Transport Minister Bezalel Smotrich on Sunday sent Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a letter suggesting the proper Israeli response to the unjustified attack on Israel by the ICC prosecutor would be to annex the Jordan Valley.
Smotrich’s letter opens: “1. As is well-known, the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court in The Hague, Fatou Bensouda, announced last Friday that she wants to launch a full investigation into “war crimes in the territories of Judea and Samaria and Gaza.”
Let’s pause for a moment to explain the relatively modern term “Lawfare.” A blend of the words law and warfare, Lawfare is a form of war consisting of the use of the legal system against an enemy, such as by damaging or delegitimizing them, tying them up in endless court maneuvers, and winning a public relations victory in which terms and understandings of legal issues are swept by falsehoods which thus become “public knowledge.”
A US Air Force judge named Charles J. Dunlap, Jr., suggested in the early 2000s that lawfare was “the exploitation of real, perceived, or even orchestrated incidents of law-of-war violations being employed as an unconventional means of confronting” a superior military power.
There is no doubt in any decent man or woman’s mind that the collaboration between the Palestinian Authority and Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda, with the latter guiding, even grooming the former in the art of lawfare against a superior foe, fits every part of Dunlap’s definition. It is an attack without foundation in the law, by a force not qualified to appeal to the international court in the first place, against a blameless, righteous country that spills the blood of its own soldiers to remain moral under the worst of circumstances in violent confrontations with bloodthirsty murderers.
Smotrich continues (we’re done with the interruptions):
2. The determination of the Prosecutor General is intended to reach the door of the International Court of Justice in The Hague.
3. It goes without saying that the tribunal has no authority to hear Israel’s case and that the entire hearing from its inception is due to a lawsuit brought by the Palestinian Authority to the tribunal.
4. Following my letter to you last week, I have no doubt that it is time to take significant steps at this time and to present to the government a decision on imposing Israeli sovereignty in the Jordan Valley, a decision which, above all, would make clear to the PA, the prosecutor general and the tribunal that the historical land of Israel is an integral part of the sovereign state of Israel. As our first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, said in response to an anti-Israeli resolution adopted at the [April 1955] Bandung [Indonesia] Conference: “Our future does not depend on what the goyim will say, but what the Jews will do!”
5. There is wide national agreement on applying Israeli sovereignty to the Jordan Valley. However, due to the sensitive political timing, and as I described in the outline I gave you last week, I suggest that after the official decision of the Cabinet meeting is passed as required, this will be brought to a Knesset vote to express the will of the people without political distinction.
6. The time has come to make it clear that unilateral measures will be met with unilateral measures.
7. In addition, I urge you once again to immediately dissolve the Palestinian Authority in order to counteract the political threat of the tribunal (the PA is the complaining entity – no PA, no trial. DI).
8. In the spirit of Chanukah, which will begin tonight, I find it appropriate to quote the immortal answer of Simon the Hasmonean to the messenger sent by King Antiochus [IV Epiphanes]: “We did not take a foreign land, nor do we govern over the property of foreigners, but over the land of our ancestors, captured unjustly by our enemies, Transport Minister Bezalel Smotrich on Sunday sent Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a letter suggesting the proper Israeli response to the unjustified attack on Israel by the ICC prosecutor would be to annex the Jordan Valley.
9. Bayyamim haheim, bazzeman hazeh (in those days at this season)
Regards,
MK Bezalel Smotrich
Minister of Transport and Road Safety