An Israeli ministerial committee on Sunday approved a contentious bill that would allow for the retroactive legalization of Jewish settlement outposts built on privately owned Palestinian land in the occupied West Bank. The measure breaks a longstanding taboo, and in the view of many experts, it defies international law.
.. Instead of evicting the settlers, the Regulation Law would transfer the rights for the use of private land into Israeli hands and force the Palestinian landowners to accept compensation. While Israel’s highest legal authorities allow settlements in areas declared public land, private property rights have technically been preserved.
.. Tamar Zandberg, a legislator from the left-wing Meretz party, said the proposed law “says you are allowed to steal.”
.. Although the crisis over Amona preceded the American presidential election, Israel’s right wing has been emboldened by the victory of Donald J. Trump, with the settlements’ supporters believing that his administration will give them a freer hand.
How Donald Trump Will Divide American and Israeli Jews
American presidents like Mr. Bush, Mr. Obama and Mr. Trump are bad for relations between Israel and Jews in the United States. They lay bare the fact that American Jews and Israeli Jews have different sets of priorities and values. These presidents underline the understandable, if unfortunate, reality that Jewish Americans prioritize Israel quite low as they vote — and that Jewish Israelis do not care about the political sensitivities of American Jews.
.. Israel knows that Jewish Americans are wary of certain leaders of the evangelical religious right, and yet accept their political support without many reservations.
Netanyahu Criticizes American Jewish Leaders Over Western Wall Protest
JERUSALEM — In a sign of a growing rift, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu criticized American Jewish leaders on Wednesday as a struggle over a stalled plan for equal prayer rights for both sexes at a Jerusalem holy site erupted with mutual recriminations and a tumultuous protest led by liberal rabbis wielding Torah scrolls.
.. The Western Wall, the holiest place where Jews can pray, has become the crucible of a fight over rituals and a sense of belonging. Together with their Israeli counterparts, North American Jews, who overwhelmingly identify with the liberal, non-Orthodox Reform and Conservative streams of Judaism, have challenged the strictly Orthodox authorities who enforce the traditional practice at the site, in which scores of Torah scrolls are restricted for male use.
.. Liberal Jews hailed the decision as historic at the time, but the government has failed to advance the plan because of opposition from the ultra-Orthodox parties that Mr. Netanyahu relies on for his governing coalition.
Frustrated by the lack of progress, and with a petition pending before Israel’s Supreme Court, non-Orthodox rabbis and lay leaders defied traditional convention by marching to the Western Wall holding 14 Torah scrolls. Despite some violent pushing and shoving by orderlies and ultra-Orthodox counterdemonstrators, they broke through the security barriers.
Why Israel Still Refuses to Choose
Next year it will be a half-century since the Israeli occupation of the West Bank began. More than 370,000 settlers now live there, excluding in East Jerusalem, up from about 249,000 in 2005.
.. The Israeli announcement this month of a new West Bank settlement was the final straw, coming just weeks after the United States concluded a $38 billion, 10-year military aid deal. Israel’s explanation that the settlement was a “satellite” of another did not wash; its actions were viewed as egregious. Seldom has Moshe Dayan’s old dictum — “Our American friends offer us money, arms and advice. We take the money, we take the arms, and we decline the advice” — been more vividly illustrated.
.. Within Israel, where Netanyahu has now amassed more than a decade in power, the political and cultural drift is toward ever more assertive and intolerant nationalism. Criticism is increasingly equated with treason.
.. The Messianic religious Zionism that holds all the West Bank to be Israel’s by biblical decree is ascendant. The left is in feeble disarray.
.. It is sobering to note that Netanyahu probably represents the more moderate wing of his government.
.. Two states had become a bad joke. Young people had more faith in nonviolent resistance leading eventually to equal rights within a single state than in yet another aborted international peace initiative or aborted uprising.
.. In a sense, then, Israel has won. David Ben-Gurion was right when he observed in 1949 that, “When the matter is dragged out — it brings us benefits.”
.. “Israel needs to be democratic more than Jewish,” says Reem Younis, an Arab Israeli.
.. It is time for incremental steps instead. Israel could find lots of ways to ease humiliations and economic hardship for Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, without compromising its security. It could take down some roadblocks, curtail the formalities for movement in and out of Gaza, and grant more building permits in the West Bank, as it just has in quietly authorizing some Palestinian development plans in West Bank areas under exclusive Israeli control. It could even, without saying so, stop settlement expansion.
.. Netanyahu will one day have to tell Israelis if he wants a big binational state or a smaller Jewish-majority state side by side with a Palestinian state. He is trying his best to avoid making the choice, keeping millions of Palestinians in limbo; the West helps him with a “peace process” that goes nowhere. Abbas also owes his people clarity and accountability — as well as a political destination.
.. “One state or two states? Who cares?” he told me. “What matters is human dignity and equality under the same law. Palestinian kids want to live well. That’s what they want.”