the legal nature of occupation and the meaning of provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention, propositions which have hardened into orthodoxy through repetition. They have been endorsed by the International Committee of the Red Cross, the UN Security Council and majorities of the International Court of Justice (ICJ). But institutional repetition does not transform defective legal reasoning into law.
To understand the problem, one must go back. After the Ottoman Empire collapsed in 1922, the international community established the Mandate for Palestine. The Mandate expressly required the facilitation of Jewish immigration and encouraged ‘close settlement by Jews on the land’. Whatever one thinks politically about the Mandate today, this was the international legal framework established for the territory.
When Israel became an independent state in 1948, another universal rule became crucial: uti possidetis juris, an unglamorous Latin expression with significant consequences. It means that when a new state emerges from a pre-existing administrative territory, it by default inherits that territory’s boundaries as its international borders.
The doctrine originated in Latin America and was later applied across the decolonisation of Africa and Asia and to the break-up of states including the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. Its purpose is obvious. Independence cannot lead to a territorial vacuum in which every boundary is up for grabs. As the ICJ has recognised, the rule provides stability, certainty and prevents fratricidal struggles over land.
Yet where Israel is concerned, the received wisdom is to disapply this elementary rule for no discernible reason. Israel was the only state to emerge in 1948 from the remaining territory of the Mandate, west of the river Jordan. This was after the severance of Transjordan from the Mandate, in order to create the Arab state of Jordan. The UN’s 1947 partition plan, which proposed a further Arab state in the territory, was never implemented, having been rejected by the Arab side, which chose war in its stead.
The consequence is uncomfortable for those who begin the legal story of Israel in 1967, after the Six-Day War. Applying the ordinary rule of uti possidetis, Israel took on the Mandate’s boundaries, the only lines on the map. Judea and Samaria – subsequently renamed the West Bank after their seizure by Jordan – did not become sovereign Jordanian territory merely because Jordan occupied them between 1948 and 1967. Nor did the 1949 armistice lines become international borders, as the armistice agreements made explicit. They were military ceasefire lines, and Egypt and Jordan were adamant they would never constitute more.
This matters because the entire settlements argument rests upon the prior assumption that Israel is the occupying power in foreign sovereign territory. A state cannot occupy its own sovereign territory. Crimea illustrates the point: Russia’s occupation does not extinguish Ukrainian title. If Ukrainian forces recover Crimea tomorrow, Ukraine will not suddenly become the occupying power just because Russia controlled the peninsula for a decade. The sovereign title comes first.
In 2024 when the ICJ asserted, in a non-binding advisory opinion filled with inaccuracies, that ‘Israel’s continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory is unlawful’, it failed to address uti possidetis, the borders inherited from the Mandate and the competing sovereignty claims. It simply assumed the answer to the territorial question and then built its legal conclusions upon that assumption.
But suppose, for argument’s sake, that one puts all this aside and treats Judea and Samaria as occupied territory. Even then, the slogan ‘illegal settlements’ subverts the law. The provision invariably invoked is Article49(6) of the Fourth Geneva Convention: ‘The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.’
Notice what it does not say. It does not say that civilians of a particular nationality or ethnicity may not live in occupied territory. It regulates the conduct of the occupying power: deportation or transfer of population.
The historical context for the Article matters. The provision emerged after the horrors of the second world war, when populations were forcibly displaced and occupying powers implanted populations into conquered territory. Its purpose was to prevent state population-transfer programmes, not to create territories from which civilians of a particular nationality or heritage are prohibited by virtue of their identity. Israeli Jews have never been deported to Judea. They move voluntarily. Some communities are more recent. Others represent the re-establishment of Jewish communities, such as Gush Etzion, which had previously been expelled during Jordan’s occupation.
There is a further problem: international practice. In Professor Eugene Kontorovich’s global study of settlement activity in occupied territories, he found that there have been many substantial movements of civilian populations in prolonged occupations – real situations of state transfer under Article 49(6), in other words – that received no international commendation and no remark as to illegality. Two-tier comes to mind. Northern Cyprus, Western Sahara and other disputed or occupied territories have involved the sort of demographic movement that supposedly triggers this Article.
This does not mean that the real abuses elsewhere should be ignored. It means international law cannot be one thing for Israel and another for everybody else. A legal rule selectively (and incorrectly) cited whenever Jews build houses across an armistice line, which is not and never was a border, is not the application of law but political posturing. Additionally, the Oslo Accords, which gave Palestinians self-government in Areas A and B of the West Bank, left Area C under Israeli administration, and deliberately reserved settlements, borders and Jerusalem for final-status negotiations.
There is an attempt to whitewash the real illegal building in these disputed territories by the Palestinian Authority, often done with international funding, in Area C. Ed Miliband, in a statement on Tuesday replete with falsehoods, told, or most likely simply repeated, a lie about the Bedouin communities in the village of Khan Al Ahmar. He claimed that these Bedouin had lived on that land for generations. There are aerial photos dating back to the Luftwaffe that disprove this claim. In fact, the Bedouin of Khan al Ahmar and the other illegal outposts in the area, planted there as political pawns, have never themselves made that claim. This is the real, politically motivated illegal building at scale. It violates international law, the Oslo Accords and any faith Israel might have that future agreements it enters into will be honoured by the international community.
