Israel set to pass ‘metropolitan Jerusalem’ bill annexing settlements: Report
Israel’s Ministerial Committee for Legislation is set to approve a bill paving the way for the annexation of Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank into what Israeli officials are calling a “metropolitan Jerusalem” under Israeli control.
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reports the settlements to be annexed include Maale Adumim, Givat Ze’ev, Efrat, and Maale Mikhmas.
The Israeli rights group Ir Amim condemned the bill, which it said “seeks to promote an illegal annexation under international law” and “further isolate East Jerusalem and its residents from the Palestinian space”.
On Gaza, Trump proposing ‘three blunt war crimes’
Mustafa Barghouti, secretary-general of the Palestinian National Initiative, unpacks Trump’s statements on Gaza’s future.
All Israel wants is to affirm its ‘permanent superiority’
Rami Khouri, a fellow at the American University of Beirut, says the current ceasefire uncertainty and the Israel-Palestine conflict as a whole have been shaped by “the essential need for Zionist groups and the government of Israel to assert superiority in terms of right and might in the land of Palestine and adjacent land of Lebanon and Syria and other places”.
“This is what they have done for a century,” Khouri told Al Jazeera. “They need to constantly affirm that according to their mythology, this land was given to them.”
“This kind of attitude has no logical dimensions in terms of what do they want in phase two, what do they want in phase one. All they do in every dimension of their life, in every area of the region in which they are involved is to use their military might, which is tremendous with the support of the United States, to assert their Zionist, supremacist, racist, ethno-nationalist ideology.”
That ideology is reflected in the ceasefire negotiations, Khouri noted.
“We shouldn’t take very seriously, or very literally, the specifications of the negotiations and the ceasefire deal if they extend it a couple of weeks. They’ll come up with all kinds of stuff to justify what they’re doing, but what they want to do is affirm their permanent superiority.”
Essay Pro