United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine |
Jerusalem Corpus Separatum |
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Corpus separatum (Latin for "separated body") was the internationalization proposal for Jerusalem and its surrounding area as part of the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine. It was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly with a two-thirds majority in November 1947. According to the Partition Plan, the city of Jerusalem would be brought under international governance, conferring it a special status due to its shared importance for the Abrahamic religions. The legal base ("Statute") for this arrangement was to be reviewed after ten years and put to a referendum. The corpus separatum was again one of the main issues of the post-war Lausanne Conference of 1949, besides the borders of Israel and the question of the Palestinian right of return.
The Partition Plan was not implemented, being firstly rejected by Palestinian and other Arab leaders and then overtaken by the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, which left Jerusalem split between Israel (West Jerusalem) and Jordan (East Jerusalem). In 2012, the European Parliament expressed majority support, and the UN General Assembly expressed overwhelming support for the view that Jerusalem should be a dual capital, with an even split between Israel and the State of Palestine, [1] [2] although exact positions are varied.
The origins of the concept of corpus separatum or an international city for Jerusalem has its origins in the Vatican's long-held position on Jerusalem and its concern for the protection of the Christian holy places in the Holy Land, which predates the British Mandate. The Vatican's historic claims and interests, as well as those of Italy and France were based on the former Protectorate of the Holy See and the French Protectorate of Jerusalem.[ citation needed ]
The Balfour Declaration, which expressed British support for the plan for a Jewish homeland in Palestine, also contained a proviso:
"it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine".
The Balfour Declaration, as well as the proviso, were incorporated in article 95 of the Treaty of Sèvres (1920) and in the Mandate for Palestine (1923). Besides safeguarding the obvious interests of the non-Jewish inhabitants in Palestine, the claims of the Vatican and European powers were claimed to be covered by these provisos. These powers had officially lost all capitulation rights in the region by article 28 of the Treaty of Lausanne (1923). The Palestinian Mandate also provided in articles 13 and 14 for an international commission to resolve competing claims on the holy places, but Britain never gave any effect to these articles.[ citation needed ]
During the negotiations in 1947 of proposals for a resolution for peace in Mandate Palestine, the Vatican, Italy and France revived their historic claims over the Christian holy places that they had lost in 1914 but expressed them as a call for a special international regime for the city of Jerusalem. The Vatican supported UN Resolution 181, which called for the “internationalisation” of Jerusalem. In the encyclical In multiplicibus curis (1948), Pope Pius XII expressed his wish that the holy places have “an international character”. The 15 May 1948 issue of L’Osservatore Romano , the official newspaper of the Holy See, wrote that “modern Zionism is not the true heir to the Israel of the Bible, but a secular state…. Therefore the Holy Land and its sacred places belong to Christianity, which is the true Israel.” The Vatican would scrupulously avoid recognition of Israel and even any use of the name for decades after Israel's establishment. [3]
The Vatican's position in 1947 culminated in the incorporation of the corpus separatum status for Jerusalem in the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine and is believed to have influenced Catholic countries, especially in Latin America, to vote in favour of the partition plan. In 1948, this proposal was repeated in UN General Assembly Resolution 194, which again called for Jerusalem to be an international city, [4] under United Nations supervision. Pius XII repeated his support for internationalisation in the 1949 encyclical Redemptoris nostri cruciatus .[ citation needed ]
The call for internationalisation was repeated by Pope John XXIII. In December 1967, after the Six Day War, Pope Paul VI changed the Vatican's position, now calling for a “special statute, internationally guaranteed” for Jerusalem and the holy places, rather than internationalisation, [3] while still not making any reference to Israel, and the revised position of “international guarantees“ was followed by John Paul II and Benedict XVI. [5] The Vatican reiterated this position in 2012, recognizing Jerusalem's "identity and sacred character" and calling for freedom of access to the city's holy places to be protected by "an internationally guaranteed special statute". After the US recognized Jerusalem as Israel's capital in December 2017, Pope Francis expressed the Vatican's position: "I wish to make a heartfelt appeal to ensure that everyone is committed to respecting the status quo of the city, in accordance with the relevant resolutions of the United Nations." [6]
Because of its many holy places and its association with three world religions, Jerusalem had international importance. The United Nations wanted to preserve this status after the termination of the British Mandate and guarantee its accessibility. Therefore, the General Assembly proposed a corpus separatum, as described in Resolution 181. [7] It was to be "under a special international regime and shall be administered by the United Nations". The administering body would be the United Nations Trusteeship Council, one of the five UN "Charter" organs. (See Resolution 181, Part III (A).)
