More on the fence in Israel from Jeremy Rabkin in Opinion Journal. (Thanks to EPG).
Maj. Michael Newton, a military lawyer who teaches at West Point, coined a new term earlier this year: “lawfare.” It is the pursuit of strategic aims, the traditional domain of warfare, through aggressive legal maneuvers. Last Friday’s decision by the International Court of Justice holding Israel’s security fence in violation of international law is another milestone in the onward march of lawfare. The ICJ has now confirmed that lawfare and warfare can be pursued simultaneously.
The terror war against Israel, launched in the summer of 2000, has by now resulted in the deaths of nearly a thousand Israeli civilians. The security fence, by greatly impeding the movement of would-be terrorists into Israel, has helped to achieve a sharp decline in terror attacks over the past year. Nonetheless, the ICJ admonished that the nations of the world are obligated not to pressure Palestinians to abandon terrorism, but to pressure Israel to dismantle its security fence.
Most of the court’s reasoning, based on arguments advanced by British barristers, is superficially plausible–so long as one ignores the actual political context of the dispute. Perhaps the Children’s Rights Convention or the Fourth Geneva Convention do provide arguments against disrupting the free movement of innocent Palestinians. But the arguments are more plausible if one ignores the terror threat to Israeli lives, as the court essentially does. In concluding that the fence sits on “occupied territory,” the court assumes that the armistice lines of 1949 are Israel’s final borders, though never accepted as such by Israel’s neighbors. In concluding that Israel cannot undertake intrusive measures to protect “illegal settlements,” the court assumes that Jews had no claim to return to places, like the Old City of Jerusalem, from which they were forcibly expelled by Arab armies in 1949….
The ruling raises still broader questions about the U.N.’s capacity to contribute to any serious international effort against terrorism. Even U.N. judges, we now see, have other priorities.