A new report examines how, according to Adalah Legal Director Suhad Bishara, Israel is expanding Jewish territorial, spatial, and political supremacy.
ByOrly Noy
Palestinians wait to cross Qalandiya checkpoint on their way from the occupied West Bank to Al-Aqsa Mosque, Jerusalem, to take part in Friday prayers during Ramadan, April 29, 2022. (Oren Ziv)
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This month, Adalah — The Legal Center for the Rights of the Arab Minority in Israel published a position paper that takes an in-depth look at the steps the Israeli government is taking to try and accelerate the annexation of the occupied West Bank. The paper divides these steps into three main categories: institutional changes and the transfer of areas of action to government offices; legalizing of outposts and expansion of existing settlements; and the direct application of Israeli law in the occupied territories.
The position paper concludes that the Israeli government “openly works to expand the regime of Jewish supremacy beyond the Green Line, and to deepen and perpetuate in the West Bank the apartheid mechanisms it has established there for generations to come.” It further calls for immediate and urgent action by international bodies — including the International Criminal Court, which has launched an investigation into suspected war crimes by Israel, and the International Court of Justice, which is holding proceedings to examine the legal consequences of Israel’s ongoing occupation of the West Bank.
“It is true that this has been an ongoing policy for decades,” according to Dr. Suhad Bishara, the director of Adalah’s legal unit and of its land, planning, and construction department. “At the beginning of the 1967 occupation, there were discussions about the status of the territories and what would be done with them, but soon after, Israel’s policies became much clearer in terms of what was happening on the ground as well as its territorial ambitions in the occupied territories, and [it became] more careful in terms of how it framed those ambitions.
A construction site for new housing in the Jewish settlement of Shiloh, in the occupied West Bank, June 21, 2023. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)
“In the 1970s and ’80s, we see in the legal rulings a discourse surrounding security needs, including when it comes to settlements. But later on, things became much clearer in terms of Israel’s demographic and territorial ambitions. Therefore, it cannot be said that this government is bringing something new, but rather is accelerating [already existing] processes. The moves it has made so far, in a period of less than six months, along with those that are on the agenda, indicate a desire to change things before something changes politically. These are steps we have not seen before.
“Until now, successive governments have operated on the fine line between Israel’s distorted reading of international law — and this includes the Supreme Court — and the perception of the occupied territories as an area in which Israel has a political interest, in the form of annexation in one way or another. The current government is no longer interested in that fine line, which in the eyes of many is illusory and does not really exist, since they have been talking about practical annexation for many years. This government wants explicit annexation moves.”
Expanding supremacy
Similar to position papers published by human rights organizations in recent years, Adalah’s document also discusses the existence of an apartheid regime in the occupied territories. However, contrary to popular perception, the document marks the progression of apartheid from Israel into the territories.
“Most of the discourse on the issue is framed in such a way that there is ‘sovereign Israel,’ which is democratic, and ‘occupying Israel,’ which in turn causes people to ask how the occupation affects Israeli democracy,” Bishara said. “The experience of the last few years has taught us that the principle of annexation takes Israeli policies vis-à-vis the Palestinian people, ever since the Nakba, and extends it to the occupied territories.
“Israel came to the 1967 occupation prepared, after 20 years of military government imposed on Palestinian citizens which included deportations, segregation, massive and arbitrary land expropriations, and a policy of territorial and spatial Jewish supremacy. This whole enterprise was normalized with the end of the military government in 1966, but it never stopped. There was no normalization of the state’s attitude toward its Arab citizens. Race-based territoriality was naturalized by laws, administrative decisions, and the like, and later was inherently anchored within what is known as the ‘constitutional revolution,’ including the Jewish Nation-State Law. Now this experience is also being extended to the occupied territories.”
Palestinian refugees in Jordan cross the Allenby Bridge into Israel under the military government’s summer visits scheme. (Pridan Moshe/GPO)
Adalah’s position paper mentions the extension of the applicability of the Admission Committees Law to the West Bank, which also brings with it the logic of apartheid segregation that originated inside 1948.
“Even today, admission committees function in West Bank settlements within the framework of military orders, but this is only one layer. [There is also] the appointment of Bezalel Smotrich as minister overseeing the Civil Administration — which manages the civilian affairs of the occupied West Bank — and the ‘civilianization’ of the management of the settlements, the transfer of powers from the military commander to ministers and government ministries, the expansion of the powers of the Ministry for the Development of the Negev and the Galilee into the occupied territories. All of these are things that have not been official government policy until now.
“We are aware that government ministries and governmental entities have operated in the territories before, including the Ministry of Construction and Housing and the Israel Lands Authority, but the answers we received in the past regarding their activities were that they were advisory bodies to the military commander, who has the ultimate authority in the West Bank. This is an idea expressed in the establishment of the State of Israel by the Zionist movement, and in the way its spatial policy has been formulated since 1948. This was also expressed in the Jewish Nation-State Law and now its expansion into the occupied territories. Therefore, it is more correct to see this as the expansion of our experience, of Palestinians inside Israel and refugees from the Nakba, into the territories occupied in 1967, and not the other way around.”
And at the same time, we are also seeing a parallel process of trying to return the Palestinian citizens to the era of the military government, through the use of the Shin Bet, administrative arrests, and the National Guard that Itamar Ben Gvir wants to establish. That is, the civilianization of the occupation on the one hand, and the securitization of relations with the Arab citizens on the other.
“Definitely. We’re seeing two parallel moves: the expansion of Israeli ‘civilianization’ of the West Bank and the normalization of two legal systems — one that refers to the legitimate Jewish citizen, for whom the state works wherever they are, whether inside Israel or in the occupied territories, and another system for the Palestinian who is ‘the Other.’
“This dual system is designed to ensure that Jewish territorial, spatial, and political supremacy will continue and expand. To this end, the Palestinian ‘other’ needs to be managed, and this management is done more and more through separate legal systems — whether by the activation of emergency regulations, proposals to involve the Shin Bet in the struggle against crime in Arab society or the appointment of teachers and principals of Arab schools, proposals that in practice give rise to two planning systems, selective law enforcement, etc.
Undocumented Palestinian workers who were arrested seen at Rantis Checkpoint, in the occupied West Bank, April 23, 2023. (Jonathan Shaul/Flash90)
“The separation that exists in the legal system in the occupied territories and within the territory of Israel is becoming much clearer in order to serve, among other things, Israeli territorial Jewish policy, both in the occupied territories and inside Israel.”
You talk about two separate legal systems for two populations, but avoid using the term apartheid. Is this intentional?
“The apartheid reports that came out over the last two years were justifiably criticized. After all, when we talk about apartheid, we are talking about a serious list of human rights violations, and perhaps even a step up in the context of the systematic policy of oppression and segregation, in a framework that defines crimes under international law. But this is another list that lacks context and does not deal, at all or sufficiently, with the question of why all this is happening.
“I do not underestimate the importance of the discourse of human rights violations, but we have enough experience, including the experience of other countries, to know that it does not stand on its own. That is, not human rights violations for the sake of human rights violations, and not because of ‘bad politics.’ This is politics that has a very clear goal, and this discourse does not refer to the colonial context of these violations.
