FOLLOWING a violent confrontation in the West Bank on February 2nd between Jewish settlers and police, who were carrying out a High Court order to evict an unauthorised mini-settlement at Amona, the Israeli Knesset voted on February 6th to pass a euphemistically named “regulation law”. This will allow the Israeli government in future retroactively to expropriate privately owned Palestinian land on which Israeli settlements have been built. It will not help the 40 Israeli families forced to leave their homes in Amona last week, but it could alter the status of as many as 4,000 housing units built on private Palestinian land in the West Bank. This is the first time since Israel annexed East Jerusalem in 1967 that Israel has acted to extend Israeli law to the occupied West Bank. The bill legalises building on private land only in some circumstances, and at least provides for compensation for the owners, either in cash or alternative land.

The prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, had previously opposed such a law. His government’s attorney-general has refused either to endorse it or to defend it if it is challenged in Israel’s High Court, as it is widely expected to be. He believes it contravenes the Fourth Geneva Convention. But while Mr Netanyahu was in London for meetings with the British government this week, he was forced by his increasingly unruly right-wing coalition partners to give the law his blessing. Still, Israeli politicians and legal experts fear that the law could potentially open up Israeli officials to prosecution by the International Criminal Court; although Israel is not a member of the ICC, Palestine has been recognised as one.

The vote is above all a sign of Mr Netanyahu’s current vulnerability at home. Under investigation over a series of corruption allegations, he increasingly finds himself at the mercy of his coalition partners (whom he will need should the attorney-general decide to indict him). The regulation law may be only the beginning. Jewish Home, the most right-wing of the coalition’s parties, has also demanded legislation to annex the settlement of Ma’ale Adumim, a suburb of 40,000 residents to the east of Jerusalem, to Israel proper.

Having had to whip his entire coalition into supporting the regulation bill for fear of seeing his government collapse, Mr Netanyahu will doubtless be hoping that the High Court now throws it out. But by doing so, it will widen the rift between Israel’s embattled judicial system and its political establishment. For Mr Netanyahu, this is a needless distraction while he is preparing for a crucial meeting with President Donald Trump on February 15th, whom he wants to encourage to get much tougher with the Iranian regime. The Israeli prime minister owes his longevity in office to courting the ultra-right, so he has only himself to blame for becoming their hostage.