“Well, I never heard it before, but it sounds uncommon nonsense.”
From Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
Beitar Illit, an Israeli settlement in the West Bank.An Israeli government committee has turned logic, law and Israeli Supreme Court precedent on its head, declaring that Israeli settlement activity in the territories occupied by Israel since 1967 is not illegal and advising the Israeli government to legalize retroactively settlements and outposts previously deemed to have been constructed outside the framework of Israeli law. This is a stunning action with enormous consequences, a serious example of “uncommon nonsense.”
The so-called Levy committee, comprising a former Israeli Supreme Court justice, a former district court judge and a former foreign-ministry legal adviser, conceded that a substantial amount of building in the territories, including the establishment of about one hundred outposts between 1991 and 2005, was unauthorized. However, the committee continued somewhat disingenuously, since these illegal activities were carried out “with the knowledge, encouragement and tacit agreement of the most senior political level . . . such conduct is to be seen as implied agreement.” It seems the committee has no problem with illegal actions by citizens as long as a senior government official winks, nods and joins in the activity. So much for the rule of law.
Levy’s committee, formed at the request of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has effectively turned its back on more than four decades of rulings by the Israeli Supreme Court, according to a quote in the Israeli press by Talia Sasson, a noted jurist and author of a 2005 Israeli government report that documented the illegal and unauthorized outpost activity. Sasson’s report, commissioned by and submitted to then prime minister Ariel Sharon, created shock waves in Israel, for it represented legal confirmation of Sharon’s controversial political decision to dismantle the outposts erected during his tenure as prime minister. In the end, however, virtually no outposts were dismantled—despite a written commitment by the Israeli government to the Bush administration to do so—and Sasson’s report was shelved with no further action taken. There is a saying in the Middle East that an issue is not dead until it is dead and buried; Sharon’s government killed the Sasson report, and now Levy’s committee has recommended burying it.
Sasson has also stressed, in private correspondence, that the Levy committee has contradicted more than four decades of Israeli law and policy, which has applied the principles of the Fourth Geneva Convention and the Hague Regulations to the occupied territories, albeit stopping short of formally recognizing their applicability.
The Levy committee’s assertion of “administrative assurance,” that is, the complicity of government officials in supporting settlement activity even when that activity contravened the law, is one of the most troubling aspects of the report. Under such circumstances, citizens in a democracy should expect that government officials who place themselves above the law would be held accountable, not that their activities would be explained away or condoned. Equally, the Levy committee’s recommendation that the outposts and settlement construction completed under these circumstances be legalized retroactively is chillingly Orwellian—as though to say it was wrong and illegal to engage in the activity, but it will now be made right and legal. One normally expects better from an Israeli democracy that, in the past, has enshrined the rule of law.
The Israeli press has made no mention of one of the most serious issues raised in the 2005 Sasson report—namely, the construction of settlements and outposts on privately owned Palestinian land. A landmark decision by the Israeli Supreme Court in 1979 ruled that the government had the right to confiscate private land in the West Bank and Gaza only for military purposes, not for civilian settlement. After that, settlement construction appeared to be confined to what the government legal adviser determined to be “state land”—that is, land not owned privately by Palestinians. Yet, over the years, the NGO “Peace Now” has argued that substantial settlement activity has taken place on private land, and several years ago, a previously classified Israeli government report indeed confirmed that reality. Thus, not only was the complicit activity of government officials and settlers in violation of laws and regulations regarding settlement construction, it was also in violation of a Supreme Court ruling. Does the Levy committee wish also to sweep Supreme Court rulings under the rug?
The Israeli cabinet will soon take up the Levy committee recommendations, and it is coming under pressure from its right-wing base to adopt the report as policy. This would be most unwise, not only because of its impact on whatever small chance still exists to find a way forward to a political agreement with the Palestinians but equally importantly for what it will say about Israel’s commitment to the rule of law. Even before the cabinet’s consideration, the Israeli attorney general must decide whether to approve it, and this is not certain; when the committee was formed, Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein reportedly warned the prime minister that he probably would not approve the committee’s report. Assuming Weinstein follows through, it would be a wise course of action to declare this committee’s report dead on arrival and buried.
