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The UN, the ICJ, and the Separation Barrier - War By Other Means

Gerald M. Steinberg (Israel Law Review) - * Due to the power of the Arab lobby, Israel is uniquely subject to discrimination in the UN and is not a full member of any of the constituent regional groupings from which the ICJ members are elected. (In recent years, Israel has "enjoyed" second class status in the WEOG - Western Europe and Others Group.) * On this basis, Alan Dershowitz compared the ICJ to "a Mississippi court in the 1930s. The all-white Mississippi court, which excluded blacks from serving on it, could do justice in disputes between whites, but it was incapable of doing justice in cases between a white and a black. It would always favor white litigents. So, too, the International Court." * "Israel is the excluded black when it comes to that court - indeed when it comes to most United Nations organs. A judicial decision can have no legitimacy when rendered against a nation that is willfully excluded from the court's membership by bigotry." The writer is a Fellow of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Director of the Program on Conflict Management and Negotiation at Bar-Ilan University, and Editor of NGO Monitor.
2005-07-21 00:00:00
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