Alan Baker, former legal adviser of the Israeli Foreign Ministry and one of the authors of the Levy Report, rejected on Saturday as “nonsense” Defense Minister Ehud Barak’s reasoning for not adopting the report.
The Levy Report concluded that there is no “occupation” and international law allows Jews to live in Judea and Samaria, as its status was not that of a nation in 1967. It was presented to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu this past summer after months of study by former High Court Justice Edmund Levy, Baker, and a third legal expert.
The conclusions of the report contradicted the view of the international community, strongly supported by the Obama administration, that a Jewish presence in Judea, Samaria and in united Jerusalem is illegal.
Netanyahu effectively shelved the report by setting it aside for further study, but with elections coming up, it was reported on Wednesday that he would recommend that the government adopt part of the recommendations.
Barak then claimed that adopting the Levy Report “will cause exactly the opposite of what its supporters want. It will not strengthen settlements in Judea and Samaria but instead wall cause political damage to Israel and deepen its isolation from the rest of the world.”
Baker, however, rejected this and said that had Barak bothered to read the report, he would have found that its conclusions correct an injustice that has been going on for years.
Reports on Thursday indicated that Netanyahu had given up on bringing the report’s conclusions for government approval because the Attorney General opposes it.
Minister Dan Meridor said on Friday that the government does not plan to adopt the Levy Report
“Ramallah and Hevron are not part of the state of Israel, and I don’t think that Prime Minister Netanyahu plans to change that,” Meridor said.