New York Daily News
New issue, same old
anti-Israel United Nations 
By JAMES S. TISCH 
Monday, March 15th, 2004 

The UN's anti-Israel theater is playing a new venue: The UN's International Court of Justice is hearing the case of Israel's security fence. The judges may be unbiased, but the question brought to them by the General Assembly is nothing more than the UN's routine discriminatory treatment of Israel dressed up in lawyers' robes and wigs. 
Same music, same lyrics, new costumes. 
In December, the pro-Palestinian majority in the General Assembly passed a resolution that asked the court to examine the legal consequences of Israel's security fence. The UN Secretariat then sent all documents likely to throw light upon the question to the court. 
Not one document mentions the 20,000 terrorist attacks against Israel over the past three years or the 126 suicide bombings that a completed fence might have prevented. 
The General Assembly did not ask the judges to consider the factual context of the security fence nor the option that it is legal and justified. The assembly had already voted to declare the fence illegal, but that was hardly unexpected. This same body earlier voted for a resolution to protect Palestinian children - but would not pass the same resolution when Israeli children was substituted. 
The selective injustice applies to other disputed territories as well. The UN has never challenged security fences in what Pakistan terms Indian-occupied Kashmir or what Greek Cypriots call occupied Cyprus. Only the fence in the so-called occupied Palestinian territory seems to merit attention. 
Israel's position that the international court should not consider the case is supported by the other democratic states that take the rule of law seriously: the U.S., the European Union, Australia, Canada, Japan, Norway and others. Backing the Palestinian position are some of the worst violators of international law, including four of the six U.S.-designated sponsors of terrorism: North Korea, Cuba, Sudan and Syria. Also supporting the Palestinians are state exporters of terrorism: Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Yemen. With whom will this court side - the democracies or the terrorists? 
Since Israel and its supporters did not agree that the international court should be involved, they boycotted the oral arguments and the judges heard only the side of the Palestinians, who argued that Jews living beyond the 1949 armistice line cannot legally be protected from terrorists because their presence in the West Bank is illegal. The Organization of the Islamic Conference went even further, arguing that Jews living in Tel Aviv have no right to self-defense either. It claimed that any fence anywhere remains unlawful because it is built on an invalid acquisition that has never been validated. This is the same body that consistently reject[s] any attempt to link terrorism to the struggle of the Palestinian people. 
The question before the court is the diplomatic equivalent of when did you stop beating your wife? It should not dignify it with a response. If it does and rules against the security fence, Harvard's Alan Dershowitz will have justifiably quipped, It would be insulting to kangaroos to call it a kangaroo court. 
Whatever the court decides, Israel's fence will and must be built. And it will save lives. Should an agreement be reached and terrorism end, it can be moved or removed entirely. 
But to paraphrase President Bush, Israel must never outsource its national security decisions. 
Tisch is chairman of the Conference of Presidents
of Major American Jewish Organizations.