With Its Ruling Against Israel, ICJ Makes Conflict Resolution Impossible

If you support a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the last thing you want to do is claim that the occupation is illegal, which is what the international community has been doing for years.

The latest example is the advisory opinion released last week by the International Court of Justice (ICJ), stating that “the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory is illegal under international law,” and that Israel is “obliged to bring an end to its presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory as rapidly as possible.”

This is exactly the kind of statement that guarantees you’ll never get a deal between the parties. Forget the law or the politics, it’s just common sense: If you frame the Israelis as land thieves whose only obligation is to get out as soon as possible, what is there to negotiate?

This is why negotiations have always formed the core of the conflict’s resolution, which the ICJ has deliberately ignored.

As legal expert Alan Baker reminds us in JPost, the ICJ’s latest action “ignores the fact that both the Palestinian leadership and Israel are committed in the Oslo Accords to negotiate between them the permanent status of the territories,” and that “this internationally recognized commitment to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by negotiation, rather than by an imposed political diktat by a UN kangaroo court, has been endorsed in tens of resolutions of the UN itself and countersigned by the leaders of the international community.”

In other words, if the ICJ wants to reaffirm international law, it ought to reaffirm the international resolutions urging the sides to negotiate.

But if and when the sides do negotiate, Israel must have something to offer. It’s not just outrageous and offensive to treat Jews as land thieves on land that connects them to biblical times. It’s also terribly counterproductive. A thief has nothing to offer. A thief is only obligated to return stolen goods.

Is it any wonder Palestinians have historically shown such a chronic contempt for the very idea of negotiations? All they’ve been hearing from anti-Israel bodies like the ICJ is that, from their perspective, there is nothing to negotiate. Israel must give back the stolen land at once.

There’s a huge difference, of course, between “giving back” and “giving up.”

Indeed, if the international community were serious about achieving conflict resolution, it would make the opposite case it is making now. It would argue that the occupation is not illegal under international law.

One might be surprised to learn that contrary to the anti-Israel brainwashing that floods the public discourse, there’s a genuine case to be made for Israel’s rights to that disputed land.

One might be surprised to learn that contrary to the anti-Israel brainwashing that floods the public discourse, there’s a genuine case to be made for Israel’s rights to that disputed land.

“Under international law, occupation occurs when a country takes over the sovereign territory of another country,” Eugene Kontorovich, professor at George Mason University Scalia Law School, writes. “But the West Bank was never part of Jordan, which seized it in 1949 and ethnically cleansed its entire Jewish population. Nor was it ever the site of an Arab Palestinian state.”

Moreover, Kontorovich notes, “a country cannot occupy territory to which it has sovereign title, and Israel has the strongest claim to the land. International law holds that a new country inherits the borders of the prior geopolitical unit in that territory. Israel was preceded by the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, whose borders included the West Bank.” This principle, he adds, “has been applied everywhere from Syria and Lebanon to post-Soviet Russia and Ukraine.”

Kontorovich has plenty more:

“Even if there were an occupation, the notion that it creates an impermeable demographic bubble around the territory—no Jew can move in—has no basis in the history or application of the Fourth Geneva Convention. Almost every prolonged occupation since 1949—from the Allies’ 40-year administration of West Berlin to Turkey’s 2016 occupation of northern Syria—has seen population movement into the occupied territory. In none of these cases has the U.S., or the United Nations, ever claimed a violation of this Geneva Convention provision.”

Whether one agrees or not with these cogent arguments is not the point. The point is that the stronger one makes a case for Israel’s rights to the land, the more Israel will have something to offer during negotiations, the more Palestinians will have an incentive to negotiate and compromise.

Until then, international bodies will continue to reinforce the definition of insanity—repeating the same actions over and over again and hoping for a different outcome.

One can only wonder: Given that the desired outcome of these anti-Israel bodies is often more to undermine Israel than to resolve the conflict, perhaps accusing the country of being land thieves is precisely the point– making it highly satisfying rather than insane. After all, it’s no longer a secret that Israel is condemned more than all other nations combined in those august, self-righteous international bodies.

In a bitter irony, guess who pays the ultimate price for this blatant discrimination against the world’s only Jewish state? At the top of the list are the Palestinian people, whose corrupt leaders and international enablers have kept them paralyzed for decades in the misery of unresolved conflict and permanent victimhood.