The Regulation Bill, which aims to legalize thousands of homes in the West Bank built on private Palestinian land and that passed a preliminary reading in the Knesset on Monday and a first reading yesterday, is a disaster for more reasons than I can list in one place. But that’s no excuse not to try. So (deep breath):

To start with the glaringly obvious, legalizing thousands of homes inside existing recognized settlements and legalizing fifty-five illegal outposts makes a permanent status agreement resulting in a two-state solution farther away than it has been at any time since before Oslo. It hardens Israel’s presence in the West Bank to a degree that makes it impossible to envision a withdrawal of civilians that will not result in violence and bloodshed or exact a crushing emotional toll. Given the location of these outposts, it also enormously complicates what is the best way in the current environment to create a de facto two-state solution on the ground – namely, the plan from Commanders for Israel’s Security to freeze expansion east of the security barrier and renounce any claims to Israeli sovereignty in that territory. Should it pass and become law, the Regulation Bill not only makes negotiations down the road that much harder, it eviscerates Israel’s own unilateral options. It is self-binding in the worst sort of way, since it does not do anything productive in deterring an enemy or reassuring an ally – which is the purpose of the self-binding contained in the North Atlantic Treaty, for instance – but instead creates a self-fulfilling prophecy of doom for Israel’s future. You need to have zero regard for your political successors or for your own political independence to take an action that boxes you in like this to one and only one trajectory going forward.

The bill also puts the lie to long-standing Israeli claims about settlements. Prime Minister Netanyahu gives no quarter in claiming that settlements are in no way the issue in preventing Israeli-Palestinian peace. He instead argues that they are a smokescreen that the other side hides behind to mask its refusal to accept Israel’s legitimacy. Netanyahu has also gotten lots of mileage from his claim that Israel has not authorized any new settlements on his watch, relying on the fact that most outside observers do not know how illegal settlement activity has proliferated. But that rhetorical flight of fancy is now gone for good. Plenty of people, myself included, have never seen settlements as the core issue behind the conflict, but recognize that they are in fact an enormous obstacle and not anything that can be blithely dismissed as insignificant. When you throw any and all restraint to the wind, however, and let settlements swallow up everything else, they become a core issue. Imagine a Palestinian living in Area C whose home is one of the 11,000 structures under a demolition order for having been built without a permit, and he wakes up to see that with a stroke of a pen Israeli homes in the exact same situation are now deemed legal. If you think that his anger is motivated by a desire to drive Tel Avivians into the sea rather than the blatant discrimination and injustice to which he is being directly subjected, you are deluding yourself.

But it is more than just arguing about the role of settlements that is at stake here. I have enormous sympathy for settlers who moved to the West Bank because they were repeatedly encouraged to do so by the government and were provided all sorts of financial incentives to go. They cannot and should not be hung out to dry. Legalizing what was blatantly illegal activity, however, creates a completely different and perverse set of incentives, and accelerates a moral hazard problem that will become impossible to overcome. We are talking about Israelis who moved onto private Palestinian land without permits and without explicit or clear government approval, and even though the bill as drafted only retroactively legalizes the activity if they didn’t know they were building on private land, it now makes everything they did completely consequence-free. There is no reason from now on for anyone to heed the laws or directives of the Israeli government with regard to building in the West Bank, since the precedent has been set that it will be treated as perfectly fine and that someone else will bear the costs. This decimates the rule of law and encourages a wide range of bad behavior that cannot be put back in the box.

The Regulation Bill also reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of what it means to be democratic. A majoritarian theory of democracy, in which leaders and parties that win elections get to do anything they please with no checks and balances, is precisely what political philosophers and creators of longstanding democracies like Great Britain and the United States feared. It is why checks and balances and separation of powers exist. Supporters of this bill seem to think that its almost-certain rejection by the High Court is a sign that the High Court is undemocratic because it is thwarting the will of the people, or that Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit’s determination that the bill is unconstitutional does not matter because nobody elected him. This is precisely how democracies turn into populist non-democracies controlled by demagogues, and supporters of Israel who dismiss this attitude as irrelevant do so at their own peril.

Finally, the legalism being used to justify the Regulation Bill is reaching Orwellian heights, and should not be viewed as anything positive. One of the ironies of the three Soviet constitutions was that they guaranteed a wider range of rights than Western constitutions; if an alien landed on Earth and read the Soviet Union’s constitutional and legal documents, it would assume that the Soviet Union was the most free and liberal country on the planet. For similar reasons, countries in which elections do not matter to the transfer of political power almost all go to great lengths to hold elections and make big shows of how they are respecting the will of the people. A patina of legality is used to legitimize that which is illegitimate. I am not suggesting that Israel is an authoritarian country, and it shares no resemblance to the totalitarian Soviet Union. But the focus on what is narrowly legal – the structures being legalized must have been built with no direct knowledge that they were built on private land, there had to have been implicit or explicit government or municipal support – is designed to make what happens appear as if it is above board. It is not. To seize private land without authorization and pay the landowners compensation whether they are willing to cede their land or not is not legal, full stop. The Israeli High Court does not view it as legal. The Israeli attorney general does not view it as legal. No source of international law views it as legal. Tying it up with a phony legal bow almost makes the entire thing worse.

Make no mistake about what this is. It is not an attempt to right wrongs. It is not an attempt to administer fair and impartial justice. Naftali Bennett, to his credit, has not been cagey but has said what this is proudly and clearly: “The Israeli Knesset shifted from a path to establish a Palestinian state, to a path of extending sovereignty to Judea and Samaria. Let there be no doubt, the Regulation Bill is what will spearhead the extension of [Israeli] sovereignty.” The bill will not pass the High Court and will not become law, but what it says about the current state of political affairs in Israel is as disturbing as anything that has happened since Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination. It is an attempt to radically overhaul Israel’s system of democracy, and that it is playing out in the Knesset does not make it any more democratic.

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