How to undermine international law
The Promising Land #5: The ICJ advisory opinion won’t bring peace to Israel or the Palestinians.
I am not a lawyer. There’s plenty else you can get me on, but not that.
So what follows is a layman’s take on the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and its advisory opinion on Israel and that country’s presence in territories liberated in the Six-Day War.1 If it’s a learned analysis you’re after, try legal commentator Joshua Rozenberg. He is widely respected by lawyers and academics but don’t let that put you off. He’s actually quite good. He has offered a forensic fisking of the advisory opinion, based on the dissenting remarks of Julia Sebutinde, vice president of the Court, who didn’t think much of her colleagues’ legal reasoning, which she branded ‘one-sided and imbalanced’. I strongly recommend a gander at Rozenberg’s article, which is free to read at time of writing.2 I would also point readers to the work of a number of legal scholars on Israel’s borders, uti possidetis juris and settlements.3
The advisory opinion
Following a request from the UN General Assembly for an advisory opinion on the legal status of Israel’s control of the ‘Occupied Palestinian Territory’, the ICJ rendered its findings on July 19. By majority vote, the Court determined the following:
‘The State of Israel’s continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory is unlawful.’
‘The State of Israel is under an obligation to bring to an end its unlawful presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory as rapidly as possible.’
‘The State of Israel is under an obligation to cease immediately all new settlement activities, and to evacuate all settlers from the Occupied Palestinian Territory.’
‘The State of Israel has the obligation to make reparation for the damage caused to all the natural or legal persons concerned in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.’
‘All States are under an obligation not to recognize as legal the situation arising from the unlawful presence of the State of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and not to render aid or assistance in maintaining the situation created by the continued presence of the State of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.’
‘International organizations, including the United Nations, are under an obligation not to recognize as legal the situation arising from the unlawful presence of the State of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.’
The dissent
Vice president Sebutinde believes the ICJ ‘should have refrained from rendering the advisory opinion requested’ because resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a political rather than a judicial process, which can be achieved only via negotiation. She appended a dissenting opinion in which she stated that:
‘The Advisory Opinion… is tantamount to a one-sided “forensic audit” of Israel’s compliance with international law’ and ‘does not reflect a balanced and impartial examination of the pertinent legal and factual questions’.
‘The Court lacks adequate, accurate, balanced and reliable information before it to enable it to judiciously arrive at a fair assessment and conclusions on the disputed questions of fact.’
‘The Advisory Opinion not only circumvents Israel’s consent to the Court’s resolution of the issues involved, but also circumvents and potentially jeopardizes the existing internationally sanctioned and legally binding negotiation framework for the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.’
‘The timeline proposed by the Court for Israel’s withdrawal from the occupied territories is impracticable and disregards the matters agreed upon in the existing negotiating framework, the security threats posed to Israel and the need to balance competing sovereignty claims.’
‘The Court’s application of the principle of full reparation is not appropriate in the circumstances of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.’
‘The Court has misapplied the law of belligerent occupation and has adopted presumptions implicit in the question of the General Assembly without a prior critical analysis of relevant issues, including the application of the principle of uti possidetis juris…’
The background
The first thing to understand about this advisory opinion is that it came about through an impeccably fair legal process.
Countries hostile to Israel sponsored a resolution at the UN General Assembly. This resolution was essentially a charge sheet and accused Israel of every crime in history with the possible exception of the Jack the Ripper murders.4 It was passed despite attracting the support of fewer than half of member states. A farrago of untruths, half truths, distortions, misrepresentations and profoundly partisan interpretations of history, the resolution formed the mandate for the ICJ’s inquiry and the advisory opinion reflects that. It cobbles together Palestinian demands, anti-Israel sources and an exclusively Palestinian reading of history into a judicial manifesto for the Middle East.
The ICJ is ‘the principal judicial organ of the United Nations’5 and members (judges) make a declaration to exercise their responsibilities ‘honourably, faithfully, impartially and conscientiously’.6 Article 24 of the Statute of the ICJ allows a member of the Court to recuse himself if he deems it appropriate.7 The opinion was handed down by Nawaf Salam, the President of the ICJ and the Court’s most senior judge. Who is Nawaf Salam? He is Lebanon’s former ambassador to the United Nations, from 2007 to 2017, a period following the Second Israeli-Lebanon War and during which there were multiple incidents of cross-border exchanges of fire between the Lebanese and Israeli armies.8
As ambassador, he voted for 210 resolutions condemning Israel, including those accusing the country of ‘acts of terror, provocation, incitement and destruction’ and ‘causing death and injury to Palestinian civilians, including children, women and non-violent, peaceful demonstrators’.9 In a 2008 speech, the judge told the General Assembly that ‘the supreme Zionist leadership’ was engaged in ‘ethnic cleansing’ of the Palestinians using ‘terrorism and organised massacres’, which he branded ‘pogroms’.10 What a curious word to use when levelling an accusation against the Jewish state. Very curious indeed.
In 2014, when an Israeli was nominated to serve as vice chair of a UN committee, Salam protested that he ‘did not consider an Israeli candidate eligible for the office of Vice-Chair’ and added that Israel should not be allowed to hold ‘any office’ at the UN.11 The day after the 2015 Israeli elections, which saw Benjamin Netanyahu returned for another term as prime minister, a tweet was posted from Salam’s Twitter account: ‘#Israel: Triumph of blatant racist & colonialist choices. Peace prospects vanish. Whole region in danger. Business as usual shouldn't go on!’12
It doesn’t seem to take much to send him into a rage about the Zionist entity. Judge Salam puts the temper into ‘judicial temperament’.
