I have now had an extensive discussion with Min Daniel Heshkowitz. When I told him about the Haaretz report he said it was just wishful thinking on their part. The situation is, as I suspected it, a matter of timing only. Apparently there are a number of urgent matters, that the Ministerial Committee, of which Min Hershkowitz is a member, had to deal with involving the High Court orders or the EU.
I suggested to him that the PM and Justice Minister Ne’eman knew what the Levy Report would contain even as they were appointing the members, so that the Report came as no surprise. He said that I might well be right. He also said that the AG is refusing to endorse the Levy Report or is at least opposed to it. This creates problems for the government because the Office of the AG is independent of the Government and it would not be right or even possible to order them to support it. Furthermore it is not an easy thing to fire him. There must be cause. There is also the possibility to hire an independent counsel to represent the government on a particular matter but this is complicated because the High Court would no doubt ask what the position of the AG was. Finally, When the government goes at the end of its term, the AG also goes and another appointment will be made by the next government.
Haaretz is the only paper reporting on this. I don’t think it reliable. No named person is being quoted here. At best maybe he didn’t want it discussed now.
I have arranged to talk with MK Hershhowitz around supper time tonight and I expect to get the low down on what is happening. Ted Belman
Netanyahu fears that raising the issue now would generate a major international controversy.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has decided to bury the Levy Report, which recommends legalizing most unauthorized settlement outposts in the West Bank and making it easier for existing settlements to expand, a senior politician who spoke with the premier about the issue told Haaretz yesterday.
Since the Levy Report was submitted, on June 21, Netanyahu has made great efforts to downplay its conclusions. Officials in Netanyahu’s inner circle told several cabinet ministers that the main problem was the report’s finding that the Fourth Geneva Convention, which governs the treatment of occupied territory, does not apply to the West Bank because the West Bank is not in fact occupied territory.
Officially Israel has always held that the Geneva Convention does not apply to the West Bank, although it has pledged to honor the document’s humanitarian provisions. But Netanyahu fears that raising the issue now would generate a major international controversy.
On the other hand, adopting the rest of the Levy Report without adopting the section discussing whether the West Bank is occupied territory would be construed as a de facto admission that Israel is in fact an occupying power.
Yesterday Netanyahu convened the Ministerial Committee for Settlement Affairs to discuss various issues related to unauthorized settlement outposts. During the meeting ministers Daniel Hershkowitz and Gilad Erdan demanded a discussion of the Levy Report, but Netanyahu rejected this demand. In private conversations Netanyahu has told several ministers that there are more important issues on the agenda at present, both regarding the settlements and in other areas.
The ministerial committee also discussed Migron. The state must soon submit its response to a High Court of Justice petition by 17 families from the outpost who are seeking permission to remain in parts of the outpost that they claim were purchased from its Palestinian owners. Police are still investigating the legality of the purchase, but the ministers were briefed on the legal situation to date.
For instance, settlers purchased only a quarter of one plot, Lot 23, and according to the State Prosecutor’s Office this makes the purchase meaningless. Another plot, Lot 2, was fully purchased, but because it has no access road it is effectively unusable.
Nevertheless the ministers decided the state would request a 90-day stay on a demolition order for Lot 10 while it continues investigating the land’s status.
The panel also discussed a petition filed by Peace Now to remove settlers who have squatted in a building located in Hebron’s wholesale market. The building was originally owned by Jews, but Jordan appropriated it as enemy property after conquering the West Bank in 1948 and then rented it out to Arab shopkeepers.
After Israel captured the area in 1967 the Israel Defense Forces continued to rent the building to these shopkeepers. When the second intifada erupted, in 2000, the IDF ordered the shops closed due to the deteriorating security situation. But it never revoked the renters’ legal rights.
Settlers later took over the building and made it part of the Avraham Avinu neighborhood. An IDF appeals committee decided they should be evicted, but this never happened. Peace Now thus asked the High Court to enforce this decision.
The ministers decided the settlers should be evicted. But since the army, as the building’s custodian, is supposed to improve and maintain it they also decided it should be rented to the Jewish community of Hebron, with the army holding the rent money in trust until the building is returned to the Palestinians. This position will now be presented to the court.
Finally, the panel decided to reverse a government decision to demolish two buildings under construction in Beit El’s Dreinoff neighborhood. The buildings were built without the necessary permits, on land seized for military purposes, so the Yesh Din organization asked the High Court to order them razed.