Resolution 181 (II) stated that the corpus separatum would be administered by a Governor appointed by the Trusteeship Council, in accordance to a Statute drafted by the same body. The Statute would then be re-examined by the same Council, allowing for citizens to participate in the process through a referendum. [8]
The corpus separatum covered a rather wide area. The Arabs actually wanted to restore the former status as an open city under Arab sovereignty, but eventually supported the corpus separatum. [9] Israel rejected the plan and supported merely a limited international regime. [10] [11] In May 1948, Israel told the Security Council that it regarded Jerusalem outside its territory, [12] but now it claimed sovereignty over Jerusalem except the Holy Places.[ citation needed ]
Corpus separatum was initially proposed in UN General Assembly Resolution 181 (II) of 29 November 1947, commonly referred to as the UN Partition Plan. It provided that:
"Independent Arab and Jewish States and the Special International Regime for the City of Jerusalem ... shall come into existence in Palestine two months after the evacuation of the armed forces of the mandatory Power has been completed but in any case not later than 1 October 1948".
All the residents would automatically become "citizens of the City of Jerusalem", unless they would opt for citizenship of the Arab or Jewish State.[ citation needed ]
The Partition Plan was not implemented on the ground. The British did not take any measures to establish the international regime and left Jerusalem on 14 May, leaving a power vacuum, [13] as the neighboring Arab nations invaded the newly declared State of Israel.[ citation needed ]
The Battle for Jerusalem ended on 18 July 1948 with Israel in control of West Jerusalem and Transjordan controlling East Jerusalem. On 2 August 1948 the government of Israel declared West Jerusalem an administered area of Israel. [14] [ better source needed ]
With the failure to implement the Partition Plan, including the continuing Arab–Israeli conflict, the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 194 on 11 December 1948 to establish a UN Conciliation Commission, whose tasks included the implementation of the international regime for the Jerusalem area. Resolution 194 provided the following directives in articles 7, 8, and 9:
At the end of the 1948–49 war, under the Armistice Agreement, an Armistice Demarcation Line was drawn, with West Jerusalem occupied by Israel and the whole West Bank and East Jerusalem, occupied by Transjordan. In the letter of 31 May 1949, Israel told the UN Committee on Jerusalem that it considered another attempt to implement a united Jerusalem under international regime "impracticable" and favored an alternative UN scenario in which Jerusalem would be divided into Jewish and Arab zones. [10]
On 27 August 1949, the Committee on Jerusalem, a subcommittee of the Lausanne Conference of 1949, presented the draft text of a plan for implementation of the international regime. The plan envisioned a demilitarised Jerusalem divided into a Jewish and an Arab zone, without affecting the nationality of its residents. The commentary noted that the committee had abandoned the original principle of a corpus separatum. Jerusalem would be the capital of neither Israel nor the Arab state. [16] On 1 September 1949, the Conciliation Commission, chaired by the United States of America, submitted the plan to the General Assembly. [17] The General Assembly did not accept the plan and it was not discussed. [8]
On 5 December 1949, Israeli Prime Minister Ben-Gurion declared Jewish Jerusalem (i.e. West Jerusalem) an organic, inseparable part of the State of Israel. [18] He also declared Israel no longer bound by Resolution 181 and the corpus separatum null and void, on grounds that the UN had not made good on its guarantees of security for the people of Jerusalem under that agreement. [18] Four days later, on 9 December 1949, the General Assembly approved Resolution 303 which reaffirmed its intention to place Jerusalem under a permanent international regime as a corpus separatum in accordance with the 1947 UN Partition Plan. The resolution requested the Trusteeship Council to complete the preparation of the Statute of Jerusalem without delay. [19] On 4 April 1950, the Trusteeship Council approved a draft statute for the City of Jerusalem, which was submitted to the General Assembly on 14 June 1950. [20] The statute conformed to the partition plan of 29 November 1947. It could not, however, be implemented.[ citation needed ]
The UN has never revoked resolutions 181 and 194, which continues to be the official position that Jerusalem should be placed under a special international regime. [21] Nevertheless, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said on 28 October 2009 that he personally believed that Jerusalem must be the capital of both Israel and Palestine. [22]
The European Union continues to support the internationalisation of Jerusalem in accordance with the 1947 UN Partition Plan and regards Jerusalem as having the status of corpus separatum. [23]
The United States did not officially relinquish its early support of the corpus separatum principle until 2017, when it recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. On 23 October 1995, the Congress passed the advisory Jerusalem Embassy Act saying that "Jerusalem should be recognized as the capital of the State of Israel; and the United States Embassy in Israel should be established in Jerusalem no later than May 31, 1999"; nevertheless, the Act contained a provision allowing the President to suspend the motion. Indeed, from 1998 to 2017, the congressional suggestion to relocate the embassy from Tel Aviv was suspended semi-annually by every sitting president, each time noting its necessity "to protect the national security interests of the United States".
