Legislation meant to retroactively legalize close to 4,000 settlement homes passed a first reading on Wednesday, December 7, after coalition infighting led to several false starts in recent weeks. The bill was approved with 58 in favor and 51 opposed. The bill could be the first step toward annexation of the West Bank, and would overturn almost 40 years of judicial rulings on private Palestinian property rights in the occupied Palestinian territories.
Far-right and settler MK Shuli Moalem-Refaeli (Bayit Yehudi) presented the proposed law over four hours earlier, amid nearly nonstop shouting from the opposition benches. “The Land of Israel belongs to the people of Israel. We returned after 2,000 years and established a state… A nation cannot be an occupier in its own land,” Moalem-Refaeli said. According to Moalem-Refaeli, the legislation is the way the state is “taking responsibility for homes it supported in the West Bank, and demonstrates that it values settlements.” “This is the best way for the State of Israel to exercise sovereignty and show that the residents of Judea and Samaria are not second-class citizens,” she said. During Moalem-Refaeli’s speech, Hadash MK Dov Khenin (Joint List) appealed to her religious beliefs, shouting to her that the Torah says not to steal. “You can’t steal what belongs to you,” she retorted. “Then why did Abraham have to pay for the land [in Hebron]?” Khenin shouted back.
Education Minister Naftali Bennett, leader of the HaBayit HaYehudi (Jewish Home) party, hailed the preliminary passage of the colonial bill to retroactively legalize Israeli settlement outposts as paving the way for Israel’s eventual annexation of the West Bank. “Today, the Israeli Knesset moved from heading toward establishing a Palestinian state to heading toward sovereignty in Judea and Samaria [the West Bank], and to remove any doubt about it — the outpost regulation bill just the beginning in applying sovereignty,” Bennett said.
Outside of the Israeli legal system, however, the move is likely to be immediately condemned by the international community. It would be frowned on by the International Criminal Court (ICC), which is already examining Israeli settlement activity, and would consider seizure of private Palestinian property to be illegal. Netanyahu, who has only reluctantly supported the legislation, has warned that it would place Israel in trouble with the ICC. Hadash MK Yousef Jabareen (Joint List) warned Knesset members on Wednesday that all those who voted for the law were heading to the ICC. The Palestinian Authority has already submitted material on the legislation to the ICC and turned to the UN Security Council, where it is hoping to secure a resolution from its 15 member states condemning Israeli settlement activity. Hadash and Communist Party of Israel strongly denounced the bill’s approval as a “legal travesty” as well as a “war crime” as defined by the ICC.
The United Nations envoy for the Middle East, Nickolay Mladenov, released a statement yesterday warning that Israel’s “formalization law” which seeks to retrospectively legalize illegal outposts in the occupied West Bank would be “a step towards the annexation of the West Bank. This legislation “has the objective of protecting illegal settlements and outposts built on private Palestinian property in the West Bank. Some have pronounced it to be a step towards the annexation of the West Bank.”
The Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) also reacted with outrage to the advancement of the law. PLO Executive Committee member Haneen Ashrawi called on the UN Security Council (UNSC) to convene an emergency meeting “in light of Israel’s disastrous settlement activities and to undertake serious punitive measures against Israel.” Ashrawi maintained that “[Israeli Prime Minister] Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing extremist government is deliberately escalating its illegal settlement enterprise and stealing Palestinian land and resources,” warning against the damaging effects of settlement expansion on the two-state solution. “Israel’s actions are provoking grave violence and instability in an already-volatile region; the international community must intervene immediately before it is too late,” she insisted
PLO Secretary-General Saeb Erekat also released a statement, noting Israel’s “long history of attempts to legalize war crimes,” and also demanded action from the UNSC and the ICC. “This latest step shows the extremist Israeli government’s confidence that the international community will not act. This culture of impunity continues to destroy the prospects to end the Israeli occupation and achieve a just and lasting peace between Israel and Palestine.”
Starting Thursday morning peace Israeli activists are holding a protest vigil outside the Prime Minister’s residence (corner of Aza and Balfour Streets, Jerusalem). They will stay there every day between 10:00 to 17:00, during the coming week. According the activists “the Settlement Legalization Bill, which the right-wing Knesset majority is vigorously seeking to enact, is a manifestly illegal measure, by which the seizure of privately-owned Palestinian land would be declared ‘legal.’ The government’s own Attorney General [and] the Knesset’s own legal counsel have stated this clearly and unambiguously. If this monstrosity is enacted into law, Israel’s Supreme Court is expected to annul it and declare it to be in violation of basic human and civil rights. It might even come under the purview of ICC. But all that might take a long time, and we do not have the luxury of tolerating such an ugly blot on the Israeli Legal Code. So, we are coming to make our protest loud and clear. We will stand in the streets of Jerusalem, holding aloft the sign ‘No to the Land Theft Law! No to Annexation.'”
Related:
Israel’s Settlement-Legalization Bill Gets Preliminary OK from Knesset