Last year the government promised that the buildings would be demolished by April, but it has since requested numerous postponements. Now the committee has decided that Beit El should file a master plan to legalize the neighborhood, and until then the government will refrain from razing the buildings.
@ yamit82:
TO YAMIT – Thank you for the excellent suggestions. I will read the book & article and watch the videos. I really appreciate them.
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For other beginners like me out there I’d like to suggest the book “The Jewish State – The Struggle for Israel’s Soul” by Yoram Hazoni. It helps to understand how the Jewish anti-Zionists have dug their claws deep into the heart of Israel. The book describes Jewish anti-Zionist antics way back to Herzl’s time, and their evil and treasonous behavior once they entrenched themselves in Israel’s media and universities.
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Usually so full of opinions, I feel overwhelmed these days just by looking at the headlines.
I’m reading about the Third Reich this year and feeling the parallels over and over again. Hitler didn’t just round up and killed Jews. He organized their ever increasing dehumanization and isolation first, and then he struck. By then a whole generation of Hitler Youth had been indoctrinated to carry out the slaughter while others looked on.
And once again one can’t rely on basic human values to prevent a catastrophe. There is a current of irrationality permeating popular culture that is quite unsettling. All that fascination with Earth apocalypse, with zombies and vampires, and with gory video games, for example – reflects an unquenched thirst for violence and mass destruction.
Anything can happen. People don’t even blink at the steady violence against civilians almost everywhere. A new Holocaust would neither shock nor surprise the average reader, and would soon become yesterday’s news.
@ Canadian Otter:
Faith and destiny – the miracle of Israel Part 1
Faith and destiny – the miracle of Israel Part 2
@ Canadian Otter:
I think you might appreciate the following links:
A Child of the Century
by Ben Hecht
The Evian Conference – Hitler’s Green Light for Genocide
“Some wits who attended the Conference pointed out that Evian spelled backwards is NAIVE but for the Jewish people it was an extremely costly naivety.”
@ yamit82:
And there wouldn’t have been a will to stop or mitigate the ensuing carnage either. Allies and the UN would have taken their time rescuing survivors.
Hardly anybody other than the Palestinian Zionist Jews themselves expected a Jewish victory.
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The first time I read about the maneuvers and official and unofficial stance by the Allied governments in the wake of the Holocaust regarding an independent Israel and the resettlement of Jewish survivors, I was shocked.
Deep in the centers of government there was no pity. There was no real remorse or sincere attempt to make amends for their part in the extermination. There was no shame.
And there was no desire for a Jewish Israel.
There was only a concern about what to do with all those Jews in DP camps, or roaming stateless all over Europe. There was particular concern with preferably not having to take them into their own countries. And – whatever they did – with not hurting Arab sensibilities.
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And by the way, and this needs to be repeated, JEWISH ANTI-ZIONISTS – today renamed Post-Zionists – were right there in the thick of it agitating AGAINST an independent Jewish Israel.
Today’s Post-Zionists are the intellectual offspring of those original Anti-Zionist traitors.
Another comment of mine in moderation?????
I was getting 1 of three moderated or filtered now it seems to be 1 of 4,
Drop all this legal Mumbo Jumbo, It may be true or not true that Israel has a stronger claim but so do the Arabs have a claim or claims.
In the end only POWER and force determines legality…Only if you can maintain the Power and keep what you claim and subsequently annex. This is how every nation in history was formed, the losers either executed, driven out or in most cases assimilated into the victors society.
Ask the American Indians about legal rights or the Basques and all those ethnic Germans, Greeks and Turks expelled and transferred from their centuries old territories by the stronger victors during and after wars. Tell the Japanese that they have legal rights to the Kurile Islands, held by Russia, and the Falklands to Argentina. Hundreds of examples can be cited.
Might makes not only right but what is legal.
2nd argument against all you legal arguments advocates are the sheer numbers of bible believers. G-d gave the Jews the Land of Israel. Since over half the population of the planet are Bible believers it should be a slam dunk for the Jews but our atheists refuse to use the Biblical argument so we are stuck with dead end San Remo and UN resolutions, which should have established The Jewish people’s aboriginal right to reestablish their nation-state in the biblical Land of Israel and becoming a pillar of international law. It didn’t because rights not asserted are not rights in fact. By not historically claiming our legal aboriginal rights we have relinquished them to others along with the authority as to who determines our legal rights.
