How many more injustices, indignities and insults can the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu inflict upon the proud people of Palestine? In a Knesset session late on Monday evening, lawmakers passed a bill that seeks to grant legal status to illegal colonies constructed on Palestinian land. Simply put, the bill authorises daylight robbery, sanctioning the theft of land from its rightful owners and handing that land to Jewish interlopers and colonists. It gives legal status to thieves and common criminals and represents a complete abrogation of Palestinian rights, trampling on property laws and overriding the principles of ownership. In effect, if you were a Jewish colonist who erected a shack or parked a caravan in a Palestinian field, your temporary squatting site is now legally yours. Nowhere else would such a fundamental transgression in law be allowed to stand — but nowhere else on Earth is like Israel!
This law has set Israeli-Palestinian relations back by decades — no small feat, given the nadir that has existed since Netanyahu and his right-wing coalition of rabbis and rabble-rousers came to power. Let’s not forget that Israeli officials already have the power to demolish homes that have stood with Palestinian families for generations, simply because those houses don’t have what the Israelis deem to be proper legal titles. That affront insults the intelligence of all Palestinians, but this latest affront simply defies all definitions of credibility and credulity.
What’s even more astonishing in this instance is that Netanyahu himself had previously warned of the dangers of passing such legislation. But Netanyahu is a power-hungry megalomaniac who will say and do anything to maintain the support of his coalition partners.
While this bill will undergo two more readings in the Knesset, constitutional experts believe that its words will result in it being struck down. That in itself is cold comfort for Palestinians whose experience of the Israeli judicial process amounts to detention without trial for endless periods; demolition of homes for a lack of proper title over generations; bulldozing of homes for acts of legitimate political protest against an illegal regime; summary execution of Palestinians on the streets by Israeli soldiers who face little or no legal sanction; division of Palestinian land by an illegal separation barrier; and the suffering caused by full-scale military invasions of the Gaza Strip by forces using cluster bombs and other munitions outlawed by international convention. That is “justice” — Israeli style.