During his first presidential campaign, Donald Trump announced that he would move the US embassy to Jerusalem. As president, he said in an interview in February 2017 to the Israeli newspaper Israel Hayom that he was studying the issue. [24] While Trump decided in May not to move the embassy to Jerusalem "for now," to avoid provoking the Palestinians, [25] on 6 December 2017 he recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and has begun the process of moving the embassy to the city. Guatemala followed the United States in moving its consulate to Jerusalem. [26]
Since the Congress does not control U.S. foreign policy, despite the Embassy Act, official U.S. documents and websites did not refer to Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. [27] However, this changed with the recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital by Donald Trump. [28]
The Holy See has previously expressed support for the status of corpus separatum.[ citation needed ] Pope Pius XII was among the first to support such a proposal in the 1949 encyclical Redemptoris nostri cruciatus , and the concept was later re-proposed during the papacies of John XXIII, Paul VI and John Paul II.
Various countries maintain consulates-general in Jerusalem. These operate in a unique way, at great variance with the normal diplomatic practice. The countries which maintain these consulates do not regard them as diplomatic missions to Israel or the Palestinian Authority, but as diplomatic missions to Jerusalem. Where these countries also have embassies to Israel, usually located in Tel Aviv, the Jerusalem-based consul is not subordinate to the ambassador in Tel Aviv (as would be the normal diplomatic usage) but reports directly to the country's foreign ministry. This unique diplomatic situation could be considered, to some degree, as reflecting the corpus separatum which never came into existence.[ citation needed ]
Following the Six-Day War of 1967, Israel gained military control of all Jordanian territory west of the Jordan. [29] On 27 June 1967, it extended its law and jurisdiction to 17,600 acres of formerly Jordanian territory, including all of Jordanian Jerusalem and a portion of the nearby West Bank; the area is now known as East Jerusalem, and widely referred to as occupied Jerusalem. The extension was widely regarded as tantamount to annexation and had widely not been recognized internationally. The present municipal boundaries of Jerusalem are not the same as those of the corpus separatum set out in the Partition Plan and do not include, for example, Bethlehem, Motza, or Abu Dis.[ citation needed ]
In 1980, the Israeli Knesset passed a Jerusalem Law declaring united Jerusalem to be Israel's capital, although the clause "the integrity and unity of greater Jerusalem (Yerushalayim rabati) in its boundaries after the Six-Day War shall not be violated" was dropped from the original bill. United Nations Security Council Resolution 478 of 20 August 1980 condemned this and no countries located their embassies in Jerusalem, [30] until the United States moved its embassy from Tel Aviv in 2018.
In numerous resolutions, the UN has declared every action changing the status of Jerusalem illegal and therefore null and void and having no validity. A recent such resolution was Resolution 66/18 of 30 November 2011. [21]
The Israeli Declaration of Independence, formally the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel, was proclaimed on 14 May 1948 by David Ben-Gurion, the Executive Head of the World Zionist Organization, Chairman of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, and later first Prime Minister of Israel. It declared the establishment of a Jewish state in Eretz-Israel, to be known as the State of Israel, which would come into effect on termination of the British Mandate at midnight that day. The event is celebrated annually in Israel as Independence Day, a national holiday on 5 Iyar of every year according to the Hebrew calendar.
The United Nations Truce Supervision Organization (UNTSO) is an organization founded on 29 May 1948 for peacekeeping in the Middle East. Established amidst the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, its primary task was initially to provide the military command structure to the peacekeeping forces in the Middle East to enable the peacekeepers to observe and maintain the ceasefire, and in assisting the parties to the Armistice Agreements in the supervision of the application and observance of the terms of those Agreements. The organization's structure and role has evolved over time as a result of the various conflicts in the region and at times UNTSO personnel have been used to rapidly deploy to other areas of the Middle East in support of other United Nations operations. The command structure of the UNTSO was maintained to cover the later peacekeeping organisations of the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF) and the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) to which UNTSO continues to provide military observers.
The occupied Palestinian territories, also referred to as the Occupied Palestinian Territory and the Palestinian territories, consist of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip—two regions of the former British Mandate for Palestine that have been occupied by Israel since the Six-Day War of 1967. These territories make up the State of Palestine, which was self-declared by the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1988 and is recognized by 146 out of 193 UN member states.
The United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine was a proposal by the United Nations to partition Mandatory Palestine at the end of the British Mandate. Drafted by the U.N. Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) on 3 September 1947, the Plan was adopted by the UN General Assembly on 29 November 1947 as Resolution 181 (II). The resolution recommended the creation of independent but economically linked Arab and Jewish States and an extraterritorial "Special International Regime" for the city of Jerusalem and its surroundings.
The United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194 is a resolution adopted near the end of the 1947–1949 Palestine war. The Resolution defines principles for reaching a final settlement and returning Palestine refugees to their homes. Article 11 of the resolution resolves that
refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible.
