Is Israel preparing to annex most of West Bank

The recently published report by an Israeli judge concluding that Israel is not in fact occupying the West Bank — despite a well-established international consensus to the contrary — has provoked mostly incredulity or mirth in Israel and abroad.

Leftwing websites in Israel used comically captioned photographs to highlight Justice Edmond Levy’s preposterous finding. One shows an Israeli soldier pressing the barrel of a rifle to the forehead of a Palestinian pinned to the ground, saying: “You see — I told you there’s no occupation.”

Even Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, seemed a little discomfited by the coverage. He was handed the report more than a fortnight earlier but was apparently reluctant to make it public.

Downplaying the Levy report’s significance may prove unwise, however. If Netanyahu is embarrassed, it is only because of the timing of the report’s publication rather than its substance.

It was, after all, Netanyahu himself who established the committee earlier this year to assess the legality of the Jewish settlers’ “outposts,” ostensibly unauthorized by the government, that have spread like wild seeds across the West Bank.

He hand-picked its three members, all diehard supporters of the settlements, and received the verdict he expected — that the settlements are legal. Certainly, Levy’s opinion should have come as no surprise. In 2005 he was the only Israeli high courtjudge to oppose the government’s decision to withdraw the settlers from Gaza.

Legal commentators too have been dismissive of the report. They have concentrated more on Levy’s dubious reasoning than on the report’s political significance.

They have noted that Theodor Meron, the foreign ministry’s legal advisor in 1967, expressly warned the government in the wake of the war that year that settling civilians in the newly seized territory was a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention.

Experts have also pointed to the difficulties Israel will face if it adopts Levy’s position. More

 

“A tipping point is happening”

Filmmaker Eugene Jarecki discusses Obama's disappointing record on drugs and why he thinks true change may be near

110 kg of marijuana seized from a vehicle that attempted to enter the U.S. near San Diego

Documentary filmaker Eugene Jarecki took on the military-industrial complex in his award-winning 2006 film “Why We Fight,” and now he turns his attention to a war closer to home — the drug war. His new film, “The House I Live In,” which won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance earlier this year, takes a critical look at the criminal justice that has ensnared millions of Americans in order to enforce the prohibition on drugs. Jarecki spoke with Salon about Obama’s disappointing record on drugs, about one of the largest voting blocs no one has heard of and about why he thinks we’re a approaching a “tipping point” in the drug war.

The drug war has never quite broken through as a major political issue. What attracted you to this issue, and why should people care now?

The election. Not just the presidential, but at the legislative level and at the local level across the country. Isn’t an election ultimately about the question that we’ve been working out for several years now — what kind of a country are we intending to be? Ever since World War II that’s been a question. We became an enormous world power, and we’ve handled that power questionably, and ultimately, I would argue, to our own detriment. And certainly to the detriment of people who don’t benefit from the industrial system. And this [the drug war] might be one of the most pressing, and sort of inspiring, areas as a possibility for real reform. Whether we’re going to continue the kind of state-following and fear-mongering that we have had since the end of the Cold War, where we almost needed a new enemy, so into that pipeline we put the drug dealer and drug user.

Could we step back and say, there must be a better way for us to lead the world? Morally, spiritually and otherwise. We are now in many ways a laughing stock for the rest of the world due to the enormity of our prison population. We have outpaced every totalitarian country in the world. Not only proportionally, but in real numbers. China has five times the population, but it has a smaller prison population. So it seems to me that the moral bankruptcy of the war on drugs would be something that really should be a central topic of these upcoming elections. More