Under cover of an Oslo "consensus", Israel has transferred ever-larger numbers of Jews into the occupied territories, thereby making a peaceful resolution of the conflict near impossible. According to the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, that is a war crime.
Fatou Bensouda, the chief prosecutor of the court in The Hague, warned this month that she was close to finishing a preliminary inquiry needed before she can decide whether to investigate Israel for war crimes, including the settlements.
The reality, however, is that the ICC has been dragging out the inquiry to avoid arriving at a decision that would inevitably provoke a backlash from the White House. Nonetheless, the facts are staring the court in the face.
Israel's logic -- and proof that it is in gross violation of international law -- were fully on display this week. The Israeli army locked down the Ramallah, the effective and supposedly self-governing capital of occupied Palestine, as "punishment" after two Israeli soldiers were shot dead outside the city.
The Netanyahu government also approved yet another splurge of settlement-building, again supposedly in "retaliation" for a recent upsurge in Palestinian attacks.
But Israel and its western allies know only too well that settlements and Palestinian violence are intrinsically linked. One leads to the other.
Palestinians directly experience the settlements' land grabs as Israeli state-sanctioned violence. Their communities are ever more tightly ghettoised, their movements more narrowly policed to maintain the settlers' privileges.
If Palestinians resist such restrictions or their own displacement, if they assert their rights and their dignity, clashes with soldiers or settlers are inescapable. Violence is inbuilt into Israel's settlement project.
Israel has constructed a perfect, self-rationalising system in the occupied territories. It inflicts war crimes on Palestinians, who then weakly lash out, justifying yet more Israeli war crimes as Israel flaunts its victimhood, all to a soundtrack of western consolation.
The hypocrisy is becoming ever harder to hide, and the cognitive dissonance ever harder for western publics to stomach.
In Israel itself, institutionalised racism against the country's large minority of Palestinian citizens -- a fifth of the population -- is being entrenched in full view.
Last week Natalie Portman, an American-Israeli actor, voiced her disgust at what she termed the "racist" nation-state basic law, legislation passed in the summer that formally classifies Israel's Palestinian population as inferior.
Yair Netanyahu, the prime minister's grown-up son, voiced a sentiment widely popular in Israel last week when he wrote on Facebook that he wished "All the Muslims [sic] leave the land of Israel". He was referring to Greater Israel -- a territorial area that does not distinguish between Israel and the occupied territories.
In fact, Israel's Jim Crow-style policies -- segregation of the type once inflicted on African-Americans in the US -- is becoming ever more overt.
Last month the Jewish city of Afula banned Palestinian citizens from entering its main public park while vowing it wanted to "preserve its Jewish character". A court case last week showed that a major Israeli construction firm has systematically blocked Palestinian citizens from buying houses near Jews. And the parliament is expanding a law to prevent Palestinian citizens from living on most of Israel's land.
A bill to reverse this trend, committing Israel instead to "equal political rights amongst all its citizens", was drummed out of the parliament last week by an overwhelming majority of legislators.
Americans, like other westerners, are waking up to this ugly reality. A growing number understand that it is time for a new, single state model, one that ends Israel's treatment of Jews as separate from and superior to Palestinians, and instead offers freedom and equality for all.
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