The Bernadotte plan officially known as Progress Report of the United Nations Mediator on Palestine submitted to the Secretary-General for transmission to the members of the United Nations was a plan submitted by the United Nations Mediator on Palestine, Count Folke Bernadotte to the Third Session of the United Nations General Assembly. It was published on September 16, 1948, one day before Bernadotte was assassinated by members of Lehi.
The Lausanne Conference of 1949 was convened by the United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine (UNCCP) from 27 April to 12 September 1949 in Lausanne, Switzerland. Representatives of Israel, the Arab states Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, and the Arab Higher Committee and a number of refugee delegations were in attendance to resolve disputes arising from the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, mainly about refugees and territories in connection with Resolution 194 and Resolution 181.
The United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine (UNCCP) or Palestine Conciliation Commission (PCC) was created by UN-resolution 194 of December 11, 1948, with the aim of mediating in the Arab–Israeli conflict. The Commission consisted of France, Turkey and the United States, and its official headquarters was set up in Jerusalem on January 24, 1949. The commission met separately with Israeli and Arab governments from February 12–25, 1949, with Muhammad Nimr al-Hawari of the General Refugee Congress (GRC) and a Palestinian refugee delegation on March 21 in Beirut, and on April 7 in Tel Aviv with Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion. It then proposed the Lausanne Conference of 1949.
The status of Jerusalem has been described as "one of the most intractable issues in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict" due to the long-running territorial dispute between Israel and the Palestinians, both of which claim it as their capital city. Part of this issue of sovereignty is tied to concerns over access to holy sites in the Abrahamic religions; the current religious environment in Jerusalem is upheld by the "Status Quo" of the former Ottoman Empire. As the Israeli–Palestinian peace process has primarily navigated the option of a two-state solution, one of the largest points of contention has been East Jerusalem, which was part of the Jordanian-annexed West Bank until the beginning of the Israeli occupation in 1967.
The Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995 is a public law of the United States passed by the 104th Congress on October 23, 1995. The proposed law was adopted by the Senate (93–5), and the House (374–37). The Act became law without a presidential signature on November 8, 1995.
An international city is an autonomous or semi-autonomous city-state that is separate from the direct supervision of any single nation-state.
The Holy See and Palestine established formal diplomatic relations in 2015 through the mutual signing of the Comprehensive Agreement between the Holy See and the State of Palestine. In 2017, a Palestinian embassy to the Holy See was opened.
The United Nations General Assembly Resolution 43/176 of 15 December 1988 was a resolution in which the General Assembly called for the convening of an International Peace Conference on the Middle East, under the auspices of the United Nations. The resolution is titled "43/176. Question of Palestine". The peace conference was proposed in the framework of international politics.
The Palestinian Declaration of Independence formally established the State of Palestine, and was written by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish and proclaimed by Yasser Arafat on 15 November 1988 in Algiers, Algeria. It had previously been adopted by the Palestinian National Council (PNC), the legislative body of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), by a vote of 253 in favour, 46 against, and 10 abstaining. It was read at the closing session of the 19th PNC to a standing ovation. Upon completing the reading of the declaration, Arafat, as Chairman of the PLO, assumed the title of President of Palestine. In April 1989, the PLO Central Council elected Arafat as the first President of the State of Palestine.
The 1948 Palestine war was fought in the territory of what had been, at the start of the war, British-ruled Mandatory Palestine. During the war, the British withdrew from Palestine, Zionist forces conquered territory and established the State of Israel, and over 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled. It was the first war of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and the broader Arab–Israeli conflict.
The Israeli annexation of East Jerusalem, known to Israelis as the reunification of Jerusalem, refers to the Israeli occupation of East Jerusalem during the 1967 Six-Day War, and its annexation.
The Ad Hoc Committee on the Palestinian Question, also known as the Ad Hoc Committee on Palestine or just the Ad Hoc Committee was a committee formed by a vote of the United Nations General Assembly on 23 September 1947, following the publication of the report of the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) on 3 September 1947, which contained majority and minority proposals.
United Nations General Assembly Resolution 303, adopted on 9 December 1949 by a vote of 38 to 14, restated the United Nations' support for a Corpus separatum in Jerusalem. Notably the voting pattern was significantly different from that of the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine vote two years earlier, with many states swapping sides. In particular, all the Arab and Muslim countries voted for the corpus separatum, having voted against the 1947 plan; conversely the United States and Israel voted against the corpus separatum, having previously supported it.
John Noel Reedman was an English-South African diplomat who was the Special Representative of the Secretary-General of the United Nations in Palestine. He had previously served as Senior Economic Advisor both to UNSCOP and the Palestine Commission. Reedman was a professor of economics at Witwatersrand University in South Africa.
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