Photo: Flickr / walkercleaveland

Let’s start with Isabel Kershner in the New York Times:

Flouting international opinion, an Israeli government-appointed commission of jurists said Monday that Israel’s presence in the West Bank was not occupation and recommended that the state grant approval for scores of unauthorized Jewish settlement outposts there. [...]

“The report relates to the question of legality and legitimacy of the settlement enterprise in Judea and Samaria,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a statement issued by his office, referring to the West Bank by its biblical name. He added that the report’s conclusions would be submitted to a ministerial committee on settlement affairs for discussion and that “the facts and claims” presented in the report “merit serious examination.”

This couldn’t be more absurd. There is an occupation. It is real. Israel can’t deny it. It is, literally, the only country in the world that doesn’t think it’s occupying the West Bank. Accepting the substantial elements of this report means this: no more occupation, annexing the West Bank, giving citizenship to Palestinians, end of Israel as a Jewish-democratic state. Or, of course, it could really become apartheid, and not give Palestinians citizenship at all. This is what the Zionist Right is leading us to: the end of the two-state solution.

This is what Haaretz’s Chaim Levinson and Tomer Zarchin wrote:

Members of the panel accepted the legal opinion presented by the right. They explained that the generally accepted concept of occupation relates to short periods in which territory is captured from a sovereign state until the dispute between the two sides is resolved. But Judea and Samaria have been under Israeli control for decades, and it is impossible to foresee a time when Israel will relinquish these territories, if ever.

And influential blogger Jeffrey Goldberg’s very apt reply:

 Of course, you don’t hear too many voices on the right in Israel clamoring to extend full Israeli citizenship to the Palestinians. The right-wing wants the land, but not the people. What the right doesn’t understand is that this arrangement would be a non-starter, for political and moral reasons. Then again, the right doesn’t understand very much, so why would it understand this?

972 Magazine has included a number of hilarious ‘memes’ that have been created by various Israelis mocking the Levy Committee:

“You see? I told you there’s no occupation!” (Photo: 972 Magazine / John Brown)