Israel's parliament gave preliminary approval Wednesday to a disputed bill that would retroactively legalize Jewish settlement outposts built on privately-owned Palestinian land in the occupied West Bank.
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The far-right Jewish Home party and members of Netanyahu's Likud faction have pushed for the law, in part to try to circumvent a Supreme Court order to destroy the settlement outpost of Amona, where 40 families live on Palestinian-owned land. The demolition is set for Dec. 25.
Isaac Herzog, who heads the opposition Labour Party, said the bill violated Israeli and international law and justified "theft."
While both are illegal under international law, Jewish settler outposts are different than traditional settlements in that they are not formally recognized by the Israeli government and are built on privately-owned Palestinian lands, rather than Israeli-occupied Palestinian lands in the case of government-sanctioned settlements.
Outposts usually start with pre-fabricated huts on remote hilltops and lived in by a handful of settlers. Over time, they acquire Israeli military protection and hook up to water and electricity networks, slowly becoming more formalized, despite being regarded as illegal.
"To those of you who still don't understand: The bill basically gives the go-ahead for annexing the territories. Welcome to the bi-national state," Tzipi Livni, a leader of the center-left Zionist Union and a former foreign minister, tweeted after the vote was approved by 58-50.
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The so-called “formalization bill” would retroactively legalize all of the 232 settlement outposts in the West Bank which include more than 2,000 Jewish homes. Lawmaker Shuli Moalem-Refaeli from the far-right Jewish Home party, said the bill was “true justice and protects human rights for all citizens,” the Jerusalem Post reported.
The draft legislation was “a clear message to the world that it does not see the occupation as temporary, and it does not want an agreed-upon solution, rather than to continue warfare and occupation," Ayman Odeh, the head of the Arab Joint List coalition in the Israeli Knesset, was quoted as saying by the newspaper.
"This law, which makes theft and robbery legal, proves again that the occupation cannot exist at the same time as the rule of law."
Even Israel’s key ally the United States criticized the bill in a rather weak statement delivered by the spokeswoman of the state department.
"This would represent an unprecedented and troubling step that's inconsistent with prior Israeli legal opinion and also break longstanding Israeli policy of not building on private Palestinian land," U.S. State Department spokeswoman Elizabeth Trudeau said Monday before the approval of the bill.