Israel’s High Court gives govt 30 days to defend law legalizing ‘settlements’

Israel’s government must present a legal defense of the “Regulation Law” after 17 Palestinian municipalities petitioned against the law to Israel’s High Court of Justice. 

Fewer than 2 days after the Knesset passed the “Regulation Law,” which prevents Jewish homes in Judea and Samaria that are found ex-post facto to have been built on private property from being destroyed, Israel’s High Court of Justice has asked the Israeli government to present a legal defense of the bill within 30 days.

The High Court’s request was made after seventeen Palestinian municipalities, with the help of three NGOs in Israel (Adalah, the Al-Mezan Center for Human Rights and the Jerusalem Center for Human Rights), filed a petition against the law claiming it to be “unconstitutional.”

“The law eliminates the basic rights of the Palestinian residents of the West Bank and leaves them with no legal protections by permitting the pilfering of their private property for the benefit of Israeli settlers in the West Bank on the basis of an ethnically-inspired ideological world-view,” the petitioners argued.

Moreover, the petitioners claimed that the Regulation Law “contradicts the obligation of the IDF Commander to protect the property rights.”

Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely, a member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, has rejected such arguments.

“The underlying premise behind the critics of Israel is that this is occupied Palestinian land,” she noted. “This premise is incorrect. The settlement law that the Israeli parliament passed this week reflects a just legal principle.”

The relevant legal principle according to Hotovely is that of compensation to those individuals found by Israel’s High Court of Justice to be owners over parcels of land where Jewish communities are already located.

The legal principle of compensation is known in all western legal systems, and this principle that Israel adopted this week creates the right justice between the Palestinians and the Jewish families,” she explained.

“Israel has both historic and legal rights to this land and the law reaches the right balance between the rights of the Jewish families to their homes and the right of the owners of these plots of land to get compensation.”

By: Jonathan Benedek, World Israel News