Virtually every democracy voted against that court's taking jurisdiction over the fence case, while nearly every country that voted to take jurisdiction was a tyranny. Israel owes the International Court absolutely no deference. It is under neither a moral nor a legal obligation to give any weight to its predetermined decision.
Excellent reminder.
Is any one in his sane mind is ready to remind us with the Hate Fence the Arab still building since the seventh century?
Didn't we seen that fence in NY, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Indonesia, Australia, France and its allies, Spain, Russia, Pakistan, Jordan, Iraq, Sudan, Israel, Philippine, Afghanistan, and the entire Dutch oven?
You tell me? _________________ The truth taught me to hate her; I couldn't.
They want to make it easier for Arabs to kill Jews!!!
Europe and the ICJ
Many things have been and remain to be said about Friday's advisory opinion on Israel's security fence by the 15-member International Court of Justice, most of it having to do with the court's jurisdiction, fitness, and reasoning. How can Israel expect justice from an international tribunal on which no Israeli jurist is eligible to serve? How can we expect it from one on which Egyptian and Jordanian judges do serve? How does the court sidestep the question of the terrorism that created the fence and then render an opinion on the legality of settlements?
But all this is of little point. The court's verdict would have been outrageous if the court were departing from some prior standard of recognized integrity. In this case, everyone knew from the start what the verdict would be, and so it was. From kangaroo courts, kangaroo justice.
More interesting is the question of the political uses to which the verdict will be put. From the lips of Saeb Erekat and his epigones, we already know: as the latest in a list of irrelevant, biased, or tendentiously interpreted UN resolutions, rattled off the tongue at high speed, to create the impression of legal unimpeachability for the Palestinian cause.
In the United States, the Bush administration has dismissed the verdict and promises to veto any Security Council resolution stemming from it. (It was an American judge, Thomas Buergenthal, who cast the sole dissenting vote in the case.) The Kerry campaign agrees.
That leaves Europe. French Foreign Minister Michel Barnier was on record against the fence before the court rendered its verdict. Robin Cook, the former British foreign minister, wasted no time adding his signature, graffiti-style, to a mock security fence in London, alongside the words "illegal under International Law." The Swiss Foreign Ministry received the verdict "with satisfaction."
Slightly more nuanced was a statement from the European Council's Javier Solana. The European Union, he said, is "committed to upholding and developing international law"; at the same time, the EU fears the fence "could prejudge future negotiations and hinder a just political solution to the conflict." He promises to "examine the court's opinion with the utmost attention."
Yet this is problematic. The EU initially opposed having the fence issue referred to the ICJ because it believed it would prejudge future negotiations. Now that the court has done precisely that, however, how does the EU square its commitment to international law with its commitment, as a member of the Quartet, to serve as an honest broker in such negotiations?
The question underlines a broader choice Europe now has before it. Either the EU can play the role of champion and defender of international legality as defined by the United Nations. Or it can pursue Europe's collective interests however it sees fit, preferably not in contravention to international law but neither in scrupulous observance of it.
In the recent past, particularly in the matter of Iraq, the EU has been able to use the international system as a vehicle to advance what were, anyway, its own interests. But Europe has not stopped to ask itself what happens when the interests of the EU don't coincide with judgments of courts such as the ICJ. That's a mistake.
Right now, the ruling of the ICJ appears as another crisis for Israel. In fact, it is a crisis for Europe. The clear intention of the ICJ ruling is to do to Israel what it helped do to apartheid South Africa in the early 1970s when it ruled the occupation of Namibia illegal and sanctionable.
Europe will have to think carefully about how far it wants to travel down that road vis-a-vis the Jewish state. Is it ready to make good on its anti-fence instincts by voting for UN sanctions, as the ICJ ruling advises? Does Europe place a higher value on Palestinian property than on Jewish lives? The game here is clear. Like adolescents who rely upon parental restrictions they claim to abhor to set limits to behavior they know is irresponsible, Europe is relying upon an American veto to protect the international system from a decision it knows is wrong and should not be implemented.
Israel has made its choice to protect its citizens from terror. Soon Europe will have a choice, too. Whatever choice it makes will be usefully clarifying for the rest of us.
