For all the sound and fury, last week’s advisory opinion issued by the UN’s International Court of Justice that said Israel’s settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem are in violation of international law and Israel is “obliged to bring an end to its presence in the [so-called] Occupied Palestinian Territory as rapidly as possible,” is an utter irrelevancy.
As the Jerusalem Post notes, not only is the advisory opinion non-binding, it also ignores Israel’s long-recognized and legitimate legal claims to the areas while disregarding the fact that both the Palestinian leadership and Israel are committed in the Oslo Accords to negotiate between them the permanent status of the territories, a process that has been endorsed in dozens of UN resolutions.
In fact, the ICJ is hardly a “court.” Its judges are merely political appointees acting upon instructions from their respective governments, presided over by a Lebanese judge with a record of hostile, anti-Israel political statements.
In this, the so-called “court” is just another biased and politically motivated UN body with an automatic majority of partisan states dictating their political will.
We will now wait to see what mischief the Palestinian Authority will try to cause with this “decision” in their pursuit of faux “statehood.”
