Mike Pompeo
Mike PompeoReuters

Rod Reuven Dovid Bryant and Jerry Gordon interview Dan Diker, Director of the Program to Counter Political Warfare at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.

The occasion is the stunning policy ruling by US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo that Israeli settlements in the disputed territories of Judea and Samaria, aka the West Bank, were legal. The Secretary’s ruling was based on studies by international legal experts and scholars sponsored by the US State Department.

This policy ruling occurred on the cusp of the EU issuing an anti-Semitic BDS labelling requirement on Israeli products produced in the disputed territories of Judea and Samaria. Overall the reaction was positive in the Israeli body polity, according to Dan Diker.

It represented a positive assault against the delegitimization and general misunderstanding about the Israeli settlement presence in the disputed territories. The US history on the issue had varied starting in 1967 that recognized Israel’s right to defensible borders Under UN Res. 242.

However, over the past nearly 53 years there had been instances under Presidents Carter and Obama that took exception to Israel’s legal rights suggesting that building settlements was problematic. The most glaring example being the Obama Administration abstention on UN Security Council Resolution 2234 in December 2016 directed at curtailing construction of new settlements.

Diker thinks that Pompeo’s decision parallels Israeli law, especially the Edmund Levy opinion that re-established the legitimacy of settlements in the disputed territories for nearly 500,000 Israelis.

In his opinion, Pompeo’s ruling paves the way to apply Israeli law for Israeli settlements in Area C which cover 95 percent of the 500,000 population that resides by the 1967 "Green Line".