"The International Court has ruled: Israel's anti-terrorism partition fence is a violation of international law, it must be torn down, and Israel must compensate Arab residents for the damage done. Israel does not plan to abide by the ruling."
An Open Letter to the International Court of Justice in the Hague
Dear Judges,
Bravo! I applaud your ludicrous, pre-determined, one-sided and bigoted ruling vis-a-vis the fence we are building in Israel. I applaud not for the justice this ruling is supposedly conveying. I am applauding you, for had you ruled differently, my supposition as to your unconditional, predetermined, anti-Semitic stance would have been wrong. Therefore, I applaud the fact that my correct assumption was proven right. Bravo.
Now that the niceties have been dispensed with, let me get down to the root of the problem you have determined is illegal, namely the fence being built in our liberated territories. The fence, which has proven its worth in gold in the fact that terrorism has been curtailed in most of the areas where this fence has been completed, is the fence you want me to tear down. But that is not of any importance to any of you.
Understandable.
After all, you remember those fences erected in Dachau, Aushwitz and Treblinka concentration and extermination camps? You saw no problem in those electrified, barbed wire fences, designed to keep me naked, starved, beaten and tortured. You exhibited not much concern when those fences around the crematoriums and killing fields took their grisly toll. Actually, you refused to get involved. In fact, the majority of your governments and citizenry celebrated the erection of such fences because it kept us dirty, filthy, black-plague spreading sub-human Jews from continuing to spread our disease. Your governments saw no injustice in the fences designed to separate me from my parents, my wife and my children. In fact, most of your populace (you know, those seeking justice by demanding that we tear down the fence we are building) enthusiastically embraced the concept of fencing me in and separating me from my property, my loved ones, my very life. Where was your indignation and outrage? Where, oh where, was the justice you claim you are pursuing?
There are fences in many areas in the world. Some are designed to prevent poor, starving people from seeking a better life just a few feet over the standing fence. They call these fences 'security against illegal immigration'. Then there are those fences and barriers that were built specifically to protect a populace burdened with a daily dose of terror and mayhem. They call them, if you are not aware, 'anti-terror security fences' and 'security fences separating conflict zones'. I wonder what would be your verdict vis-a-vis the American fence between Texas and Mexico? Or the fence between Kuwait and Iraq? Or Spain and Morocco? Or have you heard about the fence between India and Bangladesh?
Dear Judges,
There was no need to create another agency whose sole purpose is the condemnation of Israel and the defending of her enemies. For that, the UN already exists, as does the European Union. But now that you have established this kangaroo court, and have wrapped yourself in the mantle of world representation, may I suggest that you erase the word "justice" from the banner of your self-appointed court. There is no justice in what you seek. You are pursuing the wrong track.
The numbers matter not. Not so very long ago, you watched my loved ones burn in the furnaces behind the fences you cheerfully observed being built. You didn't sneeze once from the black acrid smoke and stench of our burning bodies. You shed no tears as my starved and emaciated children, my babies, stood a few feet from those concentration camp fences. You smiled as the old and the forlorn, the ones too despondent to continue, ended the miserable life you helped in inflicting, by running and touching the deadly fences. I still remember the sparking electricity frying those unfortunates hanging on the barbed wire. And the world you supposedly represent stood still.
Then... I was found 'guilty' in every war, every defensive action I took to protect myself. You condemned me in 1956 and forced me to retreat and surrender the belligerent territories I captured. In 1967, you stood by as Gamal Abdel Nassr of Egypt threatened to throw me into the sea and finish the job Hitler began. You stood by, unflinching, as the call for my annihilation was shouted throughout the Arab world. And then you condemned me for refusing to die. The echoes of the Six-Day War were still reverberating, but you proceeded immediately to demand that I, once again, relinquish what I justifiably won in my war of self-defense.
And the audacity continued unabated as you watched and applauded the Durban gathering of every possible anti-Semitic snake. And you uttered not a word of protest as the gathering meant to combat worldwide racism became a call for anti-Israel, anti-Semitic racism by the whole wide world. And only recently, without flinching, you found me guilty in Jenin and Bethlehem, in Gaza and in Ramallah, for responding to the vicious terrorist onslaught unleashed by your sweethearts.
