On Monday, the Knesset passed a bill that allows for West Bank settlements built in violation of Israeli law—or determined after-the-fact by Israeli courts to have been built on private Palestinian land—to obtain legal status. In effect, the bill will, for the first time, bring Israeli law to the West Bank. Haviv Rettig Gur clears away some of the now-widespread misconceptions about this law and explains its implications:

The law does not, as often claimed, suddenly allow the Civil Administration, the Israeli agency administering the West Bank under the army’s auspices, to seize private property for Israeli settlements. The Civil Administration is already allowed to do so, at least on paper. Rather, the new law requires that it do so.

In places where Israelis built settlements on privately held Palestinian property in good faith—i.e., without knowing it was privately owned—or received the government’s de-facto consent for squatting there, the Civil Administration is now forced to carry out the seizure in the squatters’ name in exchange for state compensation to the [Palestinian] owners equal to twenty years’ rent or 125 percent of the assessed value of the land. . . .

The law is a potential watershed moment not because of the powers it confers or the requirements it demands of state bodies, but for the simple fact that it appears to penetrate the carefully constructed legal membrane between democratic, sovereign Israel on the one hand, and the occupied—or at least, under the Fourth Geneva Convention to which Israel is a signatory, specially protected as though occupied—Palestinian population on the other. Tear down this barrier, this legal balancing act that has endured for five decades, and Israel faces a stark question: why are some of the people living under the civil control of the Israeli state enfranchised as full citizens, but others are not? . . .

Here lies the deeper message, the statement of principle that makes palatable the legal risks and diplomatic fallout, even if the law is ultimately overturned by [Israel’s] supreme court: that the Israeli population in the West Bank belongs there, that its presence is legitimate and just, that they are as much the “inhabitants” of Judea and Samaria as the Palestinians. This is not a message intended for foreign audiences, but for Israelis. . . .

This is the strange irony at the heart of this law: that it is less a reliable signal of what the future holds for Israel’s policy in the West Bank—no one who voted for it expects it to survive being challenged in the supreme court—and more a reflection of the deep sense of alienation and vulnerability that has permeated the very settlements that, superficially at least, appear so empowered by its passage.

Analyzing the recent direct Iranian attack on Israel, and Israel’s security situation more generally, Michael Oren looks to the 2015 agreement to restrain Iran’s nuclear program. That, and President Biden’s efforts to resurrect the deal after Donald Trump left it, are in his view the source of the current crisis:

Of the original motivations for the deal—blocking Iran’s path to the bomb and transforming Iran into a peaceful nation—neither remained. All Biden was left with was the ability to kick the can down the road and to uphold Barack Obama’s singular foreign-policy achievement.

In order to achieve that result, the administration has repeatedly refused to punish Iran for its malign actions:

Historians will survey this inexplicable record and wonder how the United States not only allowed Iran repeatedly to assault its citizens, soldiers, and allies but consistently rewarded it for doing so. They may well conclude that in a desperate effort to avoid getting dragged into a regional Middle Eastern war, the U.S. might well have precipitated one.

While America’s friends in the Middle East, especially Israel, have every reason to feel grateful for the vital assistance they received in intercepting Iran’s missile and drone onslaught, they might also ask what the U.S. can now do differently to deter Iran from further aggression. . . . Tehran will see this weekend’s direct attack on Israel as a victory—their own—for their ability to continue threatening Israel and destabilizing the Middle East with impunity.

Israel, of course, must respond differently. Our target cannot simply be the Iranian proxies that surround our country and that have waged war on us since October 7, but, as the Saudis call it, “the head of the snake.”