On December 23, 2016, the U.N. Security Council voted in favor of a resolution demanding the halt of settlement activity by Israel on occupied Palestinian territory with the United States notably abstaining.
But why did this happen? What event caused this resolution to be put into effect? Well, let’s go back in time.
Israel is the world’s only Jewish state, located just east of the Mediterranean Sea. Palestinians, the Arab population that hails from the land Israel now controls, refer to the territory as Palestine, and want to establish a state by that name on all or part of the same land. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is over who gets what land and how it’s controlled.
Though both Jews and Arab Muslims date their claims to the land back a couple thousand years, the current political conflict began in the early 20th century. Jews fleeing persecution in Europe wanted to establish a national homeland in what was then an Arab and Muslim-majority territory in the Ottoman and later British Empire. The Arabs resisted, seeing the land as rightfully theirs. An early United Nations plan to give each group part of the land failed, and Israel and the surrounding Arab nations fought several wars over the territory. Today’s lines largely reflect the outcomes of two of these wars, one waged in 1948 and another in 1967.
The 1967 war is particularly important for today’s conflict, as it left Israel in control of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, two territories home to large Palestinian Populations.
Today, the West Bank is nominally controlled by the Palestinian Authority and is under Israeli occupation. This comes in the form of Israeli troops, who enforce Israeli security restrictions on Palestinian movement and activities, such as how much water every household can get or how much food can be delivered to the Palestinian citizens, and Israeli “settlers,” Jews who build ever-expanding communities in the West Bank that effectively deny the land to Palestinians. These ever-expanding communities are widely known as “settlements” and are seen as illegal in the world of international law. The settlements are in breach of Article 49 of the 4th Geneva Convention, which forbids an occupier from transferring its own civilians into the territory it occupies. Israeli settlements are seen as a major stumbling block to peace efforts as they are built on land the Palestinians see as part of their future state.
The United Nations maintains that settlements are illegal, but U.N. officials have reported a surge in construction over the past months.
Some 430,000 Israeli settlers currently live in the West Bank and a further 200,000 Israelis live in occupied East Jerusalem, which the Palestinians see as the capital of their future state.
The passage of the resolution changes nothing on the ground between Israel and the Palestinians, and likely will be all but ignored by the incoming Trump administration, who have been supporting Israel and its government since the get go.
But it was more than merely symbolic.
The resolution formally enshrined the international community’s disapproval of Israeli settlement building and could spur further Palestinian moves against Israel in international forums to create their own territory and to be officially recognized as a country, rather than a state.
Before the vote, a senior Israeli official said if adopted there was “zero chance” the Israeli government would abide by the measure. Under the UN Charter, UN member states “agree to accept and carry out the decisions of the Security Council”.
The Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, has suspended funding of U.N. bodies in revenge for the ‘crazy’ resolution, as well as the government of Israel has approved hundreds of new settlements despite the resolution being passed.
The U.N. has yet to comment on this action.
