The West Bank

As much as I favour a two-state solution in Israel and Palestine, and as much as I wish that (a) the Arabs had not constantly threatened Israel with annihilation and (b) Israelis had not launched settlements in the West Bank, I certainly understand why, given the threats to and attacks on Israel, then defensive occupation seems a reasonable response. But Melanie Phillips says it much better:

... Israel is ‘occupying’ the West Bank (which on a day-to-day basis is not ‘occupied’ but ruled by the Palestinians) entirely within its rights under international law, which recognises the right of a country that has been attacked to occupy and retain land that continues to be used for belligerent purposes against it.  Which is why the UN’s famous Resolution 242 was deliberately drafted to refer to Israel withdrawing from ‘territories’ rather than all the territories – and then only when the Arabs end their war against Israel.

Her entire posting is much longer and much more detailed. It was written in response to feeble explanations by the British Foreign Office for this:

With his remarks about the Israeli settlements, Foreign Secretary David Miliband ... has signalled a sharp deterioration in relations between Britain and Israel. Miliband has urged enforcement of an EU boycott of produce from Israeli settlements in the West Bank, settlements he has called ‘illegal’.

Increasingly it looks as if govts around the world are not recognizing the constant threat to Israel's existence from some of its neighbours, and instead too many of them resent Israel's political, economic, and military successes. This resentment of success is, in part, a syndrome of cheering against a victor and for an underdog; but it is also, more likely, a manifestation of anti-Semitism, a resentiment of Jewish successes.

Phillips concludes,

The Foreign Office’s apparent ignorance of international law derives from its own innate political hostility to Israel and its wholesale endorsement -- along with virtually the entire British intelligentsia -- of the mendacious propaganda of the enemies of Israel and the west. Miliband’s remarks have nothing to do with international law, history or the truth, which he has misrepresented and repudiated, but with dirty and shameful politics. It appears that the British government has now decided openly to side with the enemies of Israel – those enemies who really have been thwarting international law for six decades in their war of extermination.