Mati Yanikov The Electronic Intifada 5 August 2024
Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s finance minister, joins tens of thousands of ultra-nationalist Jews as they prepare to march through the Old City of Jerusalem on 6 June, 2024. Eyal WarshavskySOPA Images/SIPA USA
On 19 July, the International Court of Justice published its advisory opinion on Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip.
The World Court couldn’t have been more clear.
The occupation is unlawful, Israel’s presence in occupied territory must come to an end as “rapidly as possible,” Israel is guilty of “systematic” racial discrimination, Israel must immediately cease all settlement activity, and Israel owes reparation to Palestinians.
That is not to mention the legal responsibilities of other states in view of this ruling, to act to end Israel’s illegal presence in occupied territory, not accept any physical or demographic changes imposed on these territories, and to end any assistance or aid that helps Israel maintain its presence in occupied territory.
That task is growing rapidly harder, however.
In the weeks prior to the ICJ decision, a number of plans by far-right Israeli ministers to seize more occupied land and change the legal status of administrative bodies in the 1967 occupied territories came to light.
If followed through, these plans amount to a huge leap for Israel’s ongoing annexation of West Bank land and would grant ever more leeway to settler attacks on Palestinian villages, property and lives.
Mega-dramatic
Israel’s illegal practices in the West Bank are of course not new. But the advent of the current Israeli government, generally considered the most far right in the state’s history, has allowed extremist ministers to assume significant positions related to the administration of the occupied territories, greatly influencing housing, policing and regulation of Israeli settlements, many of them illegal even under Israeli law.
One of the most significant characters is Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s finance minister, who has seized the opportunity presented by 7 October to forge ahead with settlement expansion plans that he has been busy outlining to supporters.
During a private Jewish settler gathering on 9 June in a settlement outpost south of Qalqilya in the West Bank, Smotrich was almost ebullient.
“I’m telling you, it’s mega-dramatic,” the head of the Religious Zionism Party holding one of the country’s most important portfolios, told his audience about plans – well advanced – to transfer legal authority of the so-called Area C, or 60 percent of the West Bank, from the Israeli military to a civilian administrator answerable to the defense ministry.
“Such changes change a system’s DNA,” Smotrich, a proponent of the full annexation of all occupied territory, added.
His words, recorded secretly by a member of the Israeli rights group Peace Now, were leaked to The New York Times and subsequently reported by other media outlets.
“We created a separate civilian system,” Smotrich said at the gathering, a system, he clarified, that maintains a role for the Israeli ministry of defense in order to deflect international scrutiny, and give the impression that the military is still at the heart of West Bank governance.
This is important to present Israel’s occupation as not permanent, as this would be a clear transgression of international law. For this reason, Israel’s supreme court has long maintained the obvious fiction that Israel’s continued occupation of 1967 territory is “temporary.”
Legal cover
As long as it is officially administered by military bodies and army officials, it superficially corresponds to the Geneva Convention, which states that an occupying army is permitted “temporary military occupation where necessary in lawful self-defense,” and until agreement for resolution is reached, though this correspondence does not include settlements.
The Israeli Civil Administration, which was established to govern the Palestinians of the occupied West Bank, is a military body used to justify the legality of the 57-year-old “temporary” military occupation.
Transferring it from military control to civilian control is therefore indeed “mega-dramatic,” especially in light of the ICJ’s 19 July advisory opinion.
According to several reports, Smotrich has already appointed a deputy on his behalf to the Civil Administration.
Hillel Roth, a West Bank settler like Smotrich, has assumed all authority related to planning, real estate, enforcement, transportation and environmental protection.
Roth is not under the supervision of the current head of the Civil Administration, Brigadier General Hisham Ibrahim, but under a new administration Smotrich has established.
According to The New York Times, Smotrich said the government had secured $270 million from Israel’s defense budget to guard the settlements in 2024-2025.
All this leaves the Civil Administration with very little authority and changes the situation significantly, arguably moving Israel’s creeping de facto annexation into de jure territory.
Some Israeli military personnel have voiced concerns over the reaction in the West Bank. The Israeli daily newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth, quoted one unnamed “senior security source” worrying that: “There is a high probability that the Palestinian side will see this as a blatant violation of the Oslo Accords. After all, in Judea and Samaria [the West Bank], the Civil Administration is also responsible for a Palestinian population in Area C.”
During the 9 June settler gathering, Smotrich reportedly also explained that his first goal had been to establish his new administration outside the ministry of defense to be fully under his control, but he eventually changed his mind, mainly because he thought “it will be easier to swallow in the political and legal context, so no one can say we are engaged in annexation, sovereignty and so on.”
