Another step Netanyahu has said he would like to implement is to allow a simple majority in the Knesset to overrule any High Court rulings striking down legislation as inconsistent with the country's basic laws on human rights, passed in the 1990s. Among the grievances of the particularly extremist Greater Israel faction in the cabinet is that court's dependence on international law in some of its rulings against "Illegal settlements" those established by militant vigilantes on West Bank land owned by Palestinian families for centuries.
Over the years, the High Court has, in fact, ruled in favor of numerous settlements, while drawing on aspects of Ottoman, British, and international law to do so. Ottoman law, for instance, permitted the state to assume ownership of fallow land. On that basis, the court has, in the past, allowed the Israeli state to declare swathes of the Palestinian West Bank "state land." It mattered little that an occupying state settling its citizens on such territory gravely breached the Geneva Convention IV and the 2002 Rome Statute that acts as a charter for the International Criminal Court.
In other words, all such settlements should be illegal. Palestinians often protest, to no avail, that land designated by authorities in Tel Aviv as ownerless and fallow is, in fact, private property and has even been recently cultivated. Once it officially becomes state land, however, the court has indeed permitted Israeli citizens to build on it, which is how most Israeli settlements on the West Bank came to be. The court considers such Jewish-only housing projects "legal" under Israeli law.
Although those settlements on the West Bank are often depicted as a volunteer and private activity, the Israeli government has long provided subsidies and other incentives to people moving into such remarkably low-rent settlements and continues to do so to this day. Because so many Ultra-Orthodox men, with their limited educations (and incomes), are unemployed, they are especially open to such obvious opportunities.
Although once upon a time many illegal Israeli settlements were swiftly dismantled by the Israeli army, some survived and began lobbying the government for recognition. In 2017, the Knesset took a radical step, passing a law that allowed the Israeli state to expropriate Palestinian land at will and used that power to legalize 16 previously illegal squatter-settlements. In 2020, the High Court shocked Knesset right-wingers by striking down that very law and explicitly stating that Israeli sovereignty simply didn't apply to West Bank Palestinians who were under occupation and must be treated in the context of international law on military occupations. The Court even cited Article 27 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which guarantees occupied persons respect for their dignity and family rights.
"Sovereignty and Settlement"
That ruling, with its explicit denial of Israeli sovereignty over the Occupied Territories, proved a genuine shock to the political right and underlies its ongoing Knesset campaign to neuter the courts. Extremist Bezalel Smotrich, now both minister of finance and responsible for the Palestinian West Bank, was deeply angered by that High Court ruling. He insisted that the only acceptable response would be "passing the bill allowing the Knesset to override the courts immediately." As it happens, his own home was built on private Palestinian land just outside the municipal limits of the "legal" settlement of Kedumim. The left-leaning Israeli newspaper Haaretz also reported in June 2020 that then-speaker of the Israeli parliament, Yariv Levin, lashed out, claiming the High Court had "once again today trampled, as is its unacceptable tradition, Israeli democracy and the basic human rights of many Israeli citizens." As for Netanyahu, at the time he suggested that the problem of illegal settlements would best be resolved by a formal Israeli annexation of a large area of the Palestinian West Bank.
The way the High Court held that Israel has no sovereignty over the West Bank deeply offended the members of the extremist Religious Zionism bloc led by Smotrich, including its coalition partner, the Jewish Power Party led by extremist Itamar Ben-Gvir (who is now Israel's minister of national security). Under the circumstances, you undoubtedly won't be surprised to learn that their platform for the November 2022 parliamentary election centered on "sovereignty and settlement" that is, sovereignty over and settlement of the Palestinian West Bank. Indeed, they claimed that Palestinian agricultural and building projects in their own villages were "expansionist" and vowed to act quickly to curtail them.
Having joined Netanyahu's ruling coalition since that election, they have now acquired substantial power to pursue the goal of halting Palestinian economic life. Smotrich even called for a Palestinian village to be wiped off the map of the West Bank. Though he later backpedaled under pressure, the lawless extremity he and a significant part of Netanyahu's coalition today represent should be all too obvious.
Given that the High Court stands in the way of such lawlessness, despite its own frequent betrayal of Palestinian rights, the extremists are determined to gut it. Significant numbers of those who responded to the recent mass demonstrations against Netanyahu's court decision with counterdemonstrations were bussed in from the squatter-settlements, many of them Haredim.
The Imperiled Rights of Women, LGBTQ+, and Minorities in Israel
Although the right wing's primary motivation for eviscerating the authority of the courts had to do with the urge to take fuller control of the Occupied Palestinian Territories, the changes already implemented and still contemplated by Prime Minister Netanyahu and crew have dire implications for all too many Israeli citizens as well. As a start, more than 20% of them are persons of Palestinian heritage. Think of them as Palestinian-Israelis (on the model of "Italian-Americans"), though they are called "Arab Israelis" in Hebrew. Some 60 laws and administrative decrees have already ensured that they remain second-class citizens. In 2018, in fact, the Knesset explicitly deprived them of "sovereignty," reserving it for Jewish Israelis alone (while stripping Arabic of its previous designation as an "official language").
Admittedly, on occasion, the High Court has ruled in favor of equal rights for Israelis of Palestinian heritage. It did, for instance, allow government funding of their religious communities and school administration. In most other instances, however, it repeatedly rebuffed their demands for equal treatment under the law, which helps explain why they have largely been absent from the enormous demonstrations that have shaken the country every week since January. Still, Palestinian-Israeli community activists are alarmed that the Knesset's removal of court oversight when it comes to the reasonableness of administrative appointments could prove a carte blanche for far more active discrimination against Muslim and Christian Palestinian-Israelis.
Despite a distinct lack of concern for Palestinian rights, centrist and secular Jewish Israelis are in no doubt about the serious impact the Netanyahu government's gutting of the judiciary could have on their lives. That explains why a quarter of the country has participated in those huge, ongoing demonstrations and 58% of all Israelis want the government to stop trying to curtail the power of the courts.
Haaretz reports that women fear such power could lead the present right-wing government to put authority over alimony and child support in the hands of all-male rabbinical courts, block the government from signing onto the Istanbul Convention for the Prevention of Violence against Women, and increase gender segregation at beaches, parks, and the Wailing Wall. It might even move to reduce any commitment to their very presence on governmental bodies.
Similarly, LGBTQ+ Israelis, who had, through their activism, secured ever more rights in Israel since the repeal of the country's "sodomy laws" in 1988, feared that their freedoms might be reversed by the most homophobic government in the country's history. That self-described "proud homophobe" Bezalel Smotrich typically supports a law that would exempt religious people from being charged with discrimination if they decline to provide a service on the basis of their religious beliefs.
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