Comments
Let's cut through the legalized meandering of Mr. Kurtz here. Israel does not agree that Judea and Samaria is "occupied" territory. It was a disputed territory in 1948 between Israel and Jordan and taken by Jordenian force in 1948. From 1948 to 1967 Jordan was occupying this land, the Jews were expelled, yet in its typical pro-Arab bias neither the UN nor the world protested against Jordenian occupation. Israel took this DISPUTED territory in a DEFENSIVE war it did not want. Israel has both the historical right and the contemporary right to maintain sovreignty over Judea and Samaria. The UN and the international community has demonstrated its double standards toward Israel, while ignoring the history and the Jordenian occupation of that land. No other country has ever been requested to return disputed territory it won in a defensive war. Israel has the right (both based on historical and on political arguments) to consider Judea and Samaria to be under its Administrative Sovreingty. As to the argument that the Levy Committee going against previous Israeli Supreme Court decisions, the Levy Committee represent the legislator. As in any other democratic country, the legislator can change the law. The role of the Supreme Court will be to rule based on the new law.
RE: "Israel took this DISPUTED territory in a DEFENSIVE war it did not want." ~ JossefPerl ♦ MY COMMENT: The use of CAPS does not the truth make! And anytime someone says "let's cut through the...", you know to expect a crock of B.S. It absolutely was NOT a defensive war, and all the hasbara in the world can't change that! ♦ FROM WIKIPEDIA [Origins of the Six-Day War]: (excerpts) . . .On May 25, 1967, Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban landed in Washington “with instructions to discuss American plans to re-open the Strait of Tiran”. As soon as he arrived, he was given new instructions in a cable from the Israeli government. The cable said that Israel had learned of an imminent Egyptian attack, which overshadowed the blockade. No longer was he to emphasize the strait issue; he was instructed to ‘inform the highest authorities of this new threat and to request an official statement from the United States that an attack on Israel would be viewed as an attack on the United States.” . . . Despite his own skepticism, Eban followed his instructions during his first meeting with Secretary Rusk, Under Secretary Rostow, and Assistant Secretary Lucius Battle. American intelligence experts spent the night analyzing each of the Israeli claims.[116] On May 26, Eban met with United States Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, and finally with President Lyndon B. Johnson. In a memo to the President, Rusk rejected the claim of an Egyptian and Syrian attack being imminent, plainly stating "our intelligence does not confirm [the] Israeli estimate".[118] According to declassified documents from the Johnson Presidential Library, President Johnson and other top officials in the administration did not believe war between Israel and its neighbors was necessary or inevitable.[119] . . . ♦ SOURCE - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origins_of_the_Six-Day_War
P.S. ALSO: "Rethinking Israel’s David-and-Goliath past", by Sandi Tolan, Salon.com, 6/04/07 ♦ Little-noticed details in declassified U.S. documents indicate that Israel's Six-Day War may not have been a war of necessity. ♦ EXCEPTS: . . . Little-noticed details in declassified documents from the LBJ Presidential Library in Austin, Texas, indicate that top officials in the Johnson administration — including Johnson’s most pro-Israeli Cabinet members — did not believe war between Israel and its neighbors was necessary or inevitable, at least until the final hour. In these documents, Israel emerges as a vastly superior military power, its opponents far weaker than the menacing threat Israel portrayed, and war itself something that Nasser, for all his saber-rattling, tried to avoid until the moment his air force went up in smoke. In particular, the diplomatic role of Nasser’s vice president, who was poised to travel to Washington in an effort to resolve the crisis, has received little attention from historians. The documents sharpen a recurring theme in the history of the Israeli-Arab wars, and especially of their telling in the West: From the war of 1948 to the 2007 conflict in