The legalization, regulation, budgeting and infrastructure plans for 63 illegal outposts were also announced at the gathering. These outposts, built illegally even under Israeli law, are placed at strategic locations in order to disrupt movement, control the Indigenous population and prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, an intention Smotrich was very open about on 9 June.
“We came to settle the land, to build it, and to prevent its division and the establishment of a Palestinian state, God forbid,” he told the gathering.
No man’s land
On 27 June, two weeks after the gathering, Israeli media reported that Israel’s government was to take a series of punitive steps against the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank.
The steps – including the “legalization” of five settlement outposts, settlement expansion, enforcement of building restrictions in Area A (under full PA control) and sanctions against senior PA officials, curtailing their movement and preventing travel abroad – were imposed as a result of the announcement a month earlier by the International Criminal Court that prosecutors would seek arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Galant, as well as the recognition by a number of European countries of a Palestinian state.
“This is our answer,” Smotrich said, following the announced sanctions: “We said a month ago that any country that unilaterally recognizes a Palestinian state, we will establish a settlement in Judea and Samaria in its name. Five states made this mistake, we have now established five settlements.”
Smotrich is not the only far-right minister flexing his muscles in the occupied West Bank.
At the end of June, an article in Yedioth Ahronoth described the West Bank as a “no man’s land” following the appointment of Itamar Ben-Gvir, another far-right Israeli politician who is head of the Kahanist Jewish Power party, as minister of national security.
His position grants him, among other things, authority over the police.
The article goes on to claim that the Israeli police in the West Bank – which is responsible for law enforcement over Jewish settlers in the area – is reluctant to investigate hate crimes so as not to annoy Ben-Gvir.
The article also reports that Ben-Gvir intervenes in investigations into Jewish terrorism, and details growing tensions between the three main security agencies in the occupied territories: the police, the military and the Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence agency.
Not only do police refuse to investigate incidents of deadly shooting by settlers, they are afraid to enter settlements with warrants, and sometimes they simply leave suspicious settlers to operate without restriction.
This corresponds with a reality on the ground that was established long before Ben-Gvir’s appointment. For Palestinians in the West Bank, the distinction between “military” and “civilian” has been non-existent for decades, best exemplified by the regular pogroms villagers and townsfolk in the West Bank suffer at the hands of the so-called hilltop youth and extremist settlers, often under the watchful eye of the military.
What’s different this time is that the state seems to not care even to present a pretense of due process.
Rivalries
What it also reveals, however, is that the Israeli ruling elite is not a monolith. There are many power struggles at the top of the various security agencies over the correct management of Israel’s apartheid rule.
How is it “not a single radical Jew” was arrested, Netanyahu was quoted as asking his security chiefs in a recent meeting over an incident in April that resulted in the killing of two Palestinians in the West Bank.
“The Americans are pressing,” he is reported to have said.
No charges were filed following the event, and the military commander of that area of the occupied West Bank openly questioned Ben-Gvir’s police district commander during the meeting over how the investigation was being conducted, calling it “interesting.”
But while such spats suggest friction among Israel’s security elite – and while Netanyahu’s words suggest Israel is feeling some genuine pressure from a US administration desperate to show it is doing something – the friction is contained within very narrow boundaries.
For many years, Israel’s far right has served the purpose of distinguishing between official Israeli policies and “the extremists.” This helps whitewash Israeli atrocities behind a façade of legality, while purposefully leaving the dirty work to the extremist fringes the state itself created by encouraging and funding the illegal settlement project.
But these extremist fringes have found their way to formal power and the mainstream. The monster the state created has escaped its control. How to maintain this façade?
The various reactions in Israel to the capture of power by the extremist fringes are really an indication of a growing rift in Israeli society over how best to manage apartheid, occupation, settler colonialism and genocide.
Those who are committed to a legalistic approach are mainly the legal and security establishments, and the middle-class “pro-democracy” social movement, one of whose leaders, Shikma Bresler, has been quite clear that the priority was shielding Israeli soldiers from international courts.
For these elites, the appearance of rule of law must be kept at all costs.
The far right, on the other hand, is committed to direct action. Powerful figures like Smotrich and Ben-Gvir are willing to take risky decisions that will change the legal status quo of the occupied territories to continue to physically sabotage any chance of a future Palestinian state.
And they are no longer a fringe, as the many, well-attended conferences and marches demanding renewed Israeli settlement in Gaza attest to.
As the masks are being pulled off, Israel – and the entire Middle East with it – is stepping into an uncertain future. It is becoming harder and harder for the “rules-based world order” to keep granting Israel impunity.
Mati Yanikov is a Haifa-based anti-colonial activist.
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