It's hard to fathom why the US administration rushed to Israel’s defense against Palestinian urging for Israeli officials to be prosecuted in the International Criminal Court. Successive Israeli governments claimed that all their activities in the territories conquered in the June 1967 Arab-Israeli war were strictly kosher. According to the Israeli Foreign Ministry, the West Bank is a "disputed" area, not an occupied one. Therefore, anything that Israel did and does in the territory is perfectly legal. So what lit a fire under the administration and Congress when Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas threatened to demand that the ICC in The Hague investigate Israel’s activities in the occupied territories? Why did Secretary of State Rex Tillerson warn Nov. 17 that unless Abbas withdraws this threat, the administration will have to close the mission of the PLO in Washington? If Israel is acting lawfully, shouldn't it let the Palestinians go to court and take the chance to prove once and for all that it is not an occupying power and can continue to build its settlements uninterruptedly in the territories?
The closure of the PLO office in Washington to punish the Palestinians is based on a 1994 law adopted by Congress shortly after the festive signing of the 1993 Oslo Accord between Israel and the PLO. Even diehard pessimists did not anticipate at the time that 23 years later, the agreement would serve Israel’s bid to annex 60% of the West Bank (designated Area C) rather than to enable the creation of a Palestinian state there. Few could have believed that the number of Israeli settlers in the West Bank would quadruple — from about 110,000 to over 400,000 and counting.
