“Israel’s legal system, which has proven itself fully capable of addressing legal questions … is the appropriate place for these matters to be adjudicated,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared Nov. 18. No, these “issues” do not relate to his criminal indictments for bribery, fraud and breach of trust. His praise for the country’s legal system was part of an enthusiastic reaction to the Nov. 18 declaration by US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo that legal questions regarding Israel’s settlements are a matter for Israeli courts and not for international law to decide.

Indeed, generations of police officers, prosecutors and judges have proven to be an integral element in the settlement enterprise over the past 52 years. They are part of that same legal system that Netanyahu and his associates now claim is unfit to handle the prime minister’s criminal investigations. Just like the three indictments detailing a multitude of violations of Israeli law, Netanyahu considers the claim that the settlement enterprise violates international law to be false.

That is not the view of top legal experts and jurists in the world and in Israel, among them Theodore Meron, the Foreign Ministry’s legal adviser in the late 1960s who wrote a top-secret opinion in 1967 saying the Fourth Geneva Convention applied to Israeli activities in the territories it had just captured and took precedence over the British-era 1945 emergency defense regulations on which the state relies to this day. In a 1991 petition to the Supreme Court, the anti-settlement movement Peace Now challenged the legality of the settlements. Even the justices of the country’s top court did not dare rule they were legal.

Cambridge University law professor Eyal Benvenisti goes as far as to argue that the US declaration itself is illegal since all the signatories of the Geneva Convention are committed to preserving its integrity. Speaking with Al-Monitor, Benvenisti said Pompeo’s declaration does not appear to have binding status in international law. “Even if it did,” Benvenisti, added, “It cannot change a thing in itself.” He argued that the political circumstances of the declaration — the administration’s desire to help the leader of the Likud — as well as the broad international consensus rejecting it limit its impact.