What Now, After the World Court Condemns As Unlawful Israel’s Entire 57-Year Occupation of the Palestinian Territories?

Please support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

 

In a devastating opinion issued on Friday (July 19), the International Court of Justice (one of the six organs of the United Nations, also known as the World Court) condemned as illegal Israel’s presence, and its behavior, in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip) ever since they were first militarily occupied in 1967. The case, “Legal Consequences arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem,” was initiated by a request from the UN General Assembly in 2022.

This was, of course, prior to the attacks by Hamas and other militants on October 7, 2023, and Israel’s extraordinarily violent and ongoing military response, in which, according to a recent assessment, it would be reasonable to expect that the final death toll, even if hostilities ended tomorrow, would be no less than 186,000 Palestinians, most of them civilians. Israel’s actions are subject to a separate case brought to the ICJ by South Africa, in which the Court first issued “provisional measures” against Israel in January, on the basis that what it has initiated and is engaged in is a “plausible genocide.”

What the Court decided, and how the judges voted

The 15-member court, whose judges are drawn from across the member states of the United Nations, declared, by eleven votes to four, that it was “of the opinion that the State of Israel’s continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory is unlawful,” and was also “of the opinion that the State of Israel is under an obligation to bring to an end its unlawful presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory as rapidly as possible.” Judges from countries including Israel’s staunchest allies, the US and Germany, agreed, as they did for every other decision taken by the Court, along with the recently-appointed Lebanese President, Nawaf Salam, and judges from Australia, Brazil, China, India, Japan, Mexico, Somalia and South Africa.

The only persistent dissent came from the Ugandan Vice-President, Julia Sebutinde, while the judges from France and Romania were also largely in disagreement, joined occasionally by the judge from Slovakia.

By fourteen votes to one, the Court was “of the opinion that the State of Israel is under an obligation to cease immediately all new settlement activities, and to evacuate all settlers from the Occupied Palestinian Territory,” and was also “of the opinion that the State of Israel has the obligation to make reparation for the damage caused to all the natural or legal persons concerned in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.”

By twelve votes to three, the Court was “of the opinion that all States are under an obligation not to recognize as legal the situation arising from the unlawful presence of the State of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and not to render aid or assistance in maintaining the situation created by the continued presence of the State of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.”

Also by twelve votes to three, the Court was “of the opinion that international organizations, including the United Nations, are under an obligation not to recognize as legal the situation arising from the unlawful presence of the State of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory,” and was also “of the opinion that the United Nations, and especially the General Assembly, which requested this opinion, and the Security Council, should consider the precise modalities and further action required to bring to an end as rapidly as possible the unlawful presence of the State of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.”

The main points of the Court’s advisory opinion

The advisory opinion is worth reading in its entirety, because it so thoroughly establishes the illegality of Israel’s occupation, with the Court declaring, unerringly, that “Israel’s powers and duties in the Occupied Palestinian Territory are governed by the Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War of 12 August 1949 [the Fourth Geneva Convention] and by customary international law,” and that, as a result, it “bears a duty to administer the territory for the benefit of the local population.”

In contrast, of course, as the Court established in a roll-call of 57 years of injustice and brutality, Israel has illegally created and expanded settlements for 700,000 Israelis, “as well as non-Israeli Jews who qualify for Israeli nationality under Israeli legislation,” in the West Bank and Jerusalem, stealing land, destroying Palestinian property, depriving Palestinians of water, displacing Palestinians and subjecting them to violence, and establishing two sets of laws, whereby Palestinians in the West Bank are “subject to military law and military courts, whereas settlers benefit from the criminal law and criminal justice system applicable to civilians in Israel.”

The impact of this distinction would be unacceptable under any circumstances, but how it has translated into reality is absolutely horrific, with Israel’s prison and judicial system for Palestinians by far and away the most arbitrary and abusive in any country that claims to be a democracy. As Al Jazeera explained on April 17 — declared Palestinian Prisoner’s Day in 1974 by the Palestinian National Council — an estimated 9,500 Palestinians are currently held in Israel’s 20 or so prisons for Palestinians, although the exact number is unknown, because, since October 7, Israel has “stopped allowing independent humanitarian organisations to visit [its] prisons.”

Throughout the Occupied Palestinian Territory, as Al Jazeera explained, “one in every five Palestinians has been arrested and charged at some point,” and the rate is “twice as high for Palestinian men as it is for women — two in every five men have been arrested and charged.” The military system is largely unaccountable. Numerous prisoners are held in “administrative detention,” which can be renewed every six months, apparently indefinitely, and conditions in the prisons are truly deplorable. Although independent observers have been banned, released prisoners — most released as arbitrarily as they were seized in the first place, with many bearing the marks of torture, and with some clearly deranged by their experiences — have described a horrendous system of torture, beatings, dehumanization and near-starvation, which seems to be even more depraved than most of the horrors the US inflicted on prisoners in its “war on terror,” and which has led to numerous deaths.  

As a result of its analysis of the depredations and injustices involved in Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and of their land, the Court confirmed — or reaffirmed — that “the Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and the regime associated with them, have been established and are being maintained in violation of international law.”

The Court also confirmed that Israel was guilty of “annexation,” and of “the acquisition of territory by force,” and that many of its actions are discriminatory against Palestinians under international humanitarian law. After noting that a number of the record number of 52 countries who submitted evidence to the Court “argued that Israel’s policies and practices in the Occupied Palestinian Territory amount to segregation or apartheid, in breach of Article 3 of CERD [the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination],” the Court concluded that Israel’s discriminatory legislation and measures do indeed “constitute a breach of Article 3 of CERD” — a legal recognition of the apartheid system that Israel so strenuously denies.