Perhaps some clarification is necessary in order to set matters straight. Homicide bombings, sirs, are illegal. Ambushing innocent drivers and slaying sleeping children is also considered illegal in international law. Lynching, beheading and murdering pregnant mothers and tiny babies is also illegal. And, correct me if I'm wrong, blowing up buses carrying innocent civilians is illegal, isn't it? And using ambulances to transport explosives, is also, I believe, considered illegal. The list of illegalities committed by the vicious Arab marauders against my people is so well-documented that I need not bore you with every detail.
And what is also illegal, sirs, is my government's lukewarm response to the ongoing terror. No other country in the world would have tolerated the bloodshed we are experiencing by those hoodlums you are legitimizing. But the most prominent illegality inherent in the entire compilation of illegalities is the illegality of your asinine ruling.
I feel for you. Having set up your ludicrous puppet show, no other agenda ever reaches your desks. Inundated with the myriad problems I am creating in the world, your real task of pursuing justice in the world can not move forward. On the other hand, as I understand it, the focal point and main reason this illegal court was set up was to prosecute me for defending my existence. Every other supposed or proposed agenda must take a back seat to the immense problems my mere existence does create. For taking up so much of your precious time, I apologize profusely.
In conclusion, let me leave you with the following: As long as there are rulings, edicts, decisions and statements that declare, proclaim, announce and promote my guilt, I know that I am doing the right thing and walking the correct path. Shall you, ever, G-d forbid, applaud any action I take as the correct policy, I will begin to worry.
You can take a long walk on a short plank and thanks for the ruling. It will always remind me on which side of the fence you are standing.
Last Friday, the International Court of Justice in The Hague demanded the dismantling of the wall with which Israel is sealing off its people from the Palestinians. The court's repugnance is readily understood. It is hard for many to sympathise with Israel's security fears as long as it seems committed to territorial expansion - each day, settlements grow on the West Bank.
Yet the court condemned a measure that is probably indispensable, to give Israelis a sufficient sense of physical security that some day they would be capable of surrendering the territory beyond. Israelis perceive only that the barrier works, and that it is saving lives. After losing almost 1,000 dead to Palestinian gunmen and suicide bombers in the latest four-year intifada, they point out that since March, terrorism has declined markedly.
For this they thank the vast edifice of wire and concrete, eventually intended to be more than 400 miles in length, separating Jews and Arabs. Its construction has been accompanied by the closure of borders to all but a trickle of humanitarian cases.
The economic cost both to Palestinians and Israelis has been dire but Israelis believe the price worth paying. Ehud Barak, a former prime minister, is perceived by most of his own nation as a discredited dove. Yet he said to me: "If I was prime minister, I would look any foreigner in the eye and say, 'We have 900 reasons to build the fence between Israel and the West Bank. You can count the reasons in our graveyards, in our people killed by suicide bombers. We are entitled to do this, even if we have to defy the world' ."
World opinion recoils from the ruthlessness with which the line of the barrier is being drawn, dividing Palestinian shepherds from their grazing and villagers from their neighbours. Few Israelis are troubled by these details.
"We will never go back to the 1967 borders. Why does the world always talk of Israel's mistakes? Why not of the Arab world's mistakes?" Ehud Olmert, Israel's deputy prime minister, told me.
"Had the Arab countries understood that there was no chance of destroying Israel, if they had responded to the generous offers Israel made after the 1967 war, of swapping land for peace, they could have changed the course of history."
Olmert's unspoken implication, of course, is that Arab intransigence has legitimised the Israel's expansion. But where should this stop? The great divide in Israel is between those content with the barrier as the nation's frontier, and those committed to holding thousands of settlements beyond it. Liberal opinion would abandon most of the West Bank in return for peace. The ruling Likud Party and 230,000 militant settlers want more, much more.
Many Likud supporters want to retain large areas of the West Bank beyond the fence. While a Right-wing newspaper leader writer whom I met in Jerusalem started a conversation on this issue encouragingly, saying: "The land inside the fence is the maximum territory Israel would try to keep under any final settlement." He then added: "Except in the Jordan valley, of course, where there are no Palestinians." The Jordan valley, empty or no, is inside occupied territory.
