The Real Meaning of the Fence Ruling

Yossi Klein Halevi has a good article on the real meaning of the ICJ ruling on the fence.

The real meaning of the court's decision, then, is to delegitimize not Israel's right to self-defense but its right to claim any territory, even for self-defense, over the Green Line.

The danger of that decision is to create the legal groundwork for an imposed solution that would force Israel back to the 1967 borders, even without a peace agreement — Yasser Arafat's dream scenario.

And so the war Israel needs to fight now isn't so much over the decision itself but its premise: that all land beyond the 1967 border belongs by right to Palestine.

The fact that the "Court" describes the WB in this way - the way that most of Europe and the Left describes it - is another example of the utter failure of Israel's propaganda efforts. Under international law, the WB is NOT "Palestinian land" and never was. It is land that legally is disputed; it is the unallocated portion of the original Palestine Mandate whose status must be determined by negotiations, which is exactly what the UN stated in Resolution 242. This is the information that Israel needs to get out more forcefully.