"Through annexing Palestinian land for illegal settlements, depriving Palestinians access to their own natural resources, and imposing a system of military rule that denies them safety and justice, the State of Israel has been denying the Palestinian people dignity, freedom and hope. I am particularly aware of how this is impacting Palestinian Christians, threatening their future and viability. It is clear that ending the occupation is a legal and moral necessity."

But is he right? Is Israel violating international law?

The West Bank has been occupied by Israel since the 1967 Middle East war, but decades of difficult on-off talks between Israel and the Palestinians - both of whom assert rights there - have left its final status unresolved.

But as Melanie Phillips, a British Jewish writer and commentator says Israel is not in "occupation" of "Palestinian land" and that the Jews alone are entitled in law to this territory.

"Israel is entitled to this land -- all of it -- many times over in law, as well as according to history, truth and morality."

There has never been any such thing in law as Palestinian land., she writes. "There never was a state of Palestine. When the Romans conquered the Jewish kingdom of Judea, destroyed the Jewish Temple and drove the Jews of Judea into exile, they renamed it Palaestina in an attempt to erase its Jewish identity. When the last colonial occupier of the land, the Ottoman empire, fell after the First World War, the international community that carved up the Middle East to create a number of new states kept the name Palestine to describe the territory which was now to be recreated as the homeland of the Jewish people."

"This was cemented at the 1920 San Remo Conference and given the force of international treaty law by the League of Nations -- the precursor to the UN -- in the 1922 Mandate for Palestine. This made the UK the mandatory power and gave it the duty to settle the Jews throughout Palestine. After Britain sliced some 70 per cent off this land to create (Trans) Jordan in an act of arbitrary realpolitik, Palestine consisted of what is now Israel, the "West Bank" and Gaza."

It is clear then that only the Jews were given the legal right to settle the land in what is now Israel, the "West Bank" and Gaza.

That right has never been abrogated. The 1922 League of Nations Mandate was ratified by the UN Charter 1945, which pledged to uphold the agreements entered into by its predecessor, said Phillips.

The legally binding principles entitling the Jewish people to settle all this land were subsequently further codified in the Vienna Convention of 1969, which confirmed that it included Judea and Samaria (the "West Bank") and Gaza. In 2013, furthermore, French judges in the Court of Appeal of Versailles ruled that "Israel is the Legal Occupant of the West Bank".

Dr. Gerald McDermott, an Anglican theologian, and Middle East authority, told VOL that even though most Arab states have refused to recognize Israel's right to exist (a condition of Resolution 242), Israel has implemented the principles of the Resolution three times. When Egypt terminated its claims of belligerency in 1979, Israel returned the Sinai. When Jordan signed a peace agreement, Israel returned land claimed by Jordan. Then in September 2005 Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza, only to be met with new attacks on her civilians launched from that territory.

The charge of illegal occupation must therefore be rejected. Israel has made repeated efforts to comply with UN stipulations for the territories, while her Arab neighbors have not.

When the Palestinians appeared to accept Israel's right to exist during the Oslo negotiations, Israel turned over control of major West Bank cities to the Palestinian Authority (PA). But when the PA showed support for terrorist attacks on Israeli citizens in 2000, Israel resumed control of those cities. In that same year Israel offered to return 92% of the West Bank, which some dismiss as ungenerous because, they claim, Israel never owned the land in the first place.

Yet Jews have lived in ancient Samaria (the West Bank) for over three thousand years.

When Jordan seized almost all of Judea and Samaria during the 1948-1949 war, renaming these territories "the West Bank" in 1950, that did not extinguish Israel's claim to that territory. From 1949 to 1967, Jordan held the "West Bank" as a military occupier. When Israel took possession of that territory after the 1967 Six-Day War, this did not, as so many believe, create its claim to it. Israel's victory freed it instead from illegal Jordanian occupation, and allowed the legal claim of the Jewish people to that territory finally to be acted upon, writes Phillips.

At the time that the Mandate was issued to the British, Palestine was only sparsely occupied. While some Jews had always remained in the land -- particularly in Safed, and in Jerusalem where they were in the majority from the mid-19th century onwards -- the majority of those occupants were Arabs; but they considered themselves part of the Arab people, or sometimes as southern Syrians. As the Jews returned to the land, Arabs attracted by the prospect of growing prosperity poured in from neighbouring states. But they were always referred to, and considered themselves to be, Arabs. Between 1922 and 1948, when people referred to the Palestinians they were referring to the Jews.

So the first reason why the term "occupied Palestinian territories" is a nonsense is that the areas in question were never Palestinian land but were always legally designated for Jews alone to be entitled to settle. The second reason is that the legal definition of "occupation" applies only where a sovereign state has been occupied. The disputed territories of Judea and Samaria were never part of a sovereign state, she writes.

For Israel to give up its sovereign right to the land would endanger its own existence. Does anyone trust the Palestinian Authority or Hamas to deal fairly with Israel when Hamas still holds Israelis hostage in their underground tunnels or negotiate for land when their only desire is to rid the Middle East of all Jews?

International law makes it clear: all of Israel's wars with its Arab neighbors were in self-defense. Professor Judge Stephen Schwebel, an American jurist, wrote in What Weight to Conquest:
"(a) a state [Israel] acting in lawful exercise of its right of self-defense may seize and occupy foreign territory as long as such seizure and occupation are necessary to its self-defense.

Israel cannot give an inch. The whole debate today that centers on the question of whether Israel must return "occupied territories" to their alleged Arab owners in order to obtain peace is one of the greatest falsehoods of international law and diplomacy.

Once again Archbishop Welby has gotten it wrong. He is wrong about blessing same-sex marriages which is tearing his church apart, and he is wrong about Israel. It is time he exited Lambeth Palace into retirement before the remnants of his church disappears into the Thames River.

END