A new law formalizes the outsourcing of rural settlement activity in the West Bank. A boon to the settlements, a blow to democracy — and the taxpayer.

“A proposed law would force human rights NGOs to sport special labels indicating that they receive foreign funding. Maybe it’s time to talk about what kind of policies Israeli taxpayers are funding,” writes Mossi Raz.

Education Minister Naftali Bennett on Monday said Israel should annex the West Bank, beginning with the Etzion bloc and Binyamin regions. “The time has come to say Israel is ours,” he said at a meeting of the Knesset’s Land of Israel Caucus.

Brazil has apparently rebuffed Israel’s nomination of a settler as its next ambassador in a move Israel says will damage diplomatic relations between the two countries. Dani Dayan, a 60-year-old who lives in the West Bank settlement of Ma’ale Shomron, was nominated in August as Israel’s new ambassador to Brasilia. However Brazil has yet to endorse the Argentina-born diplomat’s appointment, following lobbying in Brazil against his nomination and protests to President Dilma Rousseff about Dayan.

A Petah Tikva Magistrate’s Court on Monday released to house arrest a young Jewish man who just spent 29 days in Shin Bet custody as a suspect in the Duma terrorist attack. His release was delayed, however, after the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) appealed the order. A second hearing on the matter will be held Tuesday.

Ghassan Daghlas, a PA official who monitors settlement activity in the northern West Bank, told Ma’an that the land will be confiscated from from the Palestinian villages of Jurish and Qusra. Israeli forces delivered an order classifying the land as “state land.” Local Palestinians who have private land in the area must present an objection to the Israeli Civil Administration, Daghlas said.

“Last week the National Security Council’s Robert Malley offered an unusually sensible statement on Middle East issues. Malley, President Barack Obama’s senior adviser on countering the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), said that the United States must resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in order to defeat ISIL and similar Islamist extremists,” writes Rami Khouri.

Joint List MK Ahmad Tibi is by far the most popular lawmaker among Israeli Arabs, according to an end-of-year poll by the Statnet research institute, which specializes in the Israeli-Arab sector. The poll Statnet CEO Yousef Makladeh shared withThe Jerusalem Post Monday states that over half (52 percent) of Israeli Arabs ranked Tibi as the best MK, and Joint List chairman Ayman Odeh trailed behind with 12%, followed by MK Jamal Zahalka with 2%.

Zionist Union MK Yoel Hasson wrote in a statement Monday that Nathan Nathanson, a senior aide to the Jewish Home chair, is a convicted terrorist and called on Bennett to fire him. Nathanson, he wrote, “was a member of the Jewish Underground who tried to murder the then-mayor of Nablus with explosives and led to his severe injury and the amputation of his legs.”