July 9, 2009
by Sonja Karkar
Australians for Palestine
Women for Palestine
It is five years since the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that Israel’s Wall is a violation of international law because it invades Palestinian territory. Nevertheless, construction of the Wall has continued. The advisory opinion was sought by the United Nations General Assembly and was the first time the Court had been asked to look at the legality of an Israeli-Palestinian issue. It was delivered on 9 July 2004 and clearly spelt out Israel’s obligations under international humanitarian law.
The 14-1 majority opinion rejected Israel’s illegitimate security justifications for the Wall and said that any part of the Israeli security Wall which diverges from the 1949 Armistice Line – also known as the 1967 borders or the Green Line – and encroaches on occupied Palestinian land in the West Bank, is illegal. The Israeli Government had been advised not to take part in the oral hearings because its presence would then have made it party to the Court’s decision. In its written submission, Israel said that the Court had no authority to discuss “the terrorism prevention fence” because of its basic right to self-defence and that by hearing an “overtly political” issue, the Court was endangering peace negotiations between itself and the Palestinians. To win over public opinion, it brought the burnt-out remains of a bus to the Hague and displayed the names and photos of Israel’s victims of suicide bombings outside the Court. Israel’s purpose was to show that the Wall is necessary for Israel’s security against Palestinian violence. What was not on show were the results of Israel’s overwhelming violence against Palestinian civilians.
The Wall clearly violates their most fundamental human rights, yet Israel has deflected its legal obligations by insisting that the Wall is a “temporary “ structure, purely for self-defence and security. The court ruling reasoned that if the Wall was in fact intended for self-defence, it should have been built on the Israeli side of the Green Line. The Wall, however, is being built well into the occupied territory in order to annex illegal Israeli settlements and in the process is dividing Palestinian areas, fragmenting communities and separating many Palestinians from their means of livelihood and access to health, education and other services. The Court ruled the Wall should be dismantled immediately and that compensation should be paid for the damage caused.
Is the advisory opinion binding?
Although not binding on states, advisory opinions are very persuasive statements on questions of international law. The legal reasoning used to arrive at such opinions are based on the same rules and procedures that govern the Court’s binding judgments. Consequently, they are influential and are likely to have significant political and diplomatic effects, which if nothing else, will embarrass the offending country. It also adds considerable weight to the “discomfort” already being felt in the international community about Israel’s continual disregard of its legal responsibilities as an occupying state.
Were Israel’s reasons for not appearing reasonable?
By claiming the right to self-defence, Israel forgets that it is the Occupier, that it is occupying Palestinian land and that its occupation is illegal according to international law. This land belongs to the Palestinians and it is Israel which is continually expropriating Palestinian land for illegal settlements and destroying Palestinian land to build the wall. Despite UN resolutions condemning Israel’s actions and upholding the rights of the Palestinians, it has been ineffectual in holding Israel to account. Israel’s claim that the Court was endangering the peace process has no validity. Any peace negotiations were and are meaningless while Israel continues its occupation, colonisation and using the wall to expropriate more territory. If Israel had been party to the proceedings, the Court could have required Israel to return expropriated land to the Palestinians. When the vote was put to the UN Security Council, it was only with the help of the US veto power that Israel was protected from a binding resolution that would have enforced this ruling.
Is the wall temporary as Israel claims?
If the Wall is a “temporary security measure” to combat the threat of suicide bombings as claimed by Israel, then it should be built along the Green Line, that is, the 1949 Armistice Line between Israel and the West Bank. Instead, the Wall is being built deep inside the West Bank – sometimes as far as 20kms inside – in order to catch the illegal Israeli settlements and where it adheres to the 1967 border it is built on the Palestinian side of that border. A sub-system of smaller enclaves has been designed outside the main Wall to imprison the 500-600,000 Palestinians who will be trapped between the Wall and the Green Line. Once the 700+km Wall is completed, 55% of the West Bank will be de facto annexed to Israel leaving almost 4 million Palestinians squeezed into about 7% of their entire former homeland including the Gaza Strip – a figure that will be even less if one takes into account Israel’s continuing settlement expansion, military “no-go” zones and Israeli-only roads criss-crossing the West Bank. The Wall, which is 8 metres (25 feet) high and constructed from thick concrete, incorporates watchtowers and is flanked by patrol roads. In places, it becomes a 3 metre-high electric fence with a spread that is horizontally damaging to the landscape as intrusion sensors, trenches on either side, sandpits to show footprints, rings of razor wire and patrol roads equally alienate the Palestinians. At a cost of $US2 million for every kilometre, this wall/fence can hardly be called a “temporary measure”. For the Palestinians, the razed farms, demolished homes, fractured communities and destroyed lives are so catastrophic that no reparations could adequately compensate them – so far none have ever been offered.
