On July 23, 2025, Israel’s Knesset approved measures expanding Jewish communities in the West Bank and, five months later, the Israeli government announced that it would build nineteen new settlements. The international response was immediate. Statements condemning the decision as “illegal under international law” appeared almost reflexively, often without citation or engagement with the legal foundations of the claim itself. What stands out is not the criticism, but the confidence with which an unresolved legal assertion continues to be treated as settled law.
This recurring pattern raises a question that is rarely examined with seriousness: What, precisely, is the basis for the illegality claim—and why has it endured for decades without binding judicial resolution?
Over time, diplomatic convention has substituted for adjudication, allowing a contested position to harden into orthodoxy.
At the core of the issue is not a shortage of law, but an excess of ambiguity sustained through repetition. Over time, diplomatic convention has substituted for adjudication, allowing a contested position to harden into orthodoxy. Yet the underlying legal requirements—sovereignty, mandate continuity, and the scope of the Fourth Geneva Convention—are less secure than its frequent invocation suggests.
Take sovereignty: The law of occupation presupposes that territory has been taken from a prior lawful sovereign. In 1967, however, the West Bank was not the sovereign territory of any state. With very few exceptions, the international community did not recognize Jordan’s control of the area following the 1948 war. In the absence of a displaced lawful sovereign, the threshold predicate for applying classic occupation law is missing. This is not a marginal argument; jurists have acknowledged it across decades even as diplomatic discourse has quietly sidelined it.
Next is the continuity of settlement rights under the Mandate system. The League of Nations Mandate for Palestine recognized the right of close Jewish settlement on the land west of the Jordan River. When the League dissolved, Article 80 of the United Nations Charter preserved rights granted under existing mandates unless altered by agreement. No treaty or binding instrument has ever extinguished those rights. Regardless of policy preference, the legal continuity here is textual and institutional, not speculative.
Citing the Fourth Geneva Convention to suggest illegality stretches it beyond its text and historical purpose. The Convention prohibits the forcible transfer or deportation of an occupying power’s civilian population into occupied territory. Drafted in the aftermath of World War II, its authors intended it to prevent coerced mass population transfers. Voluntary movement, absent deportation or compulsion, does not fit the prohibition’s core language or intent. To apply it otherwise requires transforming a narrowly targeted humanitarian safeguard into a blanket territorial prohibition.
Taken together, these elements do not “settle” the dispute in Israel’s favor, but rather, they demonstrate that the prevailing illegality claim is not the product of adjudicated law, but instead an assertion repeated until it acquired diplomatic force.
This persistence is not accidental. International bodies are political institutions, not courts. They issue resolutions and statements, not binding judgments. Their language gains authority through repetition, even as the underlying legal questions remain unresolved. What begins as provisional language gradually becomes prescriptive, and what is contested in law becomes assumed in diplomacy.
For years, successive Israeli governments nevertheless exercised restraint in asserting their legal claims in the West Bank. That choice was strategic: Maintaining territorial ambiguity might preserve space for negotiation, reassure international partners, and reduce friction. That calculation has now changed.
International condemnation is predictable, yet it remains detached from foundational legal requirements.
The events of October 7, 2023, did not alter the underlying law. They did, however, shatter the premise that ambiguity and restraint would moderate rejectionism or produce security. In the aftermath, Israeli policymakers concluded that deferring the assertion of lawful claims had yielded neither peace nor deterrence, while allowing maximalist narratives to harden unchecked.
It is in this context that the Knesset’s decision should be understood. The move does not represent a repudiation of international law, but rather, its invocation. Nor does it reflect a sudden shift in Israel’s legal position, which has remained consistent across governments. Instead, it marks a decision to cease treating unresolved legal ambiguity as permanent.
International condemnation is predictable, yet it remains detached from foundational legal requirements—has itself become part of the problem. Assertions once framed as provisional have hardened into orthodoxy, even as the legal premises beneath them remain contested and unresolved.
Israel’s decision to move forward represents an effort to confront a narrative that has substituted repetition for law and diplomatic habit for legal judgment. Agee or disagree, the move forces a reckoning with questions long deferred: sovereignty, mandate continuity, and the limits of legal assertion, res judicata, absent binding adjudication.
If international law is to retain credibility, it cannot function merely as a vocabulary for expressing preference. It must confront inconvenient facts and accept that ambiguity cannot be preserved indefinitely without consequence. Israel’s conclusion is that continued deferral serves neither peace nor clarity—and that asserting legal claims long held in abeyance is now a strategic necessity.
