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Israel's Anti-Terror Fence: The World Court Case

(Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs) Laurence E. Rothenberg and Abraham Bell - The UN General Assembly (GA) resolution asking the International Court of Justice (ICJ) for an advisory opinion is actually a request for an endorsement of an already-stated political opinion of the GA. The ICJ lacks jurisdiction over the case because the GA has dictated the desired result. The court is not authorized to make endorsements of the GA's political opinions dressed in legal garb. The security fence is a necessary and proportional response to a campaign of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes by Palestinians. If the fence were built along the 1949 armistice line (the “green line”), it would not achieve Israel's legitimate security goal of protecting its citizens. The “green line” from 1949 bounding the West Bank is solely a defunct military line demarcating the extent of the Transjordanian invasion of Israel in 1948. Indeed, at the insistence of Syria, Egypt, and Jordan, each of the armistice agreements of 1949 specified that the ceasefire lines were not borders and that neither side relinquishes its territorial claims. The fence does not violate the Fourth Geneva Convention because the convention does not apply to the West Bank, a territory of disputed sovereignty to which Israel has the strongest claim, and which was not previously possessed by a legitimate sovereign. Even if the convention applied, a fence that controls movement of civilians does not violate it; the convention permits occupying states to take necessary and proportional steps for security purposes. The resort to the International Court of Justice by the PLO is itself a violation of the Oslo Accords. Under Oslo, any disputes must be resolved by negotiation between Israel and the Palestinians, by agreed-upon conciliation, or agreed-upon arbitration. Laurence E. Rothenberg is a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. Abraham Bell is a member of the Faculty of Law at Bar-Ilan University.
2004-02-10 00:00:00
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