On this day in 1980, the Knesset officially approved the Jerusalem Law, which called the city the complete and united capital. Although it was claimed that the application of the Israeli law to East Jerusalem was not annexation, this position was rejected by the Israeli Supreme Court, which interpreted the law as an effective annexation of East Jerusalem. The United Nations Security Council condemned the attempted change in status to Jerusalem and ruled the law “null and void” in United Nations Security Council Resolution 478.
The move began with the expansion of the municipal boundaries of West Jerusalem on June 27, 1967, so as to include approximately 70 km2 of West Bank territory today referred to as East Jerusalem, which included Jordanian East Jerusalem and 28 villages and areas of the Bethlehem and Beit Jala municipalities.
The Jerusalem Law began as a private member’s bill proposed by Geulah Cohen, whose original text stated that “the integrity and unity of greater Jerusalem (Yerushalayim rabati) in its boundaries after the Six-Day War shall not be violated.” However, this clause was dropped after the first reading in the Knesset. As the Knesset thus declined to specify boundaries and did not use the words “annexation” or “sovereignty”, Ian Lustick writes that “The consensus of legal scholars is that this action added nothing to the legal or administrative circumstance of the city, although, especially at the time, its passage was considered to have political importance and sparked a vigorous protest reaction from the world community.”
General Assembly Resolutions 2253 and 2254 of July 4 and 14, 1967, respectively, considered Israeli activity in Eastern Jerusalem illegal and asked Israel to cancel those activities and especially not to change the features of the city. On May 21, 1968, United Nations Security Council Resolution 252 invalidated legal and administrative measures by Israel in violation of UNGA Resolutions 2253 and 2254 and required those measures be rescinded. UN criticism since 1967 includes UNSC resolutions in addition to 252, 267 (1969) , 298 (1971) and resolution 476 (1980), regretting changes in the characteristics of Jerusalem, and resolution 478 (1980), where UN Member States were asked to withdraw their embassies from the city. Resolution 478 also “condemned in “the strongest terms” the enactment of Israeli law proclaiming a change in status of Jerusalem.” while Resolution 2334 of 2016 condemned all Israeli settlements in occupied territory including East Jerusalem. However, thirty-eight years later the United States relocated their Israeli embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem on May 14, 2018 and other countries, including Paraguay and the Czech Republic expressed similar intentions.
-Wikipedia
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