The Road Map
(The full text of the Road Map is available at http://electronicintifada.net/bytopic/historicaldocuments/73.shtml)
The “Road Map” drawn up by the “Quartet” (the US, the EU, the UN and Russia) in mid-2003 is the latest framework for peace between Israel and the Palestinians. The plan itself is hugely vague: it includes no maps, no provisions for a final-status agreement, territorial or otherwise; it also fails to note that many of its conditions are already required under international law independent of any peace agreement. The late Edward Said, world-renowned scholar, writer and academic, aptly concluded that to read the Road Map “is to confront an unsituated document, oblivious of its time and place.”
http://www.palestinemonitor.org/Special%20Section/Road%20Map/A_Road_Map_to_Where.htm
Furthermore, in practice Israel has dramatically failed to uphold its side of the agreement, and further violence on both sides has continued.
Conditions of the plan and international law
Various conditions of the plan are already obligations under international law, a fact of which the Road Map makes no mention. Under Phase I of the Road Map, Israel is to undertake
“no actions undermining trust, including deportations, attacks on civilians; confiscation and/or demolition of Palestinian homes and property, as a punitive measure or to facilitate Israeli construction; destruction of Palestinian institutions and infrastructure …”
As Human Rights Watch points out, “All of these actions violate international humanitarian law: some are war crimes.” As such, “They represent prohibitions that exist independently from the roadmap process - they cannot be negotiated away or made contingent on steps taken by another party.”
HRW also notes that “alleged security-related purposes” are the “most frequently-invoked” justification of the Israeli Defence Force’s actions; as such the condition “as a punitive measure or to facilitate Israeli construction” is utterly inadequate, especially given the prohibition of such actions under the Fourth Geneva Convention.
http://www.hrw.org/backgrounder/mena/israelpa050603.htm
Settlements
The settlements are also illegal under international law. Yet the Road Map only requires Israel, in Phase I, to implement a freeze on the expansion of existing settlements, and the dismantling of those built since 2001. At no point in the entire plan is the removal of all settlements a requirement: Phase II merely requires “further action on settlements”. To what extent is not specified. Nor at any point is the separation wall on the West Bank, which carves off a substantial chunk of Palestinian territory, condemned, explicitly or otherwise.
Moreover, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has rejected and disregarded even the Road Map’s limited requirements. As he told the Knesset (Israel’s Parliament) in July 2003, in terms that explicitly contravene the Road Map, “The future of Jewish settlement … will be debated only when we get to final-status negotiations. …We have no intention of doing it [freezing/dismantling] now. It is not in Israel's interest to do it now.”
http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/israel-palestine/2003/0728chance.htm
Israel pledged to begin immediate dismantling of “unauthorised” settlements in June 2003 (legally, of course, none of the settlements are authorised), in return for which, Israeli newspaper Haaretz related, “Washington agreed to remove the settlements from the framework of its road map.”
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=302223
However, as the Guardian’s Chris McGreal noted in late July 2003, “outposts have been going up faster than the army takes them down, with no apparent government effort to stop it”; according to the Israeli group Peace Now, Sharon had overseen the construction of two new settlements by mid-July.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,987781,00.html
http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/israel-palestine/2003/0728chance.htm
A Palestinian state?
The Road Map provisions for a Palestinian state are extremely vague. Phase II, after a cessation of violence by both sides, foresees the “option” of forming a Palestinian state with “provisional borders and attributes of sovereignty”. What either of these means is not clarified. Indeed, under the “status quo” of 2000, to which Phase I envisages the situation returning, the Palestinian Authority certainly had attributes of sovereignty – in a set of discontinuous cantons constituting a fraction of the occupied territories, within a framework of Israeli control. In many ways, indeed, the Road Map resurrects the failures of the Oslo process.
