Kontorovich: Israel Should Act Now

Imagine what Israel would look like now if it had declined to apply its law to eastern Jerusalem in late June 1967, just after the Six-Day War.

Israel did not then describe that action as an annexation of the part of the city formerly occupied by Jordan. Rather, it passed a law extending the “law, jurisdiction, and administration of the State,” and incorporating eastern Jerusalem—as well as areas of the West Bank outside of it—into the existing Israeli municipality of Jerusalem.

Israel’s action cemented the Jewish claim to Jerusalem, and by extension the legitimacy of its claims to those areas of the land occupied by Jordan from 1949 to 1967. It put down an important marker that it would not part with this territory lightly. And perhaps most importantly, the technical integration of eastern Jerusalem under Israeli law allowed Jews to move and build there easily, and to relate to it in their minds as part of Israel itself. Today, roughly half as many Jews live just in Jerusalem’s eastern neighborhoods as in all of the West Bank combined. This normalization would have been impossible without the application of Israeli law.