My new column is up at The American Prospect:
Before July 1, five apartment buildings in a West Bank settlement will be cut from their foundations and dragged over the hilly terrain to a new location elsewhere in the community. That’s Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plan, anyway.
From an engineering perspective, the idea is “delusional,” as one expert put it. That’s an understated evaluation. If the three-story buildings are moved and survive, it’s reasonable to assume that they’ll be riddled with visible and unseen fissures—just like Netanyahu’s Likud party, his ruling coalition, and the jerrybuilt legal underpinnings of Israeli settlement in occupied territory. The interesting question is which of these flawed structures will collapse first.
The idea of moving the buildings, home to 30 families, is part of Netanyahu’s response to the worst political crisis he has faced in his current term. A month ago, the country’s Supreme Court issued an absolutely final, don’t-bother-us-again, we’re-fed-up-with-you order to demolish the apartment houses by July 1, for the simple reason that they stand without permission or purchase on land belonging to local Palestinians—not to the developer who built them or to the current residents.
Settlers and their loyalists in parliament utterly oppose eviction of the families and demolition of the houses at what’s known as Givat Ha’ulpanah, or High School Hill. They’re scared of the precedent. Right-wing activists speak of 9,000 homes in settlements that could be demolished for the same reason. That’s probably an exaggeration, the equivalent of a too-big-to-fail argument. But it’s not a wild exaggeration. Rather, it’s an indication of how the settlement enterprise has run roughshod over principles as basic as “don’t steal.” For Netanyahu, ignoring the Supreme Court would mean throwing the country’s unwritten constitution in the trashcan. But that’s just the start of his legal problems.
Right-wing backbenchers proposed a fix: Legislation that would give West Bank landowners only four years to file suit against theft of their property. After that, they’d be able to get compensation, but the buildings would stay put. At first glance, the blandly named Arrangement Bill would have exercised eminent domain wherever settlers had squatted on Palestinian property.
On second glance, the West Bank is officially administered under laws of military occupation. For the Knesset to pass a law about land there would be tantamount to annexation—not a smart move internationally. Beside that, eminent domain doesn’t apply in occupied territory. The 1907 Hague Convention on the laws of war states unequivocally that “private property cannot be confiscated” by an occupying power. …
Read the rest here.