Furthermore, the “option” of statehood can only be achieved when “the Palestinian people have a leadership acting decisively against terror (which is not defined), willing and able to build a practicing democracy based on tolerance and liberty.” So if the Palestinian people democratically elect a government which upholds the rule of law, respects the human rights of all peoples but continues to resist the Israeli occupation it may not, according to the Road Map, be acceptable to the Quartet.
Phase II, all of whose requirements are on the Palestinians, foresees this happening “through a process of Israeli-Palestinian engagement”. Since, once again, no specifics are mentioned, the imposition of terms by the stronger party, backed by the US, is almost certainly assured.
Moreover, progress in Phase II is based upon consensus. In other words, all parties to the Quartet must be in agreement that “conditions are appropriate to proceed” along the road to Palestinian statehood. So if one party objects, then the process is stalled. This effectively gives each member of the Quartet a veto. The US has a long history of vetoing resolutions in the UN Security Council critical of Israel. It is difficult to see why it would behave any differently in the Quartet.
In April 2004, Sharon announced that five major settlement blocs on the West Bank would remain there “for eternity”. This plan, along with the denial of the right of return for refugees and “Israel's unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, while retaining control of the majority of the West Bank,” was endorsed by the US government. As the New York Times wrote, “Mr Bush is essentially supporting Israel's right to impose a settlement of its choice on the Palestinians.” Along with the continuing construction of the separation barrier on the West Bank, Israel’s actions have continued to flout the provisions of international law, reiterated in (though independent from) the requirements of the Road Map.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,1190807,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,1192103,00.html
http://www.obermayer.us/aer/articles/2004/4-2004/NYT0415settlements.htm
What Edward Said calls the “weird dreamy note in what is meant to be a hard-headed, definitive peace plan” struck by constant references to “the President’s vision” (in Colin Powell’s speech to the America Israel Public Affairs Committee, for example) is, it would seem, fully vindicated, both in the plan’s vagueness and subsequent actions. For Bush, the Road Map is little more than a “vision” to project to the world, while his own behaviour, and Sharon’s, continue to undermine the possibility of Palestinian statehood.
http://www.palestinemonitor.org/Special%20Section/Road%20Map/A_Road_Map_to_Where.htm
http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,926276,00.html
End of the conflict
Phase III is entitled “Permanent status agreement and end of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” It is also characterised by consensus judgement as in Phase II. Read the section above entitled “A Palestinian state?” for the problems associated with consensus judgement.
According to Phase III, first the Palestinians must become a state and then Israel will withdraw its army. But past practice suggests that this should be the other way around. First, the Palestinians have to liberate themselves from occupation, and then when they are independent and sovereign they can declare statehood.
Sabotaging peace
Shortly after the Aqaba summit at which Bush, Sharon and the (then nominal) Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas agreed on the Road Map, two Hamas leaders were shot dead by the Israeli army in a house in the village of Atil, and a third was seriously wounded. On June 10, Israel launched a rocket attack aimed at Hamas leader Abdel Aziz Rantisi, “at a time when Mr Abbas has been trying to negotiate a ceasefire with Hamas”, the Guardian reported, and at which “Hamas was reported to be considering resuming talks with the Palestinian prime minister.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,974472,00.html
Indeed, on the very day of the Aqaba summit itself, as Ramzy Baroud noted in the Palestine Chronicle, “Israeli tanks attacked the West Bank town of Tulkarm and killed a Palestinian boy. Two children were also wounded in the Israeli attack: one was seven, and the other nine.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,971420,00.html
http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/642/re5.htm
Throughout 2003, according to Amnesty International, “The IDF routinely used F16 fighter jets, helicopter gunships and tanks to bomb and shell Palestinian residential areas”, and hundreds of “unarmed Palestinians, including more than 100 children, were killed by the Israeli army in random and reckless shooting, shelling and bombings or as a result of excessive use of force, including in enforcement of curfews.” These actions flout Roadmap requirements as well as international humanitarian law, and constitute war crimes. Violence by both sides, including horrific suicide attacks on Israeli civilians, escalated subsequently.
http://web.amnesty.org/report2003/Isr-summary-eng
An alternative list of 14 reservations to think about
Even though the Road Map only requires that Israel undertake steps which it is legally obliged to do (such as withdraw from occupied territory or cease settlement construction), its government still had the audacity to issue a list of 14 reservations, whilst the Palestinian Authority, whose people have been subject to almost four decades of foreign occupation and alien subjugation, accepted it in its entirety – even though the Road Map demands far more of them than it does of the Israelis.
