Nobody has posted this yet, so, although there will be a lot of commentary, here goes.
Some time ago Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu created a three person committee headed by a former jurist named Edward Levy to study the question of illegal outposts. That committee has now issued its report, and it is a bombshell. As JP reported
The United Nations often states that Israeli settlements are illegal under international law. It bases this on its understanding that Israel “occupies” the West Bank.
But the outpost report concluded that the classical laws of occupation “as set out in the relevant international conventions cannot be considered applicable to the unique and sui generis historic and legal circumstances of Israel’s presence in Judea and Samaria spanning over decades.”
Similarly, it said, the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention against the transfer of populations is not applicable to the Israeli settlement activity in Judea and Samaria.
The committee has opined, among other things, that the Balfour Declaration made Judea and Samaria part of the homeland of the Jewish people, and that Judea and Samaria are available for settlement because they are not legally occupied territories at all, no matter how many times the Israeli government has taken that position in court and how much property has been taken by IDF on precisely that basis.
It also takes the position that since so many of the settlements were put into place with a good deal of winking and looking the other way by various governments, and often with government funds, this is a form of consent to their construction and continued existence, and that therefore they should be treated as legal, and the various bureaucratic failings involved in their creation should be wiped away, and no settlements should be demolished.
This report was delivered to the cabinet yesterday, Sunday, although he received it several weeks ago. Netanyahu has options to decide what to do with the report.
Experts in Israel and elsewhere have already begun to opine on various consequences both to Israel's position vis a vis the international community and more locally and the results they foresee are negative in many ways.
The timing cannot be worse for Bibi and Israel. As some of you are aware, the UNHRC has appointed a committee specifically to examine the situation of settlements in the West Bank and appointed its members in the last week, and Israel's governmental response was to bar all of them from the West Bank and denounce them, and the agency horse they re riding in on, in advance as bigoted and etc etc.
It is also indisputable that there is at least a substantial number of political Israelis and factions, some of them in the current government, who will agree with everything this report says. And then some with language I will report to administration if anyone uses here in threads.
It does not help, of course, that Netanyahu is also in a parlous political position at this time anyway as his coalition is threatening to fall apart over the Tal Law issue, which must be settled before August 1, and he does not need another crisis. But he has one.
And so do the Palestinians and does the rest of the world.
There are several things to be said. Yes, it is possible that for whatever reason, Bibi created a committee with a settler bias, but it is still a committee he created, and what he made is what he got. But nobody else deserves what this will create, given its essential governmental imprimatur.
The most offensive part of it IMO is the little pargraph referenced by JP to the effect that the Fourth Geneva Convention does not apply because of the sui generis situation of Israel and its conduct over decades. The entire point of international law is that there are no sui generis exceptions to it. Israel is not different from all other countries as to such matters, especially as to matters done by it after the Fourth Geneva Convention was put into place. And as to the matter of what it called 'the Wall', the International Court of Justice has already adversely opined as to all of these matters long ago, including the occupied status of WB.
At least this time, the committee only suggested that the sui generis situation only arose over decades, not over millenia. Of course the problem with arguing that something done over sixty, or less, since 1967, years, makes a difference, is that what is done in that short a time frame can equally well be undone, because it is not 'permanent' or 'established and settled' and never has been from since before the time of Israeli independence. It is uncomfortably like the situation just after the Second World War, when various European countries evicted and sent to the then partitioned Germany, Germans by the millions, some of whom had been where they were for hundreds of years if not more, when parts of Poland, such as IIRC East Prussia, for example, were part of Germany, and only shifted after WW1. And nobody has ever undone that one. There is also the precedent of institutional level literal reclaiming of various properties taken from Jewish folk before and during WWII, whose return has been diligently sought and obtained in the intervening years, where the same amount of time does not produce any better title in what all here, I think, agree were thieves.
Unless Bibi has something up his sleeve to denature this, and does whatever that is and it works, this will probably put the period to the efforts to negotiate a two state solution directly with Palestine, because both of the widespread and oneside legalization this report urges, and the violence of the last year or two of settlers who have been attacking Palestinian peasants, and their homes, crops and orchards, which this will only encourage. As it is, at least one of the Israeli papers has already referred to all WB palestinians in this course of reportage as 2,500,000 stateless persons.
"Peasants' is an important word here because one of the issues Israel has always had with the Palestinians on the land for agricultural lifestyles is that they are not in some manner thought the same as the many folk in Israeli cities and communities, and much of the original Palestinian city population was encouraged to move in 1947-8 and did, leaving behind nobody that the Israeli governments thought had a right to talk against what they wanted. Indeed, one of the poems of that period salutes the situation of an empty land, one without people they recognized as like themselves, waiting for a people to occupy it. That failure to recognize any sort of human equality is now coming to a head. When one reads Israeli papers, concerning challenged settlements, there is always one or more articles about the misery and pain caused to the settlers forced to move, but never about the pain of the Palestinians forced off their land to make way for the now suffering settlers.
What becomes most damaging to Israel about this is the report's position that all of this is legal because it does not recognize, nor does the UN at the moment, a Palestinian state, and the report's further premise that because the Palestinian state is not recognized, it cannot be 'occupied.' Prime Minister Abbas has already said his side is headed back to the UN if the settlement talks don't get moving really soon, and this will probably preserve that as well, for the various ways that the recognition of statehood can be done there.
This will also make a terrible mess of the US elections, because of Obama's support of using the 1967 line as a basis for border negotiations, and Romeny's vague promise of doing the opposite of whatever Obama has done. And with Hillary as secretary of state, who has just made a pass through this area, my blood curdles.
I have no idea what might happen next except that it is going to be awful.
-----
Comments are invited under my usual householder rules, including: no personal attacks on commenters or diarists, no anti semitism or anti Palestinian ('terrorists' and such) remarks, no Godwin violations, citations with links needed for your assertions of fact, no snark or thread jacking,