With the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague having considered Israel’s wall, the question is what the final decision will be. Who — Palestinians or Israelis — will win the hearts and minds of the international community and, just as importantly, the 15 judges who will make a decision? More than likely, the court will rule the wall a violation of international law. Most observers consider this all but certain. Beyond the fact that the wall contravenes a number of international and humanitarian laws, the basic facts clearly establish that even the location of the wall on occupied Palestinian land is illegal. If completed, the wall would leave Palestinians with only half the West Bank within isolated, non-contiguous walled enclaves, rendering the two-state solution as envisaged in the road map a practical impossibility.
If the expected ruling in support of the Palestinians is important, so too is how the court hearing plays on the world stage. Again, Palestinians will come out on top. Over the three-day period, dozens of luminaries from the rarefied world of international law repeatedly exposed Israeli policies against the Palestinian population, its glaring attempts to grab land and its systematic violations of international and humanitarian law. Palestinian presentations were made before the world’s pre-eminent judicial body and the world’s media, which transmitted the sessions live. Since the case was one of the most important, and the most watched, in the court’s 58-year-old history, it provided the perfect forum for the Palestinians to explain to the world that suicide bombings — the reason, Israel claims, for the wall — cannot be viewed in a vacuum but must be linked to the far more bloody terror exercised by Israel against the Palestinians since its founding. The wall does not stand between so-called terrorists and Israelis but between the farmer and his land, the child and his school, the patient and his doctor. Families have also been forcibly separated and Muslims rendered unable to visit holy places and sites.
As for Israel, having seen the support the Palestinians got for their cause, Tel Aviv realized too late that it was a mistake to have boycotted the hearings. Despite an intensive Israeli PR campaign outside the court to make the wall acceptable to the world, the most abiding images were of the Berlin Wall and of South Africa’s apartheid policy. Indeed, as Israeli Justice Minister Tommy Lapid recalled, it was a similar decision of the same ICJ that led to pressure be put on South Africa to end the barbarity of apartheid. The minister has already voiced concerns that a judgment favorable to the Palestinians could expose Israel to a similar boycott. Unfortunately, the court’s decision will be nonbinding and Israel has a history of flouting international law. For now, however, the Palestinians have at least won in the court of public opinion.
