T. Belman. This makes for painful reading as it is a powerful refutation of the arguments advanced by the Right in support of our legal rights to the land. The author fails to deal with the result of Res 181 which was rejected by the Arabs. He does assert that rights aren’t fixed in time and can be over taken by events and time.
Unfortunately a strong argument such as laid out here would serve to weaken Netanyahu’s resolve to reject the two state solution.
By Nathaniel Berman, Brown University, TIKUN OLAM
I. Why Now?
The resurgence of debates about legality, particularly the legality of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, has become an unexpected feature of public discussion of Israel/Palestine over the past decade. This resurgence has been primarily the work of two kinds of forces.
On the one hand, pro-settler advocates have been asserting that the pervasive international view of the illegality of the settlements is simply wrong. Such advocates range from a 2012 Israeli government “Report on the Status of Building in the Region of Judea and Samaria” (the “Levy Commission Report”), to articles published in the right-wing press, to activists relentlessly advancing such views in social media. On the other hand, the illegality of the settlements has been vigorously asserted by those active in international campaigns critical of Israel, especially the BDS movement.
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