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The opinion issued Friday by the International Court of Justice in The Hague, which stated that the Israeli settlements in the West Bank violate international law and that Israel must end its occupation in the West Bank and East Jerusalem as soon as possible, revealed nothing to Israelis that they did not already know.
The opinion shatters the lie that the occupation is only temporary and intended only for security purposes. This is the lie that Israelis told themselves during decades of occupation while they seized more and more Palestinian land, dispossessed Palestinians of their land and built settlements on it, all under the patronage of successive Israeli governments, through the agency of the settlers and with the backing of the Israel Defense Forces and the judiciary. The opinion bursts this bubble of lies and views various acts of the Israeli government as annexation of the territory.
Yet there is not even a sliver of hope that after 57 years this opinion will spur the State of Israel to wise up and comply with the demands to evacuate the settlements, and to end the occupation and the military control over the Palestinians and compensate them as well. This is mere wishful thinking, which can be deduced from the disturbing reactions in Israel to the opinion. All of them, from those of the prime minister and his cabinet colleagues all the way to the Knesset opposition of Benny Gantz and Yair Lapid, can be situated along on the spectrum of religious Zionism.
After all, what difference is there between the far right’s calls of “sovereignty now,” Benjamin Netanyahu’s babble about the impossibility of denying “the legal right of Israelis to live in their own communities in our ancestral home,” Gantz’s nonsense about the “judicialization of a political-diplomatic conflict” and the outrageous moralist preaching of Lapid, who declared the opinion “detached, one-sided and tainted by antisemitism and lacking an understanding of the reality on the ground”?
But it should not be inferred from this that the opinion will not have political and economic consequences that may cause Israel – as a result of the costs it will be forced to pay – to rethink its course regarding the occupation and settlement enterprise. It isn’t only about sanctions on violent settlers or on organizations affiliated with settlements.
The most important point in the opinion, from a practical perspective, is the obligation it places on international organizations and United Nations member states not to recognize as legal or help to maintain the situation arising from Israel’s unlawful presence in the territories. Member states are in effect obliged, in the wake of the opinion, to conduct a preliminary review of any interaction with Israel, whether in the territories or in Israel proper, to ascertain that it does not contribute to Israel’s presence in the territories.
Israel’s working assumption – that the world will continue to ignore the occupation – has been shattered in recent months. If Israel continues to ignore what the world tells it, it may wake up to a reality in which it is boycotted and ostracized like apartheid-era South Africa.
Source: https://www.haaretz.com
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