Book of the Month

Israel Jumps the Shark, Splits the Baby

by PeraclesPlease 7/15/2012 - 10:12 am

Israel astounded international observers this week as former Supreme Court Justice Edmond Levy announced in effect: "Israel never occupied nobody!" Imagine a President Romney asking Justice Scalia to provide a definitive interpretation of the Obamacare decision. The results could hardly be more unsurprising.

Fox, meet chicken coop. Chicken coop, meet fox. With Netanyahu assembling / stacking this committee of like-minded thinkers to come up with a way to prove their settlements were legal, they creatively fell back on familiar ground: the West Bank was already Israel's so they could build wherever they want anyway.

Of course it's familiar ground - this contention has been refuted numerous times by Israeli and International courts since 1967, and Israel's actions and statements towards the West Bank as an occupied territory undercuts that contention, but never we mind: Netanyahu's team has Solomaic wisdom to back it up.

That wisdom would include rights to the territory existing thousands of years (ironically ignoring an absence much longer than Jordan's, which absence and "neglect" is the basis for this latest bid for "land-up-for-grabs"/"finders keepers losers weepers").

It also includes the wisdom of splitting the baby while not splitting the baby - "not an occupation - but not Israeli-managed territory", half-fish/half-fowl?. Netanyahu carefully not accepting the report yet, even as Defense (IDF) started implementing new rules.

What's the problem? Well, if this is really Israeli land and not occupied territory, then Israeli has been denying its own Palestinian citizens - a majority of say 2.5 million - voting and human rights since 1967, uh, 45 years. 

Not to worry - based on numerous comments in a few of the nation's right-wing publications, citizenship is "earned", not granted. (Unless you're a Jew going through aliyah in which case it's immediate). The implied threat is that as soon as this "no occupation" theory is accepted, most Palestinians will find themselves declared non-citizens, so that it will be the Palestinians who are building or breathing illegally (and deportable), not Israel's Zionist settlers.

But Netanyahu is no fool - he knows there's a limit to how much the international community will support such contentions in fast speed, so slow expansion of the status quo works better - settlers have outpaced Palestinian population growth the last 3 years running, and the decade-old still-in-progress expansion wall has been accepted as fait accomplis - ostensibly to provide security but built 2x longer than needed to maximize expansion rather than security.

Besides, Netanyahu's got Hillary showing up today to show she's got Israel's back ahead of US elections - time to play it cool, be elder statesmen, "Israel's just trying to survive", and assuage its fears about Iran and Palestinian terror.

In related news, Ehud Olmert beat 2 corruption charges against him, with the 3rd - "breach of trust" - seeming a minor issue, and not criminal. It's bittersweet victory, as these charges made him step down in favor of Netanyahu, shortly after he'd offered Palestinians a promising concession - return to 1967 lines and partial return of refugees. 

Whether the ridicule of Netanyahu's Levy Report sees this government as jumping the shark, with Olmert getting a return to kickstart peace talks, or as a codification of Israeli hard-lining and a land grab for the next generations should become readily apparent shortly. (Yitzi Livni's resignation from Knesset in May predicated on the hardening of Israeli politics)

The hard-liners complaint that "you can't make peace with only 1 side" may just be their self-fulfilling prophesy. What happens if the peace process is officially declared dead is a whole new ballgame.

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This Levy report is absolutely outrageous PP; I could not agree more.  And it obfuscates the real issues in any event, which are the wisdom and morality of unfettered settlement growth; the legalities are just mush.  Nice piece.

by bslev 7/15/2012 - 3:10 pm

Thanks. It's tossed a stink bomb in for anyone who actually wanted to resolve things - how to get the Palestinians back to the table when the gov has just essentially declared they've always owned everything anyway, but thanks for playing?

And they're already spinning the US objections to be "they agree with us, they're just tossing some token objections up that don't change anything". Which might be true for all I know.

I guess the good thing is elections are delayed long enough for Olmert or others to regroup. The bad thing about that is this decision will be carried out as facts on the ground until then.

by PeraclesPlease 7/15/2012 - 3:27 pm (re: bslev)

A positive note to start: anything that causes both Bruce and Peracles to recoil in horror is an achievement. That's it for the positive stuff.

I haven't found the full 89-page report in English, just its conclusions and recommendations:

http://www.pmo.gov.il/NR/rdonlyres/42C25B01-428B-40FC-8A6B-E9B1F5315D74/...

In laying out a future legal regime for the West Bank, those eight pages never use the word "Palestinian." But Levy's mandate was not to sort out conflicting rights; it was to find a way to legalize settler outposts. He's done that more thoroughly than even Netanyahu may have hoped.

