{"id":86596,"date":"2017-02-13T12:00:51","date_gmt":"2017-02-13T12:00:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=86596"},"modified":"2017-02-07T15:08:06","modified_gmt":"2017-02-07T15:08:06","slug":"land-law-is-final-nail-in-the-two-state-solution-coffin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2017\/02\/land-law-is-final-nail-in-the-two-state-solution-coffin\/","title":{"rendered":"Land Law Is Final Nail in the Two-State Solution Coffin"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>7 Feb 2017 – <\/em>The Israeli parliament passed the legalisation law on Monday [6 Feb] night \u2013 a piece of legislation every bit as suspect as its title suggests. The law widens the powers of Israeli officials to seize the last fragments of Palestinian land in the West Bank that were supposed to be off-limits. Now, almost nowhere will be out of the settlers\u2019 reach.<\/p>\n

Palestinian leaders warned that the law hammered the last nail in the coffin of a two-state solution. Government ministers gleefully agreed. For them, this is the extension of Israeli law into the West Bank and the first step towards its formal annexation.<\/p>\n

The legalisation law \u2013 also commonly translated from Hebrew as the regulation or validation law \u2013 was the right\u2019s forceful response to the eviction last week of a few dozen families from a settlement \u201coutpost\u201d called Amona. It was a rare and brief setback for the settlers, provoked by a court ruling that took three years to enforce.<\/p>\n

The evacuation of 40 families was transformed into an expensive piece of political theatre, costing $40 million. It was choreographed as a national trauma to ensure such an event is never repeated.<\/p>\n

The uniforms worn by police at demolitions of Palestinian homes \u2013 guns, batons, black body armour and visors \u2013 were stored away. Instead officers, in friendly blue sweatshirts and baseball caps, handled the Jewish lawbreakers with kid gloves, even as they faced a hail of stones, bleach and bottles. By the end, dozens of officers needed hospital treatment.<\/p>\n

As the clashes unfolded, Naftali Bennett, the education minister and leader of the settler party Jewish Home, called Amona\u2019s families \u201cheroes\u201d. Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu empathised: \u201cWe all understand the extent of their pain.\u201d<\/p>\n

The settlers have been promised an enlarged replacement settlement, and will be richly compensated. In a more general reparation, plans have been unveiled for thousands of extra settler homes in the West Bank.<\/p>\n

But the main prize for Mr Bennett and the far right was the legalisation law itself. It reverses a restriction imposed in the 1970s \u2013 and later violated by dozens of \u201coutposts\u201d\u00a0like Amona \u2013 designed to prevent a free-for-all by the settlers.<\/p>\n

International law is clear that an occupying power can take land only for military needs. Israel committed a war crime in transferring more than 600,000 Jewish civilians into the occupied territories.<\/p>\n

Successive governments ignored their legal obligations by pretending the territories were disputed, not occupied. But to end the Israeli courts\u2019 discomfort, officials agreed to forbid settlers from building on land privately owned by Palestinians.<\/p>\n

It was not much of a constraint. Under Ottoman, British and Jordanian rule, plenty of Palestinian land had never been formally registered. Ownership derived chiefly from usage. Much of the rest was common land.<\/p>\n

Israel seized these vast tracts that lacked title deeds, declaring them \u201cstate land\u201d \u2013 to be treated effectively as part of Israel and reserved exclusively for Jewish settlement. But even this giant land grab was not enough.<\/p>\n

The settlers\u2019 territorial hunger led to dozens of \u201coutposts\u201d being built across the West Bank, often on private Palestinian land. Despite the fact they violated Israeli law, the outposts immediately received state services, from electricity and water to buses and schools.<\/p>\n

Very belatedly, the courts drew a line in Amona and demanded that the land be returned to its Palestinian owners. The legalisation law overrules the judges, allowing private lands stolen from Palestinians to be laundered as Israeli state property.<\/p>\n

Israel\u2019s attorney general has refused to defend the law. Will the supreme court accept it? Possibly. The aim of the \u201ctraumatic\u201d scenes at Amona was to depict the court as the villain of this drama for ordering the evictions.<\/p>\n

Nonetheless, there could be silver linings to the legalisation law.<\/p>\n

In practice, there has never been a serious limit on theft of Palestinian land. But now Israeli government support for the plunder will be explicit in law. It will be impossible to blame the outposts on \u201crogue\u201d settlers, or claim that Israel is trying to safeguard Palestinian property rights.<\/p>\n

Dan Meridor, a former government minister from Mr Netanyahu\u2019s Likud party, called the law \u201cevil and dangerous\u201d. Israel, he pointed out, can have jurisdiction over private Palestinian land only if Palestinians vote for Israel\u2019s parliament \u2013 in short, this is annexation by other means. It shuts the door on any kind of Palestinian state.<\/p>\n

Over time, he added, it will bring unintended consequences. Rather than make the outposts legal, it will highlight the criminal nature of all settlements, including those in East Jerusalem and the so-called \u201csettlement blocs\u201d \u2013 areas previous US administrations had hinted they might accept for annexation to Israel in a future peace deal.<\/p>\n

The other major danger was noted by opposition leader Isaac Herzog. \u201cThe train departing from here has only one stop \u2013 at The Hague,\u201d he said, in reference to the home of the International Criminal Court.<\/p>\n

If ICC prosecutors take their duties seriously, the legalisation law significantly raises the pressure on them to put Israeli officials \u2013 even Mr Netanyahu \u2013 on trial for complicity in the war crime of establishing and nurturing the settlements.<\/p>\n

___________________________________________<\/p>\n

Jonathan Cook is an award-winning British journalist based in Nazareth, Israel, since 2001. He is the author of: <\/em>Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish State (2006); <\/em>Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (2008); and <\/em>Disappearing Palestine: Israel\u2019s Experiments in Human Despair (2008). In 2011 he was awarded the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize<\/a> for Journalism.<\/em> The same year, Project Censored<\/a> voted one of Jonathan\u2019s reports, \u201cIsrael brings Gaza entry restrictions to West Bank\u201d, the ninth most important story censored in 2009-10.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 jonathancook.net<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cThe train departing from here has only one stop \u2013 at The Hague,\u201d opposition leader Isaac Herzog said in reference to the home of the International Criminal Court. If ICC prosecutors take their duties seriously, the legalisation law significantly raises the pressure on them to put Israeli officials \u2013 even Mr Netanyahu \u2013 on trial for complicity in the war crime of establishing and nurturing the settlements.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-86596","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-palestine-israel-gaza-genocide"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86596","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=86596"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86596\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=86596"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=86596"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=86596"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}