Has the Wall stopped suicide bombings?
The world has heard the disinformation repeated over and over again so often that “everybody knows” the Wall has stopped suicide bombers from entering Israel. A closer look at a number of factors soon enough tells us a different story.
The Wall is nowhere near completed and also has numerous breaches along its entire length. Tens of thousands of Palestinian workers have been slipping illegally into Israel in search of work ever since Israel reduced the number of work permits for Palestinians by eighty per cent.
The Shin Bet’s own statistics (reported by Amos Harel in Haaretz, 2 Jan 06) acknowledged that most of the suicide bombers were not deterred by the Wall, but crossed into Israel through the checkpoints where inspection procedures are sloppy. That there has been a definite drop in the number of suicide bombings since 2005, according to Israeli government figures, might have more to do with the truce agreed to between the Palestinian Authority and Israel at the 2005 Sharm el-Sheikh summit than an unfinished Wall. It is interesting to note that Hamas agreed to the truce while Israel ignored its commitments – continuing to arrest, assassinate and terrorise an exhausted population.
What is most suspect though is the Wall’s unpredictable route inside Palestinian territory which makes it far more difficult to create an impenetrable security barrier than if it had followed the Green Line. Considering all these aspects, Israel’s intentions are plain for all to see – the Wall is expropriating more and more Palestinian land.
Human impact of the wall
All the talk of Israel’s security never takes into account Palestinian security nor the ongoing destruction to the fabric of Palestinian life. Effectively, the Wall takes away the right of Palestinians to move freely within their own land. It has drastically affected their health needs, their ability to work, their access to education, their right to own property, their basic food and water requirements, and devastatingly for the children – the right to their identity.
Most critically, Israel’s Wall has caused very serious damage to Palestinian water supplies resulting in the destruction of wells and cisterns and the expropriation of some 35,000 metres of water pipes. It has also separated over 300,000 Palestinians from essential water aquifers causing astronomical agricultural losses to Palestinian farmers in a region where water is already extremely scarce. The Wall’s trajectory has been deliberately planned to take in the large illegal Israeli settlements that have been built over the Western mountain aquifer – in another words, annexing this vital water source for the unrestricted use of the settler population and Israel. The agricultural districts in the middle of the northern West Bank are particularly affected and any existing Palestinian wells are soon undermined by Israeli settlers digging new and much deeper wells alongside Palestinian ones to extract their precious water.
The Wall has set up a system of Apartheid which clearly benefits the State of Israel and its settler immigrants at the humiliating expense of the Palestinian civilian population. The International Court of Justice has ruled that the Wall must come down; the United Nations has passed resolutions calling Israel to account; Israel is clearly in breach of international law. Nevertheless, Israel’s Wall continues to create unsustainable living conditions for the Palestinians, and we are beginning to see the devastating consequences – forcible expulsion, or what is sometimes called transfer, of thousands of Palestinian civilians. This is ethnic cleansing, a genocidal policy that is a crime against humanity, and to our eternal shame, we are all watching.
Sonja Karkar is the founder of Women for Palestine and one of the founders and co-convener of Australians for Palestine in Melbourne, Australia. Her articles have been published variously in journals online – CounterPunch, Electronic Intifada, ZNet, The Palestine Chronicle, the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Friends of Al Aqsa – and in the Australian media. She is the editor of the Australians for Palestine website.
On Saturday 11 July 2009, there will be a speakout in the Bourke Street Mall, Melbourne from 11.00am to protest the siege of Gaza and Israel’s Apartheid Wall. Below are the cards that will be distributed to the public in the hope that people will protest to our Foreign Minister Stephen Smith.
THE WALL protest card July09
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