Interesting Times: ICJ to Israel - Drop dead

By Saul Singer 
July 15, 2004
The Jerusalem Post
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1089861294242 http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1089861294242 
'Consequently, the Court concludes that Article 51 of the Charter has no relevance in this case. No relevance. I see the words, but even knowing that the International Court of Justice would rule against Israel, I cannot fully believe they were written. With these words, the ICJ decision joins the parade of anti-Semitic infamy, along with such milestones as the Dreyfus trial, the UN's repealed Zionism is racism resolution, and the 2001 Durban hatefest. 
Nothing in the present Charter, says Article 51, shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations  To deprive Israel of this right, the ICJ was forced to read a new phrase into the charter limiting Article 51 to attacks by one State against another State. Why? No reason is given for this invention, which also logically implies that 9/11 did not trigger America's right to self-defense. 
This is the essence of the decision, not the court's humanitarian objections to the fence. If Israel has no right to defend itself against Palestinian terrorism, then of course the fence should be torn down. It also follows that humanitarian considerations flow only one way. There is no need to balance Palestinian well-being against Israeli lives; the former is relevant, the latter are not. 
The ICJ's second major contortion is defining the West Bank as foreign land with respect to the fence, but then claiming that attacks from the same land are not international, and therefore don't trigger Article 51. 
All of this makes a mockery of the UN Charter, international law, and any notion of simple justice. The idea that an international body could so explicitly ignore years of vicious attacks, which are obviously the whole reason for building the fence, should not lose its ability to shock, even against the background of the general refusal to see Israel as the victim of assault. 
IN A strange way, however, the decision may be helpful to Israel, but not in the way usually supposed. Some have pointed out the advantage of the decision being so biased against Israel that it undermines itself. By this logic, a decision that rejected the fence but seemed to recognize Israel's security needs and the illegality of terrorism would have been harder to ignore. 
Perhaps this is so, but the more significant result is to amplify not only the necessity of the fence but of the decision not to build it on the Green Line. Even if Israel could have likely avoided the ICJ's black eye entirely by defending itself on what had become a quasi-border, that would have been a mistake. 
The reason is that the objective of the fence had to be not just defending Israelis, but imposing a territorial price for the almost four years of unprovoked aggression the Palestinians have unleashed against us. Roughly speaking and as harsh as it may sound to say it, the more Palestinians feel that the fence is a land grab, the more we are doing the right thing. 
This is particularly true in the context of a disengagement plan which, we must admit, is susceptible to portrayal as a withdrawal under fire. The fence, and particularly where it is built, are the key antidotes to the sense that the disengagement plan is a net Palestinian victory. 
It is therefore somewhat, but not completely, disingenuous for Israel to argue that the fence is only a security device and has no political significance. It is true that the fence is not a permanent border and does not close the border chapter of a future final-status negotiation. But it does help Israel ensure that the ultimate border will be somewhere east of the Green Line, winding around several settlement blocs. 
When the Palestinians look back at their fruitless and unnecessary war, they will see that the route of the fence imposes the only diplomatic price they had to pay for their choice of terror and rejectionism. It is this payment, added to the other territorial payments they have made every time they have chosen a war of annihilation over partition and peace, that will be a critical guarantor of an eventual agreement. 
Israel has already decided for itself, at the world's urging, that it cannot diplomatically afford to impose on the Palestinians the kind of utter defeat that the US dealt the regimes of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein. The ICJ attempts to go further, denying Israel not just the right to victory, but to self defense. 
Our defiance of the fence verdict and all that it represents is an opportunity to achieve a lesser form of victory; a literal drawing of the line representing our right to exist. The global jihad, including its anti-Israeli branch, is ultimately more a test of will than of power. Israel, following its own ample moral and legal lights, may well adjust the fence here and there. In the main, however, the fence and the shameful decision against it, create a wide rampart on which all Israelis, and anyone who is proud to side with the democracies against terrorism, can proudly stand.