I told Michael Oren, a highly respected American-born Jerusalem academic, that like many people, I felt muddled about where Israel's borders should be - how to reconcile justice to the Palestinians with some acceptance of changed realities since 1967. He responded briskly: "I'm not muddled. The Palestinians have had a raw deal - chiefly from their own leaders. When offered a choice between land and peace, Israelis have always chosen peace. In 1982 there were more Jewish settlements in Sinai than there are today in the West Bank, and Israel gave them up."
Yet he added: "Part of the long-term solution has to lie in Jordan. A sizeable part of its population - and the dynamic part - is Palestinian. The Hashemite dynasty was stuck in there by the British, and some time it's going to have to be sorted out. The UN's Resolution 242 did not call for an Israeli return to the pre-1967 borders, but a return to defensible borders."
In other words, like many Israelis, Mr Oren believes that a long-term solution must allow Israel to keep settlements while the Palestinians gain territory from the Jordanians. This policy is unlikely to find favour with world opinion, never mind in Jordan or with Palestinians.
The issue of settlements, Mr Barak believes, should have been tackled when plans for the barrier were drawn up. The Ariel Sharon government's great mistake is not building the wall, but in doing so unilaterally: "It should be done as part of a coherent plan," he says.
"One: a clear long-term commitment to dismantle all the isolated Jewish settlements beyond the wall. Two: an immediate commitment to dismantle 60 to 70 settlements, move 60,000 to 70,000 people. Such action would convince people we are serious.
"Three, put on the table a proposal to the Palestinians: say that we are ready to hold negotiations with no preconditions beyond a full cessation of violence. In the absence of doing all these things together, the fence becomes simply a unilateral attempt to impose borders."
Which is exactly how the Palestinians and the justices of The Hague perceive it. The wall, and the closure of the West Bank to civilian traffic, have heightened Palestinian despair. It has become hard to get suicide bombers into Israel, yet the supply of recruits eager to sacrifice themselves is greater than ever. Behind the wall, Palestinian rage is building.
Israel just might be able to reconcile the world to its barrier if it seemed willing to quit the Jewish settlements beyond. Yet the settlement movement has been given new impetus by President George W Bush's support.
A mile or two beyond Sharon's wall, Dror Etkes, of a peacenik organisation named Settlement Watch, lowers his binoculars and points out a cluster of new settlement outposts which have sprung up in recent months - some merely trailer homes, others large apartment constructions.
"Not for one day since the 1980s has Israel ceased settlement activity on the West Bank," says Mr Etkes. "The name of the game is to exclude indigenous Palestinians from the largest possible area. Expansion of the settlements is a vital weapon in Israel's attempt to create a society on Palestinian land which can be sustained past all future 'peace negotiations'."
The settlers are passionately committed to holding their ground. Ze'ev Schiff, Israel's most respected military commentator, believes that when Israel quits even parts of the West Bank, it will be impossible to do so without using force against them. If he is right, the trauma for Israeli society would be huge.
Efraim Halevy, the former head of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, told me: "Settlers are not a lunatic fringe. A lot of them are people of very high quality." He muses unhappily: "What will be the nature of the crisis we shall go through in the next few years if we withdraw from most of the territories? How will Israel identify itself?" Israel will ignore Friday's judgment, but these questions won't go away.
Essential measure of self-defence, or infringement of property and movement rights? It was clear from its beginnings in the mid-1990s - as a proposal made by a dovish member of the Labour cabinet - that a security fence separating Israel from those determined to murder its citizens would be not one or the other but both.
To erect a barrier 730 kilometres long, three- to eight-metres high, is impossible without creating hardship for some Palestinian farmers and villagers. The Israeli Supreme Court, acting with due process unknown elsewhere in the Middle East, has already recognized this and ruled that Israel must find an alternative route for 30 to 40 particularly oppressive kilometres north of Jerusalem.
