Last month, Piers Morgan created quite a storm with a very combative interview with U.K. Lawyers for Israel’s Natasha Hausdorff. Right from the start, Morgan didn’t even attempt to disguise his contempt for Hausdorff’s war crimes apologetics and legal sophistry – interrupting her on at least 60 occasions, according to some estimates. Naturally, this provoked the ire of pro-Israel fanatics on Twitter, who accused Morgan of – you guessed it – antisemitism for daring to conduct an interview with a de-facto Israeli spokesperson with anything other than complete fawning deference.
For her part, Hausdorff, in a self-pitying Spectator column, argued that Morgan’s behaviour was simply indicative of a fear to hear the truth when it comes to what she still claims is Israel’s “war against Hamas”, which might disrupt the “disinformation and falsehoods about Israel” that Uncensored audiences are regularly subjected to.
It requires a spectacular lack of self-awareness to accuse others of peddling “disinformation and falsehoods” following an interview in which you denied Israel carried out a policy of starvation in Gaza (despite public announcements of said policy from Israeli officials and credible independent analysis that Israel has created a risk of famine in the enclave), denied Israel targets civilians (despite the countless incidents of Israeli forces doing precisely this), and, most amusingly of all, equivocating on whether Israel possesses a nuclear weapons arsenal. I, however, do not wish to focus on this assortment of Israeli apologetics that have so long been discredited that only the most fanatical of ideologues continue to give any credence. Instead, it is an argument Hausdorff gave in an earlier interview – one more fundamental to the conflict – that has recently recirculated online that is worth addressing at some length.
In a July 2024 interview with the TRIGGERnometry podcast, Hausdorff very confidently declared that Israel is not occupying and has never occupied Palestinian lands. This is a remarkable assertion given that the overwhelming consensus of the international community, whether it be the International Court of Justice, U.N. Security Council, or leading human rights organisations, is that Israel is indeed occupying Palestinian territory and has done so since 1967. Hausdorff disputes this by invoking the principle of “uti possidetis juris”, which she describes as a “critical rule of customary international law”.
To summarise Hausdorff’s contention in the simplest terms possible, the principle of uti possidetis juris states that when a colony or territory gains its independence it should maintain the same borders that it had prior to its independence. So, in Israel’s case, it would be entitled to the borders of British Mandate Palestine, which includes the West Bank and Gaza that Israel is today accused of occupying. The problem Israel had, however, is that Jordan and Egypt had other ideas and, following war in 1948, occupied the West Bank and Gaza, respectively. Far from conquering these lands in an illegal war of aggression in 1967, then, Israel was merely recovering what was rightfully theirs. As Hausdorff herself put it, “you cannot occupy what is already your own sovereign territory”.
If we accept, for the sake of argument, that everything Hausdorff says here is true, this still hardly paints Israel in a flattering light. Omitted from her diatribe was that Egypt and Jordan were not the sole targets of Israel’s war in 1967; Syria was also in Israeli crosshairs. In fact, following the war, Israel occupied the Syrian Golan Heights, which they formally annexed in 1981. Syria, formerly administered by the French, was not part of British Mandate Palestine, so it is simply not true to say Tel Aviv launched war in 1967 to recover their “own sovereign territory”. Similarly, Israel has launched multiple wars of aggression against neighbouring Lebanon, which has resulted in occupations of Lebanese lands that remain to this day. Like Syria, Lebanon was subject to the French mandate, meaning there is no possible uti possidetis juris justification for this occupation either.
Outside of this, Hausdorff’s reasoning creates a number of problems for Israel on the domestic front too. As is widely known, Israel is accused a presiding over a system of apartheid for its treatment of Palestinians. Supporters of Israel dispute this, pointing out that 20% of Israel’s population is Arab, and they enjoy the same rights and privileges as Jewish citizen. It is merely the Arabs residing in Gaza and the West Bank who are not afforded the same luxuries. Ignoring the very real discrimination Arab Israeli do face, Hausdorff’s invocation of uti possidetis juris creates a serious issue for those who claim Israel is simply a Western-style democracy.
If, as Hausdorff claims, Gaza and the West Bank are sovereign Israeli lands, then Israel is responsible for their subjects. With this responsibility, Israel has denied Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza citizenship, deprives their right to vote in Israeli elections, controls their movements, restricts who they can marry, regularly demolishes their homes, among a whole manner of other forms of discrimination that are routine for people living in these territories. If Israel and its supporters wish to claim the West Bank and Gaza as their own, they must reconcile with the reality of what this means: Israel is an apartheid state. If they do not believe this to be case, they necessarily have to argue that the West Bank and Gaza are occupied territories. That is the inescapable dichotomy for the most “moral” nation on Earth.
By so proudly invoking the uti possidetis juris principle, the best case scenario, according to Hausdorff’s own reasoning, is that Israel is an apartheid state that is only occupying territory from two of its neighbours. Some defence. But there is a more fundamental problem with Hausdorff’s argument: it’s not even true.
While everything Hausdorff says about uti possidetis juris is true and valid, the main issue for her case is that Israeli leaders at the time of independence did not even bother to invoke the principle. Instead, Israel accepted the U.N. General Assembly Partition Plan, which only entitled them to 56% of British Mandate Palestine. Moreover, in backroom talks with Jordanian King Abdullah prior to the May 1948 war, Israeli representatives made clear that they remained committed to the partition plan and had no interest in agreeing to a plan in contravention of this. Perhaps to emphasise this point, Israel actually struck an agreement with Jordan to allow them to take control of the West Bank in exchange for them not joining the other Arab states in their war against Israel. A strange move for a state that is said to have considered the West Bank its “sovereign territory”.
That Israel subsequently had a change of heart and it grew to have designs on Gaza and the West Bank is irrelevant. Uti possidetis juris does not allow for retrospective territorial claims. As the Israeli legal scholar David Kretzmer explains:
There is no precedent for application of the uti possidetis when not only the newly established State itself does not claim that is inheriting the colonial borders but shows in its actions that it does not regard those borders as its borders.
That a state’s appetite for territory grows, when 20 years after independence it expands its control beyond its independence borders, can in no way change the fact that it did not claim to have inherited the borders of the colonial power that ruled the territory before it became independent.
As someone defiantly telling others to hear the truth, maybe Hausdorff ought to listen to this.
Blair Graham is a PhD student at the University of The West of Scotland studying international relations. This follows completion of undergraduate and Master’s degrees from the University of Glasgow in politics and international relations, respectively. Blair can be found on X @BlairGraham97.
