Israeli settlers at risk of losing their special West Bank status
Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank may soon get a taste of the military rule that Palestinians have been living under for 55 years.
If Israel’s parliament does not act, a special legal status accorded to the settlers will expire at the end of the month, with wide-ranging consequences. Lawyers who live in the settlements, including two members of Israel’s Supreme Court, will no longer be allowed to practice law.
Settlers would be subject to military courts usually reserved for Palestinians and would lose access to some public services.
While few expect things to reach that point, the looming deadline has put Israel’s government on the brink of collapse and drawn dire warnings.
“Without this law, it would be a disaster,” said Israel Ganz, governor of the Benyamin Regional Council, a cluster of settlements just outside Jerusalem. “The Israeli government will lose any control here. No police, no taxes.”
For over half a century, Israel has repeatedly renewed regulations that today extend a legal umbrella to nearly 500,000 settlers — but not to the more than 2.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank. After failing to pass on Monday, the bill will be brought for another vote in the Knesset next week in a last- ditch effort to save the governing coalition — and the legal arrangement.
The law underpins separate legal systems for Jews and Palestinians in the West Bank, a situation that three major human rights groups say amounts to apartheid. Israel rejects that allegation as an attack on its legitimacy.
“This is the piece of legislation that enables apartheid,” said Jessica Montell, director of the Israeli human rights group HaM-oked, which provides legal aid to Palestinians.
“The whole settlement enterprise depends on them enjoying all the rights and benefits of being Israelis even though they are in occupied territory.”
An overwhelming majority in the Knesset support maintaining the separate systems. The main reason the bill didn’t pass was that the nationalist opposition — which strongly supports it — paradoxically refused to vote in favor in an attempt to bring down Israel’s broad-based but fragile coalition government. In a similar vein, anti- settlement lawmakers voted in favor of the legislation to keep the coalition afloat.
Israel captured the West Bank in the 1967 Mideast war and has built more than 130 settlements there, many of which resemble small towns, with apartment blocks, shopping malls and industrial zones. The Palestinians want the West Bank to form the main part of their future state.