Over the last several decades, when the United Nations had the temerity to pass resolutions, and the International Court of Justice in The Hague to pass rulings, calling on it to cease and desist, Israel put itself up there with Dick Cheney in the foul epithets department.
The United Nation’s highest court last week ruled that the 440-mile barrier that the Israeli entity is building around, and in many places well inside, the West Bank — a matrix of chain fences, barbed wire and concrete walls that is wreaking havoc on the lives of tens of thousands of ordinary Palestinians — is illegal, violates the human rights of the inhabitants and must be dismantled. It called on countries not to help Israel build it, and “not to render aid or assistance in maintaining the situation created” by the wall — amounting to a call for sanctions.
“Israel is under an obligation to cease forthwith the works of construction of the wall built in Occupied Palestinian Territory, including in and around Jerusalem, and to dismantle forthwith the structure therein situated,” it said. The court ruled 14 to 1 against the wall.
Sure, the court’s opinions, though nonbinding, carry a lot of weight, what Palestinians have come to call a “moral victory.”
Try instead Pyrrhic victory.
For in any other case than that having to do with Israel, a moral victory of this magnitude would have translated into concerted action by the international community to implement the court’s decisions and to pressure the offending government to abide by them. Consider the time when the court ruled against South Africa’s occupation of Namibia in 1971, which resulted in an economic boycott against South Africa’s white-minority government and finally led to Namibia’s independence.
But not when it comes to the Israeli entity, which, forever backed by the US at every turn, is convinced that it has immunity from UN resolutions. The list of these resolutions that several Israeli regimes have over the years failed to comply with is too long to tabulate here, but consider the more notable ones.
Consider, if you wish, Security Council Resolution 337, June 14, 1967, on the right of return of Palestinians forced to flee from their homes; SCR 242, Nov. 22, 1967, that referred to the “inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war” and called for the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the occupied territories; SCR 252, May 21, 1968, which called on Israel to rescind measures changing the legal status of Jerusalem, and end its expropriation of land and property there; and SCR 462, March 1, 1980, that called for the existing settlements to be dismantled — along with countless other resolutions passed in the General Assembly indicting the Zionist entity for blatant breaches of the Geneva Conventions.
All these resolutions are regularly re-affirmed, but none has been implemented. To be sure, Israel would be in violation of many more resolutions of the Security Council had the US not applied its veto.
One such resolution that clearly will not see the light of day, but that the overwhelming majority of the UN member states would dearly love to have passed, is one that condemns Israel’s dreadful arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. It is expected that as early as this week, The Hague ruling will go to the General Assembly where it will be formally passed as a UN resolution.
For Israel, however, it will be the case of yet another decision by the international community to brazenly ignore, knowing it has US backing behind it.
In a speech at the UN General Assembly on Sept. 12, 2002, President Bush said, referring to a recalcitrant Iraq: “Are Security Council Resolutions to be honored and enforced, or cast aside without consequence? Will the United Nations serve the purpose of its founding, or will it be irrelevant? We want the resolutions of the world’s most important multilateral body to be enforced.”
Yet the Bush administration has brought the UN, and along with the US itself, into disrepute by allowing Israel to flout one resolution after another, as Washington goes about expecting Arabs to support its war in Iraq, its war on terrorism and its war on injustice in the Middle East.
