The Week In News
14
THE BALTIMORE JEWISH HOME
APRIL 8, 2021
ATTENTION Yeshiva & Seminary Students!
West Bank is “Occupied” Again
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The Biden administration is now calling the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Golan Heights, and East Jerusalem “occupied territory,” reversing changes made under President Donald Trump. While the Trump administration broke longstanding tradition and deleted the phrase when referring to the aforementioned areas, the State Department’s report on international human rights violations defined the Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights again as “occupied territories.” Even so, the State Department did not return to calling its chapter in the 2020 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices “Israel and the Occupied Territories,” keeping a change implemented by former U.S. Ambassador David Friedman. The envoy had waged a multi-year battle to change the name of the chapter from “Israel, Golan Heights, the West Bank and Gaza” to just “Israel.” In a phone call with diplomatic correspondents, State Department spokesman Ned Price stressed that the Biden administration reverted to the traditional language to define “the current status of the West Bank.” “This has been the longstanding position of previous administrations of both parties over the course of many decades,” Price asserted. “It is a historical fact that Israel occupied the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights after the 1967 war.” Dropping the term “occupied” from the annual State Department report was just one of many moves the Trump administration made that reversed historical anti-settlement positions traditionally held by the
U.S. Throughout his four years in the White House, Trump and his advisers repeatedly reiterated their opposition to longstanding U.S. policy that viewed the areas Israel captured during the 1967 Six Day War as occupied territory. Apart from recognizing Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights and moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo also declared that West Bank settlements do not violate international law and lifted a ban on using U.S. taxpayer money for Israeli scientific research conducted in Jewish villages in Judea and Samaria.
Info on IDF MIAs
Yamina party chairman Naftali Bennett passed a letter to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that contained detailed information regarding the burial place of troops missing in action for almost four decades. The letter in question was printed on stationary belonging to the Palestinian National Organization (PLO), a terror group that controlled large swaths of Lebanon in the 1980s. Bennett transferred the document last July after his source told him that the handwriting belonged to former PA President Yasser Arafat. The identity of the person who originally gave Bennett the letter was not disclosed and was described simply as “an entity of foreign origin.” According to reports, the document contained a handwritten map of a graveyard in Damascus, Syria, used by the PLO to bury its dead during the 1980s. The map specifies the location of three unmarked graves along with instructions how to locate them should the need arise. While it is not known who is buried in the graves, it is suspected that the map refers to the final resting place of missing IDF soldiers. Israel’s National Security Council (NSC) confirmed that it had received