It is worth remembering that this ruling was in response to complaints brought by Palestinian villagers themselves. They have the right to challenge expropriations and to be compensated for lost land. The system is not much different from the system that prevails in other democratic countries when a major public project is deemed to supersede the rights of individual landowners.
None of this deterred the International Court of Justice in the Hague - the main legal tribunal of the United Nations - from yesterday declaring the fence illegal and a violation of the rights of Palestinians. The 14-1 decision, which is non-binding, predictably included a call on the UN to take action to prevent construction from proceeding. This is doubtless an invitation for another anti-Israel resolution by the reflexively anti-Israel General Assembly. It is also more weary evidence that in disputes before world bodies, Israel is rarely given a fair hearing.
There is precisely one good reason to continue building the fence: It works. According to the Israeli defence ministry, since the erection of the initial stretch of the fence, terrorist penetrations into Israel from the northern West Bank have plunged from 600 per year to zero. Eighty-five Israelis were killed in one month in 2002, before the fence. This year there was a stretch of four months without any civilian casualties. This did not reflect a sudden policy of clemency among Israel's enemies. Indeed, terror spokesmen promised "volcanic" revenge for the assassinations of Hamas founders Sheik Ahmed Yassin and Abdel Aziz Rantisi. The revenge has not materialized.
One issue on which even fair-minded observers are likely to differ is the route followed by the fence. It is true that much of it extends beyond the Green Line of 1967 and into West Bank territories viewed internationally as Palestinian. The status of settlers is hotly disputed within Israel itself. But the government can hardly leave these citizens vulnerable to attacks on the opposite side of the fence. Ideals, again, must contend with reality.
If the court of public opinion rules that the fence is ugly, sad and costly, few will disagree. No nation wishes to spend billions of dollars on security to protect its citizens from ruthless, random attacks. But the larger point, which must never be forgotten, is that no nation should have to do so. Israel must. That is why it must also ignore the Hague ruling.
Israel should consider the Israel Supreme Court's judgment but should disregard the one from ICJ, as they presently do, I believe. Good.
Why doesn't that ICJ court have any Jewish representation there but only judges from countries that are mostly antisemite (France, Belgium, Russian Federal, etc.)?
Sharon should give orders to speed up the building of the fence. He started the thing; he should finish it, eh?
Last edited by Levi on Tue Jul 13, 2004 9:35 am; edited 1 time in total
Posted: Mon Jul 12, 2004 10:44 pm Post subject: What Israel Has Lost
by Richard Baehr
A few weeks back, Charles Krauthammer wrote an article, “Israel’s Intifada Victory,” in which he argued that rather than bringing Israel to its knees, the intifada had been a strategic disaster for the Palestinians. In one sense, Krauthammer is clearly correct: the Palestinian terror campaign now appears to be waning, and the construction of Israel’s security fence promises to greatly minimize the threat of future terrorist incursions from the West Bank into Israel. But in another crucial sense, the intifada has been seriously detrimental to Israel. It has made the Israeli Palestinian conflict the focus of Muslims around the world, and isolated Israel internationally more than at any point in its short history.
During the years of the Oslo process, there was a very slow process of normalization of relations between Israel and some of its Arab neighbors. Strong defenders of Israel, such as Dennis Prager, argued that this was important enough to move ahead with the peace process despite its risks. Negotiations were conducted with Israel’s most implacable foe, Syria, as well as with the Palestinian Authority. After a surge of terrorism following Arafat’s return, the years from 1996 to 2000 were years of relative quiet on that front, and the economies of both Israel and the Palestinian territories grew rapidly. Over a hundred and fifty thousand Palestinians were working within Israel, and Israelis were spending lots of money in the territories, including their losses in the Jericho casino.
For a career terrorist such as Yassar Arafat, this situation was threatening. Circumstances were being created in which many Palestinians might have begun to see half a loaf (a Palestinian state on some of the land) as better than the situation that had existed since 1967. Many Palestinians might have been ready for compromise if the leadership of the movement had the courage to show them the way.
