This epic transformation is taking place after close to fifty years of occupation. During that time, Israel made profound changes to both the landscape and the demography of the territory it conquered. Palestinians were subjected to a military government that denied them participation in the political process that shaped the rules applied to them and determined their future. Israel used the authoritarian powers that international law gives an occupying force to exploit the territory in a way never envisaged by the framers of those laws. It unilaterally annexed East Jerusalem, a move that was widely condemned abroad. The international community does not recognize the unified city as Israel’s capital; even Trump’s declaration on moving the US embassy to Jerusalem stops short of acknowledging the annexation of the city’s eastern parts. [...]
What the government is embarking on amounts to both de jure annexation and the crime of apartheid. In recent months, the expansion of de jure annexation has been staggering. Lawyers for the Ministry of Justice recently drafted a bill to give the Jerusalem district court, rather than the High Court of Justice (which is a bench of the Supreme Court), the power of judicial review over the military government in the Occupied Territories. This shift away from the High Court represents a move to designate the West Bank as a district within Israel. In addition, the attorney general has directed the government’s legal advisers that when drafting bills, they should take into account the need to find a legal mechanism to apply those bills to Israeli settlers as well.
At the same time, the ruling parliamentary coalition has put its lawyers to work drafting numerous annexationist bills. Their latest accomplishments include a law, enacted last year, which instructs the army to confiscate private Palestinian land and assign it to the intruding Israelis who have put up settlements there. This law is not only a naked sanction of land theft; it is also an unprecedented imposition of Knesset legislation on Palestinians who have no parliamentary representation. Another law that passed the legislative process a few weeks ago gives the state’s Council for Higher Education authority over Israel’s academic institutions in the West Bank, normalizing their presence and operation there. One bill currently making its way through the legislature would extend Israel’s law and administration to the municipal areas of Jewish settlements; another proposes the establishment of a Greater Jerusalem Council, which would include nearby settlement blocs. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu even bragged recently that these annexation plans are coordinated with the US administration—a claim he had to retract after a strong denial from the White House.
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