The UN Court and Israeli Occupation of the West Bank

Riaz Osmani

19 July 2024

The International Court of Justice (ICJ; French: Cour internationale de justice, CIJ), or colloquially the World Court, is the only international court that adjucates general disputes between nations, and gives advisory opinions on international legal issues. It is one of the six organs of the United Nations (UN), and is located in The Hague, Netherlands (source: Wikipedia).

This World Court said today that Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories and settlements there are illegal and should be withdrawn as soon as possible, in its strongest findings to date on the Israel-Palestinian conflict (source: Reuters).

An important fact here is that this ruling by the ICJ is non-binding. Can Israel really use that fact to simply dismiss this ruling? Founders of the UN like the USA, UK etc. must be put on notice that they were the architects of the international order after WWII by using the UN as a vehicle, and the ICJ came along later as the UN’s top court. The founders must give the ICJ teeth. The best way to do that would be to use their leverage on Israel (whatever’s left of it) to force the latter to abide by this ruling, a process which Israel will fight tooth and nail.

Now, one must be fair and maintain that we would have not arrived at this juncture had some Arab states, notably Egypt, Syria and Jordan not attacked Israel in June 1967 to decimate whatever geographical and political shape the latter was in at that time. By declaring that war and losing it to Israel (third such instance since Israel’s creation) the Arabs (but not the Palestinians) made Israel take control of the West Bank, Gaza and other territories that were previously under the control of those Arabs (the other territories having been returned through peace treaties with some of those Arabs later on).

The sacrificial lamb after the 1967 war was the collective of all Palestinians. They had no problem with the past UN resolution of the creation of two states (one for Jews, the other for themselves) in the land that was the British Mandate of Greater Palestine (carved out from the defeated Ottoman Empire). It was the neighbouring Arab states who would not accept such an outcome, who repeatedly attacked the newly created Israeli state in order to destroy it, and who contributed to the situation where a Palestinian state was never created at all. We would have had one created back then had it not been for the stance of the Arab League regarding Israel. West Bank and Gaza would not have come under Israeli control had it not been for Egypt, Syria and Jordan.

Events since then have been hijacked by extremists on the Palestinian side (suicide bombers, Hamas, Islamic Jihad etc.) and by extremists on the Israeli side (Jewish settlers, the assassin of the great Israeli leader and peace maker Yitzhak Rabin, the Netanyahu government of today etc.). Two opportunities under the auspices of two former US Presidents for Israeli and Palestinian delegations to come to a final status agreement (i.e. the mythical two-state solution) have been missed thanks to those extremists on both sides who have sadly been feeding off each other. The Oslo Peace Process is long dead; the lives of Palestinians have gone from bad to worse; the sense of security for Israelis have gone from none to none.

Thanks to Palestinians who have elected Hamas as their representatives, which do not accept Israel’s right to exist and is hell-bent on wiping it off the map, and Israelis who have elected the Netanyahu government that does not believe in a future independent Palestinian state attached to Israel, we are furthest away from a two-state solution than we have ever been. But those details are not for this article.