Ms Natasha Hausdorff:

I appear before the committee not as a representative of the state of Israel but as a legal practitioner and the legal director of UK Lawyers for Israel, UKLFI, charitable trust. I thank the committee for this opportunity to address the slew of falsehoods delivered to this committee two days ago. It is with great concern that I address, first and most important, how Irish aid is being hoodwinked to devote funds to a political campaign and funnelled into illegal building projects which fuel the conflict and perpetuate Palestinian suffering. Second, I will address the underlying legal status of the disputed territory. Third, I propose to explain the specific instance of the recent property dispute in Sheikh Jarrah and the context in which illegal squatters face eviction.

This hearing takes place in shocking circumstances, in the context of a campaign of terror waged by Palestinian terrorist groups as part of an internal Palestinian power struggle and with the aim of Israel's destruction.

What all the presentations on Tuesday left out is Palestinian terrorism, which has been the hallmark of the last few days and has blighted Israel's 73 years of existence. It has been incited and encouraged by the same fabrications that were aired in this committee two days ago. To describe Israel as colonialist is an outrage. Jews, who had been persecuted around the world, found shelter among their brothers in their homeland and paid dearly in blood to survive years of onslaught by invading Arab armies, many having themselves been ethnically cleansed from those same Arab countries, are now being called colonialist for the crime of their continued existence.

It cannot be overstressed that Irish aid funding for illegal building projects in Area C does a great deal of harm. The Palestinian Authority has full planning control over Areas A and B, where more than 70% of the land is suitable for development and empty. There are indeed opportunities for development, such as the impressive building projects in Rawabi, the first planned Palestinian town, which I have had the privilege of visiting many times. Aid could be going to planned initiatives which would help ordinary local people.

With regard to the building projects at Khirbet Humsah, firing range 203 in the Jordan Valley, also called Humsa Al Bqai'a, and the firing range 917 in the Hebron hills, these are not Palestinian communities. These areas have always been state land since the time of the Ottomans and were designated by the IDF as training grounds because of uninhabitable conditions. No peace-promoting purpose is served by building illegally in the middle of a firing range, removed from basic municipal services such as water, electricity, sewerage systems and links to other communities. It is illegal outposts built without planning permission or permits that are subject to removal and demolition, just as they would be if I or members of the committee sought to build on the Curragh in County Kildare or the Salisbury Plain firing range in England without planning permission and a permit.

It is important that we are clear about the underlying legal status of the territory through the proper application of universal principles of international law. There is a fundamental principle of customary international law which establishes the borders of newly emerging states at independence, as in Israel's case in 1948. It is universally applied. In the 19th century the principle was applied in South America, later it was applied in Asia and Africa and, still later, at the disintegration of the former communist federations. It has been applied to all the states that emerged in all these cases, as well as to states emerging from former mandates. The universal rule for determining the borders of newly emerging states at the moment of independence dictates that the new state takes on the boundaries of the pre-existing administrative unit as its interactional borders. The principle is called uti possidetis juris. It is the default rule to provide certainty, avoid frontiers being challenged, avoid wars breaking out and promote peace and stability. Those are the reasons the International Court of Justice, ICJ, recognised as being behind the development of this fundamental principle.

Another fundamental principle of international law is equal application. One cannot have a general rule and an exception for a country that one just does not like very much or to which one has some ideological and-or political opposition. That is not how any responsible legal system can operate. The question then is what does this principle, universally applied, tell us about the legal status of the territory in Israel's case. In 1948, the administrative lines of the eastern side of the British Mandate for Palestine ran along the Jordan river all the way to the south, originally dividing it from the separate administrative unit of Transjordan, which became the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. By the way, Jordan's borders also follow the principle of uti possidetis juris. Israel, as the only state to emerge from the British Mandate for Palestine territory in 1948, automatically assumed as its borders the administrative lines of the former mandate territory, and that included eastern Jerusalem and the West Bank which were areas occupied by Jordan in 1948 during Israel's war of independence. These same areas were recovered by Israel in 1967.

