Natasha Hausdorff, is a British barrister and advocate for the State of Israel. She contends that under international law, the entirety of the land west of the Jordan River—including what is commonly called the West Bank and Gaza—was designated for the establishment of a Jewish homeland under the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine (1922), later incorporated into Article 80 of the UN Charter. According to her view, rooted in the League of Nations Mandate and the San Remo Resolutions, Israel possesses legal claims over the entirety of what is often referred to as Israel and Palestine. She completely rejects the idea that Palestine has statehood or even an entitlement to statehood.
This is a minority view among international lawyers, but it is apparently a serious legal argument made in some circles. If that argument is taken seriously in wider circles, the consequences for Israel’s self-understanding are devastating.
If the West Bank and Gaza are sovereign Israeli territory, then the millions of Palestinians living there are either citizens or must be offered citizenship. Under international law, a sovereign state cannot permanently deny political rights to the people living within its recognised borders. Israel would have been ignoring this obligation for almost 60 years since (as Hausdorff frames it) its reclamation of the territories.
Profoundly, if Hausdorff wins her argument, Israel would cease to be—or only narrowly remain—a Jewish-majority state. The population of Arab Israelis combined with the Arab population of Gaza and the West Bank is about 7.2 million people; the Jewish population of Israel and the West Bank is about 7.1 million. Either a Jewish minority or a slim Jewish majority would completely upend the nature of Israel as it has traditionally understood itself.
Thus, the state would face an existential choice:
- Grant full citizenship to Palestinians, become a democratic, pluralistic state, and abandon its vision as a Jewish state; or
- Deny citizenship, entrench a permanent underclass, and accept inevitable and well earned international condemnation as an apartheid state.
Israel is not saved by granting autonomy to Gaza and the West Bank. Autonomy, even full local self-government, does not erase Israel’s obligation to protect the human rights of the population—including the right to nationality, to vote in national elections, and to enjoy freedom of movement. Furthermore, if the Palestinian autonomous governments operating in Gaza and the West Bank are abusing Palestinian rights, as Israel contends, then Israel has an obligation to address those abuses—without compounding them with abuses of its own.
Israel’s standing in global rankings of economic and social development would collapse. GDP per capita would drop by more than a third. Infant mortality rates would rise. Life expectancy would fall. Israel would plunge significantly on the Human Development Index and on all major indices of freedom. Israel could no longer portray itself as a thriving, innovative democracy; it would have to adopt a far more humble narrative: a reasonably well-off regional neighbor grappling with profound socio-economic and human rights challenges.
While Hausdorff’s argument offers a legal defense of Israel’s historical claims, I imagine it is not a defense that Israel wants to hear because sovereignty is not a free lunch. If you claim the land, you inherit the people. If you inherit the people, you inherit obligations.
אי אפשר לאכול את העוגה ולהשאיר אותה שלמה
(You can’t have your cake and eat it too)