Bishop defiant over settlement comments

FOREIGN Minister Julie Bishop is refusing to back down over her view that it is unhelpful to label Israeli settlements illegal after coming under fire from senior Palestinian officials.

Bishop made the comments to The Times of Israel earlier this month, saying “I would like to see which international law has declared them illegal”, and insisting that prejudging the legality of settlements is unhelpful to peace negotiations.

However, in an opinion piece in The Sydney Morning Herald last Friday, Palestinian chief negotiator Saeb Erekat accused Bishop of wanting to “reinvent international law”.

“I would be unsurprised if her next step was a cup of coffee with her Israeli counterpart, Avigdor Lieberman, in the illegal settlement of Nokdim, where he lives, in land stolen from Bethlehem,” he said.

“If Bishop wanted to support the negotiations process, she did the opposite. It is precisely due to Israeli settlement expansion that most of the Arab world doubts that negotiations will succeed.”

Erekat’s sentiment echoed that voiced by senior Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) official Hanan Ashrawi who said “Australia’s wilful defiance of international consensus [sends] a clear message to both the international community and to the Palestinians that Australia is more committed to supporting Israel’s annexation of Palestinian land than backing any peace resolution”.

Bishop, however, remained unwavering in her view this week.

“I am aware of the debate about legality, however the political negotiations will determine the status of the settlements and not an interpretation of international law,” she told The AJN.

“The Australian government supports the final status negotiations and will not seek to pre-empt the outcome of any of the issues which will have to be resolved by the two parties.”

The Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ) rose to Bishop’s defence in the wake of the attacks. ECAJ executive director Peter Wertheim said her comments “did not warrant the extreme reaction directed at her”.

“Bishop’s response seemed prudent in the circumstances and innocuous, as she was not expressing a legal view either way about the settlements,” he said.

“We have no difficulty with the question of the legality [or] illegality of the settlements being publicly debated and are well aware that the majority view within the international community is overwhelmingly against Israel.

“But we do object when someone seeks to tell any audience that his/her opinion has the status of an ‘incontrovertible’ truth, as the latest PLO legal opinion states.”

He added that Ashrawi also “indulged in an exaggeration in claiming that the Fourth Geneva Convention and Hague Regulations and other international conventions ‘explicitly’ refer to and condemn Israel, which is plainly wrong”.

“The ECAJ corrected this particular error and our correction has not been refuted,” he said.

GARETH NARUNSKY

Foreign Minister Julie Bishop.