The Court also looked into the effects of Israel’s policies and practices on the exercise of the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination, noting that “[t]he right of all peoples to self-determination has been recognized by the General Assembly as one of the ‘basic principles of international law,’” and also stating, “The centrality of the right to self-determination in international law is also reflected in its inclusion as common Article 1 of the ICESCR [the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights] and the ICCPR [the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights], the first paragraph of which provides: ‘All peoples have the right of self-determination. By virtue of that right, they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development.’”

The Court found that, via the fragmentation of territorial integrity, through “acts aimed at dispersing the population and undermining its integrity as a people,” through the loss of the Palestinian people’s “right to exercise permanent sovereignty over natural resources,” and through the loss of the right “freely to determine its political status and to pursue its economic, social and cultural development,” self-determination has been largely erased. As the Court described it, “Israel’s unlawful policies and practices are in breach of Israel’s obligation to respect the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination.”

In conclusion, the Court called on Israel “to bring an end to its presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory as rapidly as possible,” to “immediately cease all new settlement activity,” and “to repeal all legislation and measures creating or maintaining the unlawful situation, including those which discriminate against the Palestinian people in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, as well as all measures aimed at modifying the demographic composition of any parts of the territory.”

The Court also called for reparations, including the return of land, assets and cultural property, and, regarding the obligations of other states, noted that, “while it is for the General Assembly and the Security Council to pronounce on the modalities required to ensure an end to Israel’s illegal presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and the full realization of the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination, all States must co-operate with the United Nations to put those modalities into effect.”

Other countries’ complicity was also spelled out in the ruling, as Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch from 1993 to 2022, explained in a Guardian article, stating, “Perhaps most ominously for Israel, the court ordered all governments not to ‘render aid or assistance in maintaining’ Israel’s presence in the occupied territory, given its illegality. That should apply foremost to the US government, the largest supplier to Israel by far of arms and military aid. The former Liberian president Charles Taylor is serving a 50-year prison term in a British prison for aiding and abetting war crimes by shipping arms to an abusive rebel group in neighboring Sierra Leone. No one is holding their breath awaiting ICC charges against US officials, but Biden should reconsider continuing to finance and arm the maintenance of the occupation precisely because charges would be legally justified.”

What now?

It remains to be seen what happens now, and whether the UN General Assembly — and, particularly, the UN Security Council, where the US, as one of the five permanent member states, wields a shameful and often-used veto — can find a way to impose any meaningful action on Israel.

Perhaps, as Hassan Ben Imran, a member of Law for Palestine, told Al Jazeera, “with the UN Security Council ‘compromised and paralysed’ as a result of US veto power, the General Assembly should take the lead.” Al Jazeera explained that, “although the General Assembly does not have the power to expel a UN member state without approval from the UN Security Council, it does have the ability to suspend its rights and privileges, meaning that the state would not be able to participate in the sessions of the General Assembly and other UN bodies.”

As Al Jazeera added, “This was notably what happened in 1974, when member states voted to suspend the participation of apartheid South Africa, over the objections of the United States, the United Kingdom and France, helping to turn the apartheid regime in South Africa into a pariah state.”

As Ben Imran further explained, “The only way forward is political, economic and military sanctions through the UN General Assembly … Just like apartheid South Africa, Israel should be suspended, or unseated, from the UN, FIFA, the Olympics and other fora. The UN General Assembly may initiate this line of action.”

The importance of action cannot be understated — not just because Israel is still murdering Palestinian civilians with unfettered glee in the Gaza Strip, but also because the very credibility of international humanitarian law is at stake. One of the saddest aspects of the ICJ opinion is the admission, by the Court, that Israel has been ignoring rulings, opinions and resolutions since the aftermath of its occupation in 1967. In Resolution 242, on November 22, 1967, the Security Council “emphasiz[ed] the inadmissibility of acquisition of territory by war,” and called for the “[w]ithdrawal of Israel armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict.”

Moreover, as is clear from Israel’s response to the opinion, its fanatical self-obsession is more dangerous and messianic than it has ever been before. A statement from the office of the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, declared, “The Jewish people are not occupiers in their own land — not in our eternal capital Jerusalem, nor in our ancestral heritage of Judea and Samaria [the occupied West Bank]. No decision of lies in The Hague will distort this historical truth, and similarly, the legality of Israeli settlements in all parts of our homeland cannot be disputed.”

That is all patently untrue, but words alone will evidently not stop Israel from continuing its genocidal aggression; for that, something more will be required — international isolation, for which this ruling and others undoubtedly help, an end to arms sales, sanctions, boycotts and divestment. Already, Israel’s economy is collapsing (as Mondoweiss reported last week, “over 46,000 businesses have gone bankrupt [and] tourism has stopped”), but it needs to suffer much more to appreciate the moral depths to which is has sunk, and quite how repulsed decent people around the world are at its vengeful, gleeful, self-righteous slaughter of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians over the last nine and a half months.

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of an ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (see the ongoing photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.50).

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and, in 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to try to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody.

Since 2019, Andy has become increasingly involved in environmental activism, recognizing that climate change poses an unprecedented threat to life on earth, and that the window for change — requiring a severe reduction in the emission of all greenhouse gases, and the dismantling of our suicidal global capitalist system — is rapidly shrinking, as tipping points are reached that are occurring much quicker than even pessimistic climate scientists expected. You can read his articles about the climate crisis here.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.