Scan any news story from the past two years relating to Israel’s legal rights and you’re likely to come across professor Eugene Kontorovich’s name. Whether it was drafting the Pompeo Doctrine, where the U.S. secretary of state disavowed a 1978 policy deeming settlements illegal, or the passage of anti-boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) laws, or the reversal of Airbnb’s policy of removing Israeli settlement listings from its site, Kontorovich played a key role in facilitating these legal wins.
As director of the Center for the Middle East and International Law at George Mason University Scalia Law School in Virginia as well as the director of the Kohelet Forum, Kontorovich said the Airbnb episode is one of his “big successes. They didn’t call it a policy of Israelis and Jews because that would be very, very racist,” he said, “but guess how many disputed territories they found around the world? They were very shocked to find out that there were in fact many other such territories and that if they were to apply the policy to all of them, it would mess up their business globally.”
Kontorovich’s latest battle is destroying the myths surrounding the Israeli government’s plans to apply sovereignty over (aka annexation of) Judea and Samaria. The term annexation in international law refers to the forced appropriation of one state’s territory by another state, Kontorovich said, explaining that in this case, applying Israeli law to those areas — some 30% of the land as delineated in President Donald Trump’s administration’s peace proposal — is simply a realization of a long-held right.
Close to 500,000 Israeli Jews living in the settlements are governed by a mish-mash of military rule and archaic Ottoman laws that makes implementing any changes to the area — such as building roads, schools and basic infrastructure — a bureaucratic nightmare that takes at least twice as long as anywhere else in Israel, Kontorovich said.
The reason that it is still this way decades on, he explained, is because of Palestinian intransigence. He added that in 1967, when Israel captured the area from Jordan occupation in a war of self-defense, the belief was that a final status solution would be hashed out quickly with the Palestinians. “This was supposed to be temporary until the Palestinians quickly came to the table, which didn’t happen,” he said. “But in the Middle East, nothing is as permanent as the temporary.”
According to Kontorovich, several offers of Palestinian statehood have been proposed but not one has been accepted. For the past 53 years, he said, settlers “have been held hostage to Palestinian rejectionism,” and every peace agreement before Trump’s was based on the notion that there would be population transfers of Jews living in those areas.
“Israel is not going to play along with this game, and neither will America,” he said, “that the Palestinians should only get a state that was pre-cleansed of Jews.” That idea, he noted, is “morally repugnant.”
Applying Israeli law now “underscores that Israel is not going to accept a situation in which it has indefensible borders [as well as] the notion that Jewish presence there is illegal and is so reprehensible that it needs to be reversed. The communities there are a reality,” Kontorovich said, “and they’re not going anywhere.”
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