Arafat, of course, had never accepted Israel’s existence as a predominantly Jewish state, nor did he ever accept that a Palestinian state should be confined to the West Bank and Gaza. Even during the detente period in the 90s, Arafat continued to talk of Jaffa, and Haifa and of course Jerusalem, as Palestinian and Arab cities. And he constantly demanded a right of return for three generations of descendants of refugees from the 1948 war to move back to their homes within pre-67 Israel, despite the fact that 95% of these so-called refugees had never even set foot within pre-67 Israel. At times, such as when Bibi Netanyahu completed the tunnel near the Western Wall, Arafat created a provocation leading to a short but deadly burst of violence, which resulted in nearly 100 dead Israelis and Palestinians. In case they had forgotten, this served to remind Israelis that the terror weapon had not been bottled up for all time.
The culmination of the Oslo process came at the Camp David talks in the summer of 2000. Some in the Israeli peace camp (and their allies in the American Jewish community) continue to argue naively that Arafat really wanted to get a deal done, but Israel’s offer was not “generous enough.” Some of this revisionist history is attributable to a more obvious explanation -- the participants in the left-of-center Israeli governments who trusted Arafat for seven years, and believed he was capable of ending the conflict, do not want to appear to history and their present day colleagues in Israel to have been rubes.
What Arafat hoped to achieve with the intifada is anybody’s guess. Did he merely want to squeeze a few more concessions from Israel? I doubt this, because it suggests that Arafat believed a deal could be struck that ends the conflict. If there is no intersecting set between the best Israel could offer (a two state solution) and what Arafat ultimately desired (a single Palestinian Arab-dominated state), then clearly no slightly sweeter compromise offer by Israel would end the conflict.
Did he envision the intifada taking the course it did? I tend to doubt that all the terror groups which participated in the intifada were merely Arafat’s puppets. Some groups and leaders were positioning themselves for the power struggles to come in a post-Arafat political entity. And killing large numbers of Israelis quickly became the most socially acceptable way to achieve political prominence in the deep sickness of the Palestinian political culture.
But whether planned at each stage or not, the continuation of the conflict has played out in a way that has been intensely harmful to Israeli interests. The emergence of satellite television and the internet in homes across the Arab and greater Muslim world, and the extraordinarily vicious way in which Israel has been portrayed in these media, stoked resentment against Israel and Jews to a frightening level. The behavior of disaffected Arab youth in cities across Europe, where Jews have been mauled, and their synagogues and institutions bombed and defaced, is a sign that even in “civilized” Western countries, the anger of the Arabs towards the “Zionist entity” knows no bounds.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been front and center in the faces of Arabs and Muslim for four years. And the presentation of this conflict has not, to use a favored phrase of the New York Times, been particularly “nuanced.” The Jews are presented as murderers, baby killers, occupiers, oppressors, and brutal settlers. The Palestinians are mere victims. As a result, the entire Arab and Muslim world is now involved to a much greater extent in the conflict than in prior periods. Hence, it is not just for the Palestinians to make a deal with Israel.
Arafat has always exercised some degree of control over how internationalized this conflict became. Now his power to stoke the masses has been greatly enhanced. As Krauthammer has argued, the Palestinians have suffered from Arafat’s war, just as the Israelis have. Their incomes and standard of living have declined. Many died or were wounded. Any short term hope for an improved future and greater political autonomy has disappeared. Bitterness reigns.
But if your goal is war and struggle until victory (as is the case with Arafat and many Palestinian leaders), this suffering was a necessary move in the long term struggle. A mellowing of the mood of Palestinians, and improvement in their lives, as occurred from 1993 to 2000, was inimical to the goal of hardening the Palestinians for the battle ahead. Now, Palestinians detest Israel more than they did before Oslo. And they have over a billion Muslims who support any and all actions to strike back at Israel. Compromise is not in the air, and is not possible.
Hence Sharon’s plan – to lessen the area of direct contact between the two sides and achieve some separation, is probably the best that can be achieved in the years ahead. The security fence will both limit Palestinian terror attacks (and Israeli reprisals), and enable Israel to remove roadblocks in the West Bank, and eventually ease living conditions for the residents. With the Palestinians behaving like a wounded tiger, the Israelis have chosen not to let the tiger roam free to mangle their people.
