Israel’s leftists are very upset over the report filed by an official committee that states Judea and Samaria are not “occupied territories.” The committee was headed by Supreme Court Justice (ret.) Edmund Levy, and included Judge (ret.) Tehiya Shapira and Dr. Alan Baker as members.
MK Shlomo Molla (Kadima) reacted sharply to the report: “I am warning the Prime Minister and the ministers not to adopt Edmund Levy’s report because it will bury the peace process for good.”
“The report badly tarnishes Israel’s image and prevents all possibility of advancing toward the peace process,” Molla added. “This report only supports the settlers’ rampages and gives a stamp of approval to a transgression of the law.”
Yesh Din wrote that the members of the Levy committee “must have fallen into the rabbit hole, and their report was written in Wonderland, in which the laws of the absurd rule – there is no occupation, are no outposts, and apparently there is no Palestinian people.”
Pro-Arab Peace Now also said that the report was “pre-ordered” by the right, “which exerted pressure to establish the committee and made sure to stir about and determine its makeup.” The group added: “There is no reputable jurist in the world who will agree to take notice of the political manifesto that the committee wrote as if it were a serious report. The determination that there is no occupation proves that the committee’s members live in perpetual denial and if they were asked to, they might also have been willing to determine that the earth is flat and the sun rises in the west.”
Attorney Talia Sasson accused the Levy Committee of ignoring High Court rulings that are relevant to the matter at hand. She added that in her opinion, the Attorney General and Legal Advisor to the Government will not be able to approve the committee’s recommendations. Sasson authored the original ‘outposts report’ that doomed many Jewish communities to destruction, before she left the Justice Ministry and ran for Knesset on the ultra-leftist Meretz ticket.
Like MK Yariv Levin (Likud), Minister Yisrael Katz (Likud) was happy with the report. “The report does historic justice to thousands of families in Judea and Samaria and corrects the wrong that was done to them for years.” He called on the government to accept the report.
MK Otniel Schneller (Kadima) dismissed the leftist accusations that Levy “worked for the right wing” as being “hypocritical and holier-than-thou” when one takes into account Sasson’s involvement in writing a supposedly objective anti-settlement report and then running on the Meretz ticket.
