Mandelblit: ‘Regulation Law unconstitutional’

Jerusalem, 22 November, 2017 (TPS) -- The “Regulation Law” which aims to retroactively grant legal status to Jewish outposts built on private Palestinian land in Judea and Samaria, is “unconstitutional,” Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit has written in an official response to motions petitioned to the High Court of Justice by both Palestinian and Israeli human rights groups against the controversial law.

“There is no avoiding the legal classification of the Regulation Law as unconstitutional, and destined to be voided,” said Mandelblit. The Attorney General added that even though there is a need to find legal solutions for people who have unwittingly built their homes on private land, the current law also grants protection to those who have built their homes recently, while fully aware that it was done on privately owned land. According to Mandelblit, using this law to give a stamp of approval in such instances is “inappropriate”.

“This is a sweeping and offensive arrangement, which grants clear superiority to the interests of the settlers over the property rights of the land owners in the region,” Mandelblit wrote, adding that the law “does not hold up to the test of proportionality,” and that it would lead discrimination against Palestinians.

The Judea and Samaria Settlement Regulation Law by its full name seeks to retroactively legalize Israeli settlements built on private Palestinian land in Judea and Samaria in exchange for the allocation of alternate lands or financial compensation.  

The State was forced to hire a private attorney, Harel Arnon, the author of a book on land laws and international law in Judea and Samaria, after Mandelblit refused to defend the Law, which he has said is indefensible in court and could put Israel in breach of international law, possibly leading to legal proceedings at the International Criminal Court.

The Regulation Law was passed in February 2017 following the eviction of some 40 families from Amona, an unauthorized outpost adjacent to the settlement of Ofra, north of Jerusalem. The law would retroactively legalize close to 4,000 homes built on private Palestinian land by expropriating land rights to the state. The Palestinian landowners would be compensated with alternate lands or compensation at a rate of 125 percent of the land’s value.

The state said in a response to the court in August that it believed the Regulation Law met the criteria of both Israeli law and international law and that it rejected “attempts to intimidate the government and its officials on the grounds that the Law constitutes a violation of international law.” Furthermore, it said, “the government of Israel rejects attempts to impose on the State of Israel different and more stringent standards than are standard practice elsewhere in the world.”

The response added that “the Law improves the situation of the (Palestinian) landowners  vis-a-vis their present situation in which they find themselves without land, without compensation and without the ability to sell, this as a result of the racist legislation passed by the Palestinian Authority which calls for the death sentence in the event of selling land to Jews.”