if Edmund Levy’s committee decides to tell the government that the territory of Migron can be taken despite the Supreme Court’s decision and they decide to do it, who knows? They can do anything. It’s 11 o’clock in the morning now? They can say it’s 11 at night. What can I tell you? I have no words.
Well, Makor Rishon this past Friday has reported that the special experts' committee of the outpost/satellite communities is adopting the legal position which I, and others, have been promoting for years.
On its front page, we can read that the committee members, former Supreme Court Justice Edmund Levy, District Court Judge Techiya Shapira and former Ambassador and Foreign Ministry Legal Advisor Allan Baker will be recommending to the Prime Minister that the opinion of former Supreme Court President Justice Aaron Barak be rejected.
That opinion, which accepted the clearly wrong concept that Judea, Samaria and Gaza were to be considered as "belligerently occupied", (see: "...such also is the law of belligerent occupation, in the framework of which Israel acts in the occupied territories" and in 2002's HCJ 7015 & 7019/02: Judaea and Samaria and the Gaza Strip are effectively one territory subject to one belligerent occupation by one occupying power, and they are regarded as one entity by all concerned, as can be seen, inter alia, from the Israeli-Palestinian interim agreements" although revpages 615-616 here but see Howard Grief here) may finally be overruled and the correct, just and correct legal standing of those areas will be established.
Those areas of the former Mandate for Palestine were illegally occupied by Jordan. They cannot have been "occupied" by Israel as they were a part of the territory to become the Jewish National Home. The state and waste lands in those regions were to be used, if not privately owned, to facilitate "close Jewish settlement". And as I have been championing, all property that was a gratis gift of the rulers of Jordan and upon which no building was built, no house was constructed, no field was planted and harvested nor any taxes paid should be returned to its previous legal status as state land and we have solved the articially created problem of "illegal construction".
As the Jewish Press has it, too:
The 90-page report, including addenda, discusses at length the issue of the outposts. Levy, Baker and Shapira fundamentally reject the legal line used by Attorney Talia Sasson in her report on the outposts. To their understanding, the vast majority of outposts can be defined as legal, since they are within the master planned areas of legal settlements whose establishment was approved by the government. The committee further recommends that the Nature and Parks Authority [headed by former Yesha Council senior member and Gush Etzion Regional Council Chairman Shaul Goldstein - YM] declare thousands of acres in the Judea and Samaria as national parks, to facilitate the preservation of their environmental resources. With the conclusion of the committee’s work the ball returns to the court of Prime Minister Netanyahu and Justice Minister Ne’eman, who ordered the report.
Could it be that we are on the brink of a major legal revolution, or, actually, a restoration?
A restoration of national sovereignty, of national standing, of national pride?
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