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A Judge from Uganda Sides with Israel
(Wall Street Journal) Robert Nicholson - In a gross miscarriage of justice that surprised no one, the International Court of Justice issued an advisory opinion Friday saying that Israel's "occupation" of the "Palestinian territories" violates international law. The ICJ's opinion will reinvigorate the Palestinian crusade against Israel. In legal terms, the opinion is little more than a warmed-over presentation of the Palestinian narrative. Several judges took issue with the majority opinion, but it was Uganda Judge Julia Sebutinde, the court's vice president and the only full dissenter in the case, who has come out to tell it like it is. Judge Sebutinde's dissent is a masterful analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that dismantles the majority opinion point by point, arguing that the court shouldn't have taken the case to begin with. The Israel-Palestinian conflict will be solved by a political process based on negotiations between the parties, Judge Sebutinde wrote, not a judicial settlement in The Hague. She asserts the legality of Jewish rights in all of Mandatory Palestine, cites the legal documents and principles that justify those rights, recounts the history of Palestinian intransigence, and notes a Jewish presence in the land going back to ancient times. "Israel is not a colonizer," she wrote. Judge Sebutinde also points out how a "pro-Palestinian group of states" is hijacking institutions like the ICJ to create on paper what they can't build on the ground. The writer is an adviser to The Hague Initiative for International Cooperation (thinc.).