There has been so much blood, so much despair, so much injustice and so much anger over the tragedy of Palestine. Yesterday the quiet and carefully measured judgment from the United Nations’ International Court of Justice in The Hague on the illegality of Israel’s 400-mile West Bank wall resonated all the louder for its calmness.
Here was an international body handing down a decision arrived at after a painstaking sifting of the evidence for and against the wall. The court has reached the conclusion that the wall is illegal, that construction must stop and that compensation must be made to Palestinians whose homes and farms have been destroyed or blighted by the edifice.
If Israel wants a wall, there is nothing to stop the Sharon government building it on its own territory. But even though the Israelis have claimed that it is only a temporary measure until suicide bombings stop, the judges at the International Court were firm that this does not entitle Israel to build the wall on Palestinian land.
The Sharon government had anticipated this verdict and said because it was not binding, it would not be bound by it. It preferred to point to last week’s decision by the Israel Supreme Court that a part of the wall should be rerouted because of the hardship it would cause. This judgment proved nothing because it ignored the basic fact that Israel is simply not entitled under international law to throw up this monstrous construction on land that is not its own.
History shows that Israel will now sit tight and hope that the United States will once again come to its aid by blocking any further action. The process has already begun, with a White House spokesman denouncing the decision and claiming the court was “not the appropriate forum”.
But Washington has some difficulty this time. Though The Hague court’s decision cannot of itself force Israel to comply, it can form the basis for action by the UN. In the normal course of affairs the United States would squash any anti-Israeli initiative with its Security Council veto, but this is not a good moment for the Bush White House to start laying down the law at the UN.
The only way that it can disengage itself from the troubles it has unleashed in Iraq is by having the UN accept a powerful mandate to step in and support the Iraqis. Bush has always refused to admit that American support for Israel lies at the heart of the distrust and hostility it faces in the Arab world. However, with the International Court of Justice’s carefully argued decision, Washington has an opportunity to make its critics in the region sit up and think. If it accepts the ruling and backs the United Nations General Assembly unequivocally when, as seems almost certain, it calls on Israel to comply with the judgment, the Sharon government will be unable to shrug off the decision. There has been a clear and fragrant breach of international law and the world’s self-appointed policeman ought to find that completely unacceptable.