The decision Friday by the International Court of “Justice” telling Israel to remove the fence from Palestinian territory has to be seen in the light of what has occurred the past four years. The Court would have needed a modicum of courage to pass on the controversy, and try to defuse an issue that requires political resolution, rather than a judicial one. Israel’s own Supreme Court had already ruled on the matter, taking into account both the Israeli security concerns, and any hardships caused for the Palestinians. Unlike the ICJ, the Israeli Supreme Court acknowledged the security issue directly. For the ICJ, only hardship for the Palestinians mattered, not to even mention their prejudging a resolution of the political conflict. Israeli lives are not cheap, and many Palestinians want to slaughter Jews. That, after all, is why the fence is being built.
As pointed out in an Australian newspaper, the Court opinion also took a slam at anti-terror measures by the United States in its opinion, a fact not elsewhere reported, by effectively rewriting Article 51 of the UN Charter, and limiting the self-defense or retaliatory measures a nation may take if it is not directly attacked by a state. Since both the US and Israel have aggressively fought both terrorists and their state sponsors and accommodators, the Court essentially chose to shield both the perpetrators, and their state sponsors.
Israel now has only one ally, the United States, another reason why the International Court might have chosen to take a shot at both countries in its opinion. Fortunately, that ally in the person of President George Bush, has been unwavering, and solid in backing Israel through an extraordinarily difficult four year period. But the pressure on Israel by the Palestinians and their allies will continue to be applied in every court, and international body the Palestinians and their Arab and Muslim allies can find. Outside of the United States, the rest of the world is now either part of the mass movement that wants Israel gone, or cowering in the face of the intense anger of this group of nations and people who hate Israel.
While thousands are slaughtered in the Sudan, the International Court of Justice, the General Assembly and the Security Council will worry about cutting down olive trees. While nationals of various countries are beheaded in Muslim countries around the world, the UN will focus on Israel.
Arafat has achieved nothing for his people, but also a great deal. He has made them the world’s chosen victims, and their grievance the only one for which the world demands action. And by so doing, he has insured that in this decade, and for this generation, the conflict will continue, and remain bitter, a raw sore for all those who now have bought into the Palestinians’ fantasy history of how this all got to be this way. Few in the Arab or Muslim world remember Arafat walking out of Camp David, and if they do, they undoubtedly think he made the right decision. Arafat has played the ultimate Palestinian card -- the weak against the strong -- and asked the world to choose. It has chosen. This is no victory for Israel.
Unlike the ICJ, the Israeli Supreme Court acknowledged the security issue directly. For the ICJ, only hardship for the Palestinians mattered, not to even mention their prejudging a resolution of the political conflict. Israeli lives are not cheap, and many Palestinians want to slaughter Jews. That, after all, is why the fence is being built.
Quote:
With the Palestinians behaving like a wounded tiger, the Israelis have chosen not to let the tiger roam free to mangle their people.
As pointed out in an Australian newspaper, the Court opinion also took a slam at anti-terror measures by the United States in its opinion, a fact not elsewhere reported, by effectively rewriting Article 51 of the UN Charter, and limiting the self-defense or retaliatory measures a nation may take if it is not directly attacked by a state. Since both the US and Israel have aggressively fought both terrorists and their state sponsors and accommodators, the Court essentially chose to shield both the perpetrators, and their state sponsors.
This is the real problem here! That is why The Judge has to come and deal with the UN and the world at large, protect His People, restore peace and justice for all, and damn the guilty ones!
July 13, 2004 -- The United Nations has once again disgraced itself, courtesy of the profoundly misnamed International Court of Justice, whose morally bankrupt ruling last week gave a green light to Palestinian terrorism.
With only an American jurist dissenting, the 15-member panel declared the security fence being built by Israel to be a gross violation of international law. It called on the General Assembly and the Security Council to "consider what further action is required."
Missing from the decision, of course, was any reference to what has prompted construction.
Israel built the barrier because terrorism, emanating from the Palestinian-controlled territories, has taken more than 1,000 Israeli lives since the fall of 2000.
And while the international community has repeatedly condemned virtually every forceful action Israel undertook to defend itself, it has refused to press Yasser Arafat to fulfill his repeated promise to put an end to the terror.
What alternative did Israel have?
