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Detail - Israeli Violation of Palestinian Self-Determinaton

Goto Source for this Table - section of International Law Study Guide describing illegal Israeli violation of Palestinian right self-determination.

In the adjacent Palestinian territories that Israel has occupied since 1967, the government has taken physical and legal steps which significantly interfere with the right of self-determination of the Palestinian people who live in those territories:

• (1) They expropriate land from Palestinian land-owners and change the status of those lands or fill those lands with Israeli infra-structures that isolate the Palestinian communities in the center from each other and the outside world. These include Israeli civilian settlements, Israeli military encampments and buffer zones, wilderness preserves, Israeli use-only highways, and a huge security wall which often cuts through or completely surrounds Palestinian communities virtually destroying them. Access points into and out of these areas are controlled by Israeli military checkpoints where harrassment of Palestinian civilians and commerce has been extensively documented. This inhibits social and economic activity extensively, while also stopping any growth of these communities even as their population expands naturally. This has created intense poverty in all of these areas, and now measurable malnutrition is spreading, detectable first amongst the children.
• (2) They have replaced all local government agencies with Israeli military committees and have a established a government system which is both oppressive and exploitive substantially interfering with the local economy and violating the human rights of the local native population. This has sent unemployment spiralling upward and economic activity spriralling downward, while benefitting the Israeli economy in many ways.
• (3) They enforce laws with modified versions of the Defense (Emergency) Regulations of 1945 which were first developed by the British Mandate Government to quell the violence that plagued Palestine at that time. These regulations were vigorously protested at that time by the Zionist community, but are now used by Israel against the Palestinian people. These regulations allow such illegal measures as imprisonment without trial or charges, deportation, home demolition, measures of collective punishment, etc. - all illegal according to international law. But beyond these, the Israeli military also practices torture and assassination as well in the occupied territories.

All of this has virtually destroyed the Palestinian economy and society within the occupied territories - and thus their inalienable right of self-determination.

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Goto Source for this Table - section of International Law Study Guide describing illegal Israeli violation of Palestinian right self-determination.

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(c) Israel Law Resource Center, February, 2007.