Arab Media Watch therefore sets out an alternative list of 14 reservations based on principles of justice and legality:
1. The basic gist of the Road Map is that the Palestinians have to provide the necessary conditions on the ground for Israel to withdraw its armed forces from territory it occupied in June 1967. But as we have seen, Israel can effectuate a withdrawal of its own accord unilaterally, as it did with the Gaza Strip in August 2005. Why not then also from the West Bank, including occupied East Jerusalem?
2. No matter how many reforms the Palestinians undertake, they can never become a sovereign, viable and independent state whilst they remain under occupation. According to Article 43 of the 1907 Hague Regulations, it is Israel’s (and not the Palestinians’) obligation under international law to ensure public order and safety in occupied territory. According to the Israel Supreme Court, the Hague Regulations are binding on Israeli law as part of customary international law.
3. UN Security Council resolutions 242 and 338 call for a full withdrawal of Israel’s armed forces from territories it captured in June 1967. There are no preconditions to this withdrawal, such as “when the Palestinian people have a leadership decisively acting against terror.” This is an additional requirement. If Israel had to satisfy a similar requirement in 1948, it is difficult to see how it could have become a state whilst its forces were actively engaged in a terror campaign against British soldiers and Palestinian civilians.
4. Israel’s wall is not mentioned in the Road Map at all. It is difficult to see how Israel is “enhancing territorial contiguity” for a future Palestinian state, as is required by the Road Map, when it is constructing a vast concrete and steel barrier to the tune of $3 billion which is snaking its way throughout the West Bank, in and around occupied East Jerusalem. In fact, one could question whether Israel’s actions in this regard are sincere at all. Israel is certainly not acting in “good faith”.
5. An “agreed, just, fair, and realistic solution to the refugee issue” is vague. Which refugees is this sentence referring to? If it is trying to tie the Palestinian and Jewish refugee problem together, then it is entirely without foundation. As the late UN mediator Counte Folke Bernadotte wrote in his Final Progress Report to the UN General Assembly before his assassination at the hands of Jewish extremists in September 1948:
“The liability of the Provisional Government of Israel to restore private property to its Arab owners and to indemnify those owners for property wantonly destroyed is clear, irrespective of any indemnities which the Provisional Government may claim from the Arab states” [emphasis added].
His recommendations formed the basis of UN General Assembly Resolution 194 (III), which provides that “the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date.” Israel allowed the 13,000 Jewish refugees displaced as a result of the 1948 war to return, but few Arab refugees. What is “agreed, just, fair and realistic” is entirely subjective and devoid of legality.
6. Israel is only required to dismantle settlement outposts erected since March 2001, and to freeze the natural growth of existing settlements. Yet settlement activity is prohibited by Article 49 (6) of the Fourth Geneva Convention in Relation to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Times of War of 1949, to which Israel is a signatory. In violating this provision, Israel is committing a “grave breach” of the Fourth Geneva Convention. Moreover, as highlighted in the Mitchell Recommendations, settlements violate US (and European) policy towards the region. The US has voted in favour of several UN Security Council resolutions critical of Israeli settlement policy. Settlements are illegal and should be dismantled or handed over to the Palestinian Authority, irrespective of what is said in the Road Map.