The legal status of that territory applying this principle is that Israel has been the sovereign since 1948 and Israel's borders were those of the British Mandate for Palestine territory which preceded it, except where otherwise agreed upon by Israel and its relevant neighbour. Indeed, Israel's peace treaties with its neighbouring states to date, namely, Egypt and Jordan, reinforce that reading because the treaties ratify borders between Israel and its neighbours explicitly based on the boundaries of the British Mandate for Palestine. There has been no agreement of any kind on the transfer of sovereignty since 1948. In the 1990s, Israel entered into agreements with the Palestinian Liberation Organisation to divide up administrative control. Areas A and B were to be under the territorial control of the PLO and Area C remained under Israeli territorial control. All the agreements have been explicit about not addressing issues of national sovereignty. That has been left open for future final status agreements. Therefore, we are left with the original general doctrine regarding the new state incorporating the territory of the previous administrative unit.

I noted several references on Tuesday to the case of Crimea. Ukraine still has sovereignty over Crimea, despite Russia's invasion, and that goes back to the principle of uti possidetis jurisand the administrative boundaries of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. When it became independent, it did so in the entire administrative unit of the former Soviet republic. If Ukraine were to one day recover Crimea from Russia, as Israel did with eastern Jerusalem and the West Bank from Jordan in 1967, no one here would accuse Ukraine of being in occupation of Crimea.

Much has been made, for political purposes in recent days, of the property dispute in Jerusalem's Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood. Israel's critics have distorted the facts, perverted international law and attempted to intimidate the courts and law enforcement officials into adopting a bigoted approach, demanding that the state defy court orders and deny the property owners their legal rights on the basis of the race of the relevant parties. The current dispute in Sheikh Jarrah involves several properties of tenants whose leases have expired and, in a few cases, squatters with no tenancy rights against owner landlords who have successfully won court orders evicting the squatters and overstaying tenants.

Litigation of these properties has been an ongoing subject for decades and the case has gone all the way to the Supreme Court. The owners in these disputes acquired their rights through an uninterrupted chain of transactions from predecessors in title in the 19th century. These legal rights were acquired under Ottoman law and have remained good through all subsequent government regimes, namely, the British Mandate for Palestine, Jordanian occupation and purported annexation, and Israeli. No one seriously disputes the validity of the transactions through which the current owners acquired rights from their predecessors in title. The tenants in these disputes acquired their leasehold rights through a chain running from the Jordanian Custodian of Enemy Property in the 1950s. Their rights as leaseholders, not owners, were reaffirmed in several court rulings that culminated in 1982 with Israel's civil courts issuing rulings adopting settlement agreements between the leaseholders' predecessors in title and the owners.

The only break in the owners' uninterrupted chain of title is the seizure of these properties from 1948 to 1967 by the Jordanian Custodian of Enemy Property. This is when Jordan, which had illegally occupied eastern Jerusalem and the West Bank during its invasion of Israel in 1948, ethnically cleansed these areas of all Jews. Jordan transferred custody over all Jewish-owned property to the Jordanian Custodian of Enemy Property. However, it never transferred title to any party and it never extinguished the owners' rights. Instead, the custodian leased some of the properties to Arabs, who were the predecessors to the current overstaying tenants.

When Israel regained the territory in 1967 and Jordan's occupation of eastern Jerusalem ended, Israel adopted legislation which vindicated the private property rights of persons of all ethnicities.

The Legal and Administrative Matters Law 1970 preserved the rights of private parties who received title from the Jordanian Custodian of Enemy Property. Notwithstanding the illegality of Jordan's occupation, those who received rights from the Jordanian custodian were all Arabs, since Jordanian law denied property rights to Jews. Ironically, if the Jordanian Custodian of Enemy Property had assigned title to the predecessors of the current Arab holdover tenants over the lands it seized from Jewish owners, Israeli law would have respected the resulting title.

The reason the holdover tenants in Sheikh Jarrah lack ownership today is not because the State of Israel has denied Palestinians any rights they acquired but, rather, because the Government of Jordan declined to give Palestinian Arabs title to the land Jordan had seized. Israel has not granted anyone ownership of any of the affected properties and Israeli law respects and upholds the property rights of persons of all ethnicities. Israel has even respected the property rights created by prior regimes that explicitly discriminated against Jews in their property law, namely, the Ottoman Empire, the British Mandate of Palestine and the Jordanian occupation regime. That is the reality. The claim of illegality is fabricated. I welcome questions from the committee.