Arab intellectual Azmi Bishara a former member of the Knesset has warned of the gravity of Israel’s recent legislation that legalized land grabs and settlement expansion in the West Bank and described it as “another annexation law.”
Bishara stated in recent Facebook remarks that under this new law the 1967 occupied lands would be dealt with similar to the territories that were occupied after the Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe) when Israel annexed vast tracts of lands owned by Palestinians in the 1950s through enacting legislation for that purpose.
He affirmed that Israel’s law at the time considered the appropriation of privately owned lands for settlement construction in exchange for financial compensation or other lands a “public interest.”
He noted that the plots of lands that had been given back then by Israel in return for other annexed ones were either absentees’ property (owned by absent Palestinians) or seized property classified as state land.
The Arab thinker called the new Israeli step at the Knesset “much more dangerous than the transfer of the US embassy to Occupied Jerusalem” although it did not for some reason created the same clamor.