Lots of Israelis, like Levy and his panel, want outright annexation of the West Bank -- sorry, Judea and Samaria. Netanyahu may have the same long-term dream, but he knows the timing is not ripe. There's not just the question of international law and international relations; adoption of the Levy Report would also contradict pesky precedents set by rulings of the Israeli Supreme Court and past declarations by virtually all Israeli governments. His solution may well be to duck taking any position on the report's legal underpinnings, but simply start implementing its proposals as if they were government policy.

The New York Times and the U.S. Jewish leaders who have denounced the report are of course right about its impact on Israel's image. I tend to agree with the Daily Beast's Peter Beinart, however:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/07/13/levy-is-right.html

The Levy Report has done a service by calling a spade a spade. This is where Israel is heading, and these rationalizations are at the heart of 21st century Zionism. Can this disastrous course be reversed? There's not much of an internal dynamic against it, is there? Polls show not enough Israelis are really concerned about the drift toward a perpetual garrison state. Much less about the generations-long oppression of a few million people defined, if thought about at all, as "the other."

Peracles muses about Kadima regrouping as an opposition party. It's not going to happen. And hetherw the Levy Report is formally adopted or formally rejected isn't really important. Its release marks a crossroads, and I'm afraid Israel will merrily continue on the familiar, well-worn path it has blindly chosen.

 

by acanuck 7/17/2012 - 5:51 pm
The only hope is if it causes most to recoil in horror. Yes, the Levy Report is the status quo+, just enough to take the lipstick off the pig. A wall that's reallyy an expansion corridor. A promise of negotiation predicated on accepting you have no claims. I miss Ariel Sharon - son of a bitch that he was, there seemed always a core sense about him. Netanyahu? A thoroughly craven political creature. Don't know what Peres does anymore except as walking corpse reminder of what was once a peace process. Cynicism rules. Almost no press comments on Hillary's visit - the right wingers have won, facts on the ground.
by Anonymous pp (not verified) 7/17/2012 - 6:45 pm (re: acanuck)

Kadima today left Netanyahu's "grand coalition" -- not over the Levy Report, but because of the PM's continued kowtowing to the ultra-Orthodox over their exemption from military service. Netanyahu still has a Knesset majority, but it's now totally dependent on those far-right religious and settler parties. That increases the pressure on him to adopt Levy to keep his coalition in power. But endorsing the report could fuel support for Kadima, if not for parties to its left. Netanyahu may opt to call early elections without taking a decision on Levy, though that also carries a risk. Quite a dilemma!

by acanuck 7/17/2012 - 7:23 pm

Though elections would be later than the original September, so potentially Kadima has time to organize. 

However why Netanyahu needs to call early elections isn't clear to me - he can still implement Levy in principle, he has support for his major freakout over Iran, he'll have an 8-seat majority in Knesset to pass anything else, and he didn't seem to care about Palestinian peace, which is the only place where a super-majority seemed needed.

by PeraclesPlease 7/18/2012 - 2:17 am (re: acanuck)

Kadima has, as you say, "potentially" time to organize. But the party took a gamble replacing Tzipi Livni with Shaul Mofaz, who took the party into Netanyahu's coalition in exchange for promises of conscription reform and a renewed peace initiative. When push came to shove, Netanyahu sided instead with his original ultra-Orthodox partners.

So Mofaz's strategy has failed, just as party ex-leader Ehud Olmert has beaten the most serious corruption charges against him. Olmert sounds like a man who wants his old job back; if so, Kadima is going to be torn apart by infighting at the top while it should be fighting Likud. If I were Netanyahu, I'd want a snap election. If Likud gains seats, Kadima is still available as potential coalition partner, but on much better terms.

by acanuck 7/18/2012 - 3:17 am (re: PeraclesPlease)

Mofaz is gone. Livni likely is permanently wounded - she couldn't pull a government together when given a chance. So Olmert is probably their horse to ride - though still facing one more corruption charge until Fall, I believe.

The early elections were originally for September. I don't think there's any way Netanyahu can call elections before January roughly, more likely February (don't think anyone will be thrilled with elections in holiday season, though could be wrong)

But it is a question whether Kadima can look any stronger after this pretty weak effort.

Who knows - I don't give a shit about Israeli politics except that they don't drive down the whole Middle East... something a few of them seem intent on doing.

by PeraclesPlease 7/18/2012 - 4:18 am (re: acanuck)
It's the one-state solution. No worries mate. The world knows how to boycott, divest, and sanction, and Israel knows how to spell apartheid in Hebrew. Let them drop the charade already, and we will show them what isolation looks like. Divest Now! (fuck Peace Now, that's dead.) We welcome The United Semitic Peoples' Kemalist Republic. One Semite, one vote. One state, no fuckin' Yahwists.
by jollyroger 7/18/2012 - 3:00 am
Also, since Israel apparently wants to reverse partition, everybody gets the right of return....don't they?
by jollyroger 7/18/2012 - 3:07 am (re: jollyroger)

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