The consequences extend far beyond legal disputes. The phrase ‘illegal settlements’ is increasingly being used to mean something much more disturbing: that Jews should not live in certain places because they are Jews. Consider what is being demanded. A future Palestinian state is routinely imagined as requiring the removal of hundreds of thousands of Jews from their homes. The Jewish residence in Hebron, the cradle of Jewish civilisation, is inexplicably presented as an international crime. As is the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem or the Jewish communities re-established after their inhabitants were expelled.
No comparable demand would be tolerated elsewhere. We would immediately recognise the ugliness of saying that peace between two peoples requires territory to be cleansed of one ethnicity. Yet once the proposition is dressed in the language of ‘settlements’ and ‘international law’, politicians repeat it.
The consequences affect Britain. Once Jewish homes are described as inherently illegal, businesses serving Jews become ‘complicit’, charities supporting Jewish communities become suspect, Jews buying property supposedly become participants in an international crime, then vocabulary moves effortlessly from international diplomacy into campaigns of exclusion at home. That is how the weaponisation of international law contributes to Jew-hate. It provides ancient prejudices with a veneer of respectability couched in modern legal terminology. The Jew is no longer accused of simply being somewhere he does not belong. He is an ‘illegal settler’. His home is not merely unwanted; it is a ‘war crime’. Exclusion becomes a virtue.
This weaponisation of the law is also disastrous for peace. Peace will not be achieved by teaching Palestinians that every Jewish home beyond an arbitrary ceasefire line is a crime, any more than it will be achieved by pretending that Jews have no history, rights or legitimate claims in the territory. Negotiations require recognition of claims which must be reconciled.
International law was designed to provide rules by which disputes could be resolved. It was not created to furnish political campaigns with intimidating vocabulary. The starting point should therefore be the law itself, applied consistently: the Mandate, uti possidetis juris, the actual status of the 1949 armistice lines, the wording of the Geneva Convention, subsequent agreements, including the Oslo Accords, and state practice elsewhere.
Do that, and the supposedly simple proposition that ‘Israeli settlements are illegal under international law’ becomes incoherent. Perhaps that is why it is repeated so insistently. It is much easier to make this empty declaration than to confront what the law actually says.
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The Arabs have made the same mistake of refusing to cut their losses and get on with the rest of ther lives in 1948, 1967, since the Second Intifada and now in defying the Trump Plan to dump Hamas. Each occasion has let the Zionist enterprise use the opportunity to dig in, expand and flourish.
Similarly the Arabs have repeated the error of hostiity with violence promotiing Zionism. The Tsarist use of Antisemitism as a diversion from socio -economic problems created practical political Zionism. The Nazis taking the same trick to Holocaust levels confirmed the need for Zionism in the biggest “Told you so!” of its history. Then the Arabs out of vicarious revenge and little wisdom followed by expellinng thier Jewish communties doubling the State of Israel’s population. Now the promotion of active and violent anti-Zionism by the Palestine lobby will do the same as aliyah from France and the US have already these twenty years since Durban reduced the French Community by 10% and sent 100 000 US Jews to Israel.
In the same way the World at large accepted the “Green Line Israel” of 1949 because the Arabs’ political and military incompetence deserved it; so the same will happen to the “Israeli periphery” and settlements in the 1967 territories as increasing Jewish migration to Israel before the Palestine Lobby’s unwise promotion of anti-Zionism effectively alias Antisemitism.
This reconquista might not take the 700 years of Spain nor the 400 of Greece and the Balkans BUT it has and will happen because theology apart the spread of Islam was so much warlordism and justification for war lording and with the end of the petro-era will shrink even as Islam shrank once the Europeans found the Cape Route eastwards and no longer had to pay customs dues to the Moslems inbetween.
Everybody that was involved in the Oslo Accords has already stated, unequivocally, that the Oslo Accords are dead. There are several countries that like to claim that the Oslo Accords were intended to produce a two state solution to the situation in current day Israel. Those same countries like to require Israel to return to the 1949 armistice lines (Anybody remember Obama?) which were not accepted by any of the countries involved. Some of these complaining countries were also witnesses to the signing of the Oslo Accords.
Coming back to the two state solution for a moment, I, for one, am not sure that those words were even mentioned in the Accords, but even if they were, the British, while ignoring their responsibilities in the government of the mandate, split it in two in 1922, giving more than 75% to become the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, thus forming a two state solution.
Then everybody expected the Jews to agree to partition the remainder yet again and give up the heartland of Israel from 3000 years ago to the Arabs (so-called Palestinians). Taking this seriously for a moment, what these folks are calling for is to make a state for the Arabs in Gaza(1), a state for the Arabs in Judea(2), a state for the Arabs in Samaria(3) with a port on the Mediterranean coast thus splitting the remainder of Israel (4 & 5) at its narrowest point, a state for the Arabs in the Golan region (6), a state for the Arabs in the upper Galilee (7), and a state for the Arabs-Beduins in the Negev(8). I’m sure, with some imagination, the rest of Israel can divided up further. There is a further important point to take into account: none of these 6 new Arab states would be self-sufficient. They would depend on Israel for food, fuel, water, electricity and probably even financial support in some matters, just like the PA calls for today. They would then probably also require fees or customs duties or some other cash income if anyone wanted to travel from northern Israel (4) to southern Israel (5).
Of course, we shouldn’t forget Jerusalem, which a whole bunch of countries want their share of, starting with the Vatican, Turkiye, Russia and of course most of the neighboring Arab countries, although they cannot show mention of Jerusalem in their holy texts. Israel has proclaimed that Jerusalem is it’s indivisible capital but it seems that everybody is against that claim. Israel has possession of Jerusalem and is unlikely to give up its holy city to anyone without protest.