Israel exists today due only to the fact that the renascent Jewish State militarily defeated the seven Arab states (namely, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan fka Transjordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Yemen) which, together with the Arab League’s “Arab Liberation Army” and local “Palestinian” militias drawn from Arab population centers throughout the western portion of Mandatory Palestine, had sought to annihilate the Jewish State, thereby igniting Israel’s War of Independence.
Had the Jewish population centers of the western portion of Mandatory Palestine been destroyed by the Arabs, and had Israel thereby lost its War of Independence, then neither United Nations’ resolutions nor supranational remorse would have sufficed to reverse such a catastrophic outcome.
“IF” this diatribe about Bibi’s Intentions are accurate,this may just be the unfortunate but necessary Straw That Broke The Camel’s Back to end his traitorous reign. Hallivay!
Arab land claims in Judea and Samaria are almost entirely if not exclusively attributable to Jordanian land grands made during their 19 year illegal occupation. In many cases these parcels were simply gifted by the so called “king” on land he had no rights to. So how do these specious “claims” trump the legal, religious, de facto, historic and moral land claims of the Jews to the cradle of Jewish civilization in Judea and Samaria? Only a Leftist self-hating quizzling Jew can entertain such claims and that pretty much describes the Israeli Supreme Court and top echelon of the government of Israel to our ever lasting shame.
A- MK Hershhowitz is what many commenters would describe as a Kapo Jew. He has had several opportunities to unite with other patirs on the right but demurred in-favor of keeping his-job as minister.
B-He is a classic NRP apparatchik. He has not a single iota of ideology, especially the right wing Nationalist variety.
Let’s see BB appointed his friend Y. Neeman to head the Justice ministry. Neeman claims to be A-political in that he has no political party backing only BB who appointed him. So in fact BB through his surrogate controls the Justice ministry.
It was BB himself he appointed the AG Weinstein, knowing full well what his nominee had for a political,ideological and legal POV. Therefore one must assume the obvious that the current AG mirrors the VIEWS OF BB!!
BB even in his first term was a two stater PM the moment he accepted OSLO< Wye Plantation and began to implement their terms.
BB ceded Hebron … shook Arafat's hand more than once and called him a peace partner; even as they were blowing up babies and elderly Israelis. He could have done away with Yasser and his 40,000 banditos at any time by just giving the order. He preferred Jews dying to Arafat and other Arabs.
BB is wedded to Oslo and a 2 state political course and has been from before his first ascendency the the office of PM in 1996.
BB also has a score to settle with the settlers and the Land of Israel faithful who caused his aborted first term, a year and a half before the official end of his term….
BB keeps score never forgets or forgives a perceived slight or injury and will extract when he can payback.
He is like Barak both a sociopath and psychopath. They have no friends and will do anything to achieve their own ends. Both BB and Barak are known paranoiacs.
Does the Prime Minister (or a surrogate) hold regular press conferences to communicate what he thinks about issues, and what he is doing or planning to do about them?
If not, what is the regular way for citizens to find out? Do they ever find out? Or do they rely on rumors or evidence after the fact? Or by listening to rare speeches, such as the one the PM gave at the beginning of his term, when he disclosed he favored the creation of the State of Palestine?
Canada has a parliamentary system. The sessions are public. There is a Question Period. The media have access to MPs and even ministers as they walk to and from the chambers of parliament. The media, particularly radio, interviews ministers whenever there is a controversial issue, which happens frequently.
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While looking at the Knesset page on Wikipedia I found this gem:
The Speaker and his deputies decide whether to place the bills on the Knesset agenda, and have the power to block any bills that are deemed racist or reject the existence of Israel as a Jewish state.
Astounding on two counts: on the power of the Speaker, and on the fact that many bills passed by the Knesset can be profoundly racist against the Jews. And while some bills may not explicitly reject the existence of Jewish Israel, they directly or indirectly undermine it in significant ways.
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PS: The Levy Report may have been commissioned to provide legal backing to the government’s intention to eventually extend sovereignty to the largest settlements (but disengage from everything else). But I’m just guessing, like all of you Israelis 🙂
Haaretz is the Palestinian Arab daily in Hebrew.
This is another example of its anti-Zionist and anti-Israel outlook.