Gaza, Israel is often miscast as the vulnerable David in a hostile sea of Arab Goliaths. . . A key discrepancy lay between U.S. and British intelligence reports and those conveyed to the administration by the Israelis. On May 26, the same day Eban met with Johnson and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, Dean Rusk, the secretary of state, relayed a message from Israel indicating “that an Egyptian and Syrian attack is imminent.” In a memo to the president, Rusk wrote: “Our intelligence does not confirm this Israeli estimate.” Indeed, this contradicted all U.S. intelligence, which had characterized Nasser’s troops in the Sinai as “defensive in nature” and only half (50,000) of the Israeli estimates. Walt Rostow, the national security advisor, called Israeli estimates of 100,000 Egyptian troops “highly disturbing,” and the CIA labeled them “a political gambit” for the United States to stand firm with Israelis, sell them more military hardware, and “put more pressure on Nasser.” As for the Egyptian president, there was a huge difference between his public and private signals. . . privately Nasser was sending strong signals he would not go to war. On May 31, he met with an American emissary, former Treasury Secretary Robert Anderson, assuring him that Egypt would not “begin any fight.” Two days later, Nasser told a British M.P., Christopher Mayhew, that Egypt had “no intention of attacking Israel.” The same day he met again with Anderson, agreeing to dispatch his vice president, Zakariya Mohieddin, to Washington, in an apparent last-ditch attempt to avoid war. (Anderson and Johnson had also spoken of a visit to Cairo by Vice President Hubert Humphrey.) ♦ SOURCE - http://www.salon.com/2007/06/04/six_day_...
RE: "Israel took this DISPUTED territory in a DEFENSIVE war it did not want." ~ JossefPerl //♦ FROM HANNAH ARENDT [ in "Lying in Politics" ]: “The trouble with lying and deceiving, is that their efficiency depends entirely upon a clear notion of the truth that the liar and deceiver wishes to hide. In this sense, truth, even if it does not prevail in public, possesses an ineradicable primacy over all falsehoods.” ♦ SOURCE - http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Hannah_Arendt
Jossef: You know, Jossef, your comment here reminds me of Huxley's observation of some things in science where "many a beautiful theory was killed by an ugly fact." You can capitalize the statement that Israel's war in '67 was "defensive" all you want but it's meaningless. In the first place everyone who has ever launched a war has always claimed theirs was "defensive," so to did Hitler even term his war on the jews, and one tends to doubt you'd accept that as a basis for further analysis of his actions. And then there's the fact that while Israel at first denied that it started the hostilities at all, it later admitted same, and then later yet as regards its allegedly defensive nature Menachem Begin himself said "In June 1967, we again had a choice. The Egyptian Army concentrations do not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him." And then there's the Israeli cabinet member at the time who attended the war-deciding meeting who said that the story about the war being launched defensively was "invented of whole cloth and exaggerated after the fact to justify the annexation of new arab territories." So this is why no-one else in the entire world accepts your theory Jossef, this one ugly little fact. And while Mr. Begin quite obviously meant Israel had no need to be honest about it with the rest of the world, he can't make us accept the dishonesty he simultaneously admitted it had been promulgating.
Israel was not attacked in 1967. None of the fighting in the 1967 war was in Israel. If Israel was attacked wouldn't there have been some fighting in Israel? If Egypt had been about to invade Israel would Israel have been able to catch them so off guard that there entire Air Force would be destroyed mostly on the ground? It seems to me like Egypt would not have been caught off guard if they were about to attack Israel. All this suggests that Nobody was about to attack Israel. Not to mention nobody argues that the fighting did not begin with an Israeli attack on Egypt. Neither Israel not Israeli forces were attacked. In 1973 Israeli forces WERE attacked but they were attacked in Israeli occupied territory. Not in Israel.