Ever since the fence (still only partly built) began going up, anti-Israel terrorism attacks emanating from the West Bank have fallen 90 percent — with a 70 percent reduction in the number of Israelis killed, according to Israel's government. And literally dozens of would-be attackers, including suicide bombers, have been foiled by Israeli security. Moreover, as the Israelis note, the fence is temporary: It's reversible — but the deaths of those killed by unrestrained Palestinian terror are not. Which is why Prime Minister Ariel Sharon defiantly — and correctly — vowed that construction will continue.
The court's decision was purely political; though non-binding, it is meant to give the Palestinians and their allies a quasi-legal basis for an attempt to bring economic and other sanctions against Israel.
Shamefully, the European Union moved quickly to endorse the ruling, citing the "untold humanitarian and economic hardship" to Palestinians. As for the "humanitarian hardship" to the families of Israelis killed by terrorism, the EU evidently has no sympathy.
The White House, on the other hand, rightly dismissed the decision as the political sham it is.
Only when the United Nations is prepared to treat anti-Israel terrorism with the same zeal — by declaring it a violation of international law and imposing tough sanctions on its perpetrators and collaborators — might the world body be in a position to pass moral judgment on Israel's readiness to defend its citizens.
July 13, 2004 -- AS the Cold War waned, President Ronald Reagan went to Berlin and defiantly turned to the Soviet Union and said "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" Now, we should turn toward Israel and say, despite the recent decision of the International Court, "Mr. Sharon, build this wall!"
The contrast with Berlin is striking: Nikita Khrushchev built the Berlin Wall to keep people in; Israel has built its fence to keep terrorists out.
The 480-mile security fence is being erected by Israel to keep out Palestinian terrorists who have killed almost 1,000 civilians since their campaign of suicide/homicide bombings began. To put the Israeli losses in perspective with their small population, that death toll is the equivalent of 50,000 dead in the United States — slightly fewer than we lost in the entire Vietnam War.
The fence has succeeded brilliantly. No Israeli has been killed in a terrorist attack in an area where the fence has been completed in all of 2004 and terrorist attacks are down substantially from the rate of previous years.
Now the International Court of Justice, dismissing Israeli security concerns, has ruled that Israel violated international law in routing the fence over Palestinian property. The fact is that a multilateral peace in the Middle East is clearly impossible. At the end of his tenure, President Bill Clinton negotiated a treaty with very generous terms only to watch it be rejected by Yasser Arafat and the PLO delegation. It is fanciful to believe that the cessation of a few miles of territory to an independent Palestinian state is going to prevent suicide bombings and other acts of terror by deranged fanatics.
Nor is it realistic to expect to deter suicide bombers by threatening to kill them. Unilateral Israel military action, occupying Palestinian territory and rooting around for terrorists, just antagonizes the world and does little to protect Israel or deter attacks.
A fence, which I have urged for years, is the best — and only — way to protect Israel. It is a unilateral way to make peace. The ICJ ruling, which is non-binding, came after the Israeli High Court ruled that the government must reroute part of the fence around Jerusalem to reduce the hardship to the Palestinian population.
But if the route and location of the fence causes economic dislocation to the Palestinian community and makes a contiguous political state harder to achieve, that is just too damn bad. For decades, Israel has been willing to negotiate acceptable terms with the Palestinian authorities — only to see each agreement destroyed by their inability to control their terrorist-inclined extremists.
Israel had to stanch the bleeding caused by the massive terror attacks of 2002 and 2003 — raids that amounted to the Holocaust on the installment plan. It was by only taking matters into its own hands and making terror raids physically impossible that Israel have been able to protect its own citizens and make military raids into the West Bank less necessary.
This wall, combined with a program of targeted strikes against terrorist leaders, has proven highly effective and must not be reversed.
The Israeli action also holds important lessons for the United States. In effect, Israel is saying that neither negotiation nor military raids can destroy the Palestinian terror organization. But technology, by putting Israeli civilians out of reach, can do so.
In our deployments in Iraq, we should heed the Israeli example and take care to insulate our forces from as much hostile action as possible, realizing that those the terrorists cannot reach, they cannot kill.
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