7. The Road Map is inconsistent with international criminal, humanitarian and human rights law. It depicts the Palestinians as the “baddies” engaged in “terror” and “violence”, while the Government of Israel is depicted as the “good guys” and censured in the mildest terms. Israel is not to take actions that “undermine trust”. Many of these so-called actions which “undermine trust” are war crimes according to Article 8 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, which defines these as:
(a) Grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, namely, any of the following acts against persons or property protected under the provisions of the relevant Geneva Convention:
(i) Willful killing;
(iv).. Extensive destruction and appropriation of property, not justified
by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly;
(vii)… Unlawful deportation or transfer or unlawful confinement etc.
According to Article 7 of the Rome Statute, “crimes against humanity means any of the following acts when committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack: … d) Deportation or forcible transfer of population”. This is defined as “forced displacement of persons concerned by expulsion or other coercive acts from the area in which they are lawfully present, without grounds permitted under international law.”
All Israel has to do is stop acts which it should not be doing in the first place, irrespective of what is said in the Road Map. It is hardly surprising that Israel did not sign up to be party to the International Criminal Court. The people undertaking these acts are war criminals, and according to Article 146 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, they should be prosecuted. Many signatories have incorporated the Geneva Conventions into their common law such as the UK, which has also signed up to the ICC. This was incorporated into British law through the International Criminal Court Act 2001.
8. With hindsight, the most obvious failure of the Road Map is its timing. The US decided to unilaterally abandon the timetable set for the creation of a Palestinian state in 2005. In April 2004, US President George W. Bush told Ibrahim Nafie, editor-in-chief of the Egyptian daily Al Ahram newspaper, that due to the violence on the ground the timetable had to be abandoned. Yet if Israel simply withdrew its troops from all of the occupied territories and not just from Gaza, as it was required to do in 1967, all these problems could have been avoided in the first place. Resistance only exists when there is an occupying army to fight.
9. The Arab states have unanimously offered Israel full recognition in exchange for a full withdrawal through the Saudi peace proposal offered in Beirut in 2002 and reiterated in Algiers in 2005. This offer stands irrespective of what it said in the Road Map. All Israel has to do is end the occupation of all the territories it captured in 1967 to reap the benefits.
10. The Quartet, in its periodic statements on the Road Map, has failed to mention anything about the wall’s construction, the expansion of settlements (as opposed to activity), the disfigurement of Jerusalem, the violation of human rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, and the self-determination of the Palestinian people (though statehood is contemplated). It is therefore readily apparent that the Road Map is not premised on the rule of law or respect for human rights. It therefore runs the risk of repeating the failures of the Oslo process, which similarly took no account of human rights considerations.
11. According to Israel’s sixth reservation: “Declared references must be made to Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state and to the waiver of any right of return for Palestinian refugees to the State of Israel” in both the introductory statements and the final settlement. Yet the Palestinians (and anyone else for that matter) are under no obligation whatsoever to recognise Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state. This would only legitimise the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948. In this day and age, the violent and forced creation and maintenance of ethnically homogenous states are generally frowned upon.
12. According to Israel’s seventh reservation: “End of the process will lead to the end of all claims and not only the end of the conflict” [emphasis added]. But it is not for Israel to decide by itself whether the conflict has ended or unilaterally waive Palestinian claims for compensation and restitution. In fact, in the wall case the International Court of Justice, the principal judicial organ of the UN, held that Israel is required by international law to make reparation to Palestinians for all damage caused by the wall’s construction in the West Bank.
13. According to Israel, the Road Map’s monitoring mechanism will be under US management, which raises questions as to its neutrality since the US is notorious for its pro-Israel stance.
14. According to Israel’s 14th reservation: “Arab states will assist the process through the condemnation of terrorist activity. No link will be established between the Palestinian track and other tracks (Syrian-Lebanese)”. Again, Israel is trying to keep the process strictly bilateral, which works to its advantage because it is the more powerful state. Israel does not want the Palestinians to join forces with other Arab states, or for its negotiations with the Palestinians to be undertaken through a multilateral institution such as the UN, where the process would be more balanced. Israel wants total control.