How the road to Ukraine began in 1967

There is much angst among the Western liberal cognoscenti over the “peace agreement” with Russia currently being foisted on the Ukrainian people by the Trump administration in Washington, chiefly on the ground that it is less a peace agreement and more a capitulation.

Russia’s reward for more than three years of naked aggression will be to keep the 20 percent of Ukrainian territory it now occupies, including the Crimean Peninsula it annexed in 2014. The only crumb of comfort for Kyiv is that, while the US will recognize Russian sovereignty over this captured territory, Ukraine need not — and nor need anyone else. With the possible exception of China, it seems unlikely that anyone will. Currently, the only countries that recognize Crimea as Russian are Afghanistan, Cuba, Nicaragua, North Korea, Syria and Venezuela: peculiar company for the US to be keeping.

Vitriol has been directed at Donald Trump in particular for his personal role in driving this process forward, and it is true that he and his various administrations have executed some bewildering U-turns on the issue. In 2014, when he was still best known as a reality TV host and the White House was no more than a glint in his eye, Trump was already expressing his admiration for Vladimir Putin: “I think he’s a very capable leader … what he did with Crimea is very smart.”

Four years later, however, when Trump had been president for two years and had perhaps learned that being the powerful “leader of the free world” came with certain responsibilities, his Secretary of State Mike Pompeo made clear what the official view was: “The US reaffirms as policy its refusal to recognize the Kremlin’s claim of sovereignty over territory seized by force in contravention of international law.”

Vitriol has been directed at Donald Trump in particular for his personal role in driving this process forward

Ross Anderson

What Pompeo was “reaffirming” was the Welles Declaration, issued by a predecessor, Sumner Welles, after the Soviet Union annexed Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in 1940. “The people of the United States are opposed to predatory activities no matter whether they are carried on by the use of force or by the threat of force,” Welles said. Washington refused to recognize Moscow’s sovereignty over the three Baltic states for 50 years, until the Soviet Union collapsed and they gained their independence. The declaration was followed in 1941 by the Atlantic Charter, signed by the US and the UK, in which Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill insisted that there should be “no territorial changes that do not accord with the freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned.”

All this, Trump’s critics say, has been official US policy for 85 years — until now. The charge against the president is that, in recognizing Russia’s right to govern territory captured by force in Crimea and eastern Ukraine, he is upending the policy of every White House administration since Roosevelt’s, including his own first term.

But is he really? Surely I cannot be alone in detecting a whiff of hypocrisy here. Since 1967, excluding Trump, there have been 10 US presidents: Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Joe Biden. While most of them have paid lip service to various UN resolutions, all of them without exception have in practice accepted Israel’s right to occupy and populate the territory it seized by force that year, along with the vast tracts of Palestinian land it has settled since. The “freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned,” to repeat the grand words of the Atlantic Charter, appear no longer to matter.

Since 1967, when Israel captured (and I make no apology for repeating “by force,” since that is the key phrase in the original 1940 Welles Declaration) and annexed East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, and occupied the West Bank, it has claimed the right to 5,640 sq. km of land stolen from Jordan, 365 sq. km stolen from Egypt and 1,200 sq. km stolen from Syria, and illegally settled more than 700,000 Israelis on land stolen from the Palestinian people.

It did not stop there. Since it began its blood-soaked assault on Gaza in October 2023, Israel has reoccupied 30 percent of the Palestinian enclave, it has pushed troops farther into Syria and it occupies five strategic hilltops in southern Lebanon. Its justification for these land grabs (again, by force) is that, for security reasons, Israel requires “buffer zones” — which is a curious irony given the ethnic composition of the people doing the grabbing: the right to “lebensraum,” or “living space,” was a key policy tenet of the Nazi party in Germany in the 1930s, used by Hitler to justify the invasion of Poland. And look how that ended.

Unlike the Palestinians in the West Bank, settlers enjoy the luxury of being subject to Israeli civilian law

Ross Anderson

Unlike the Palestinians in the West Bank whose land they have stolen, who suffer under arbitrary military law, settlers enjoy the luxury of being subject to Israeli civilian law: evidence that Israel considers this stolen land to be part of Israel.

If anyone doubts the malign intent behind any of this, I urge you to watch “The Settlers,” a documentary by the filmmaker Louis Theroux broadcast last week by the BBC. The film is Theroux’s second attempt to delve inside the heads of Israeli settlers. His first, “The Ultra Zionists,” in 2011, was merely disturbing: the new one is positively chilling.

Theroux describes people pursuing “an openly expansionist ethnonationalist vision while enjoying the benefits of a separate and privileged legal regime.” One settler claimed to be living in “the heart of Judea.” Another said: “I believe that Gaza is ours and we need to be living there.” A rabbi said Lebanon should be “cleansed of these camel riders.” Another settler declared: “We were in this land planting vineyards before Muhammad was in the third grade,” displaying a level of gratuitously offensive religious bigotry and ignorance that beggars belief — this is about land, not religion. As for the historical claim, it has always been absurd: by settler logic, the tribal elders of the Lenape people, the original inhabitants of Manhattan who now live in Oklahoma and Wisconsin, have the right to establish a reservation on Fifth Avenue.

Remember all this the next time someone tells you that Trump has overturned decades of settled US policy against the capture and occupation of other people’s land by force: that ship sailed nearly 60 years ago.

• Ross Anderson is associate editor of Arab News.