Whose occupied territory?
The opinion’s central finding is that Israel’s ‘continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory is unlawful’ and that Jerusalem is obligated to bring it to an end ‘as rapidly as possible’.
First things first: what is the basis for this term ‘Occupied Palestinian Territory’? We hear it all the time, but there has never been a state called Palestine. The term is generally used to mean Judea and Samaria, Gaza and East Jerusalem, but how did these territories become Palestinian? Israel liberated them in 1967 from Jordan (Judea and Samaria, East Jerusalem) and Egypt (Gaza), both of which had acquired them by force, which is contrary to international law. Jordan annexed Judea and Samaria — also contrary to international law — and renamed these areas ‘the West Bank’.
Prior to 1948, they were part of the Mandate for Palestine, created by the League of Nations to dispose of a territory of the recently collapsed Ottoman Empire. The 1922 Mandate recognised ‘the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine’ and ‘the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country’. (Note the wording: reconstituting.) Through this charter the international community tasked the British with fulfilling the undertakings given in the Balfour Declaration, namely ‘the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people’. It was to be ‘clearly understood’ that ‘nothing should be done which might prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country’.13
I said to note the word ‘reconstituting’. If your knowledge of this conflict comes from contemporary journalism or undergraduate teaching, you might be wondering why the League of Nations spoke of reconstituting a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Surely Palestine was the homeland of the Palestinian Arabs until Zionist Jews came from Europe, stole the land and declared it their country? Not quite.
Inconvenient history
Participants to the case raised the question of Israel’s ‘deep historical ties and own valid claims’ to the disputed territories. The opinion summarily dismisses this argument, stating that the Court ‘is not called upon to pronounce on historical claims concerning the Occupied Palestinian Territory’ and claiming that ‘no information has been provided to the Court to substantiate such claims’.
Ah, so Palestinian claims on the land require an immediate Israeli withdrawal but Israeli claims are ‘historical’ and not something with which the Court need trouble itself. Denying Jewish history in Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria is integral to Palestinian chauvinism because the historical record is fatal to the anti-Zionist project. Jews are not interlopers in the Land of Israel. They are indigenous.
Let’s turn for a history lesson to Barry Strauss, the Bryce and Edith M. Bowmar Professor in Humanistic Studies at Cornell University and a specialist in ancient Greek and Roman history. As he summarises in a very useful paper, ‘Jewish Roots in the Land of Israel/Palestine’, Jewish history in the Levant can be traced back at least three thousand years, with the first recorded reference to ‘Israel’ coming in the Merneptah Stele in 1210 BCE.14 The archeological evidence suggests the land was divided into two kingdoms, with the north traditionally known as ‘Israel’ and its southern counterpart ‘Judah’ or ‘Judea’, the capital of which was Jerusalem. The Kingdom of Israel was conquered by the Neo-Assyrians in the eighth century BCE and its leaders expelled. The Judean kingdom continued but in 597 BCE, Jerusalem was conquered (and destroyed) by the Neo-Babylonians, who exiled the Jewish leadership to modern-day Iraq. Judah was renamed ‘Yehud’, which means ‘Jew’. ‘Yehud’ fell under the control of a succession of empires, including the Persians, the Ptolemaic dynasty and the Seleucids. Their homeland colonised by one great power after another, the Jews nonetheless maintained a continuous presence in Eretz Yisrael and both those living in the land and those in the diaspora shared a common peoplehood, expressed through a dead and later revived language, religious custom and a spiritual yearning to rebuild the capital of Jewish nationhood, Jerusalem.
In the second century BCE, the Jews, led by Judah Maccabee, revolted against the Seleucids, who oppressed the Jews, looted their temple and banned their religious practices. The revolt proved successful and the Maccabees restored a measure of Jewish autonomy in Judea, though the fighting continued. Judea’s independence did not last. In 63 BCE, the Romans invaded and after a series of failed uprisings, in 70 CE they destroyed Jerusalem and its temple, killing, expelling or enslaving a great many of the Jews. Nevertheless, the Jews persisted in trying to liberate their land and after half a century of insurrections the emperor Hadrian decided to punish the natives by renaming the territory. ‘Judea’ was scrubbed and replaced with a new name intended to downplay the land’s Jewish heritage: Syria Palaestina. Palestine, as it later became known, changed hands several more times, from the Romans to the Sasanians to the Byzantines, until the seventh century when the Arabs conquered the land. From then until the early twentieth century, Palestine was mostly controlled by one Islamic empire after another and became a predominantly Muslim province, though never a sovereign Arab state or country. (The exception to Islamic rule was the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, through which the Crusaders governed Palestine from 1099 to 1291 CE.)
In the late nineteenth century, the Zionist movement proposed aliyah, or Jewish return, to Eretz Yisrael and the Old Yishuv, the remnants of Jewish communities in Palestine, were joined by the New Yishuv, Jews from the diaspora who were returning to Zion. By 1880, Jews were a majority once again in Jerusalem, but the growing Jewish presence in Palestine was met with violence by local Arabs, which in return saw reprisals from Jewish militias. Near the end of the British Mandate, a partition plan was proposed that would have divided the land and given the Jews and the Arabs each their own state. The Jews accepted, the Arabs refused. The Jews declared themselves an independent state, to be called Israel, on May 14, 1948 and the surrounding Arab powers immediately invaded, bent on strangling the Jewish state at birth. Israel survived but saw its borders shrink, as Jordan captured East Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria while Egypt seized Gaza. In 1967, as the Arab nations prepared another invasion, Israel pulled off an improbable pre-emptive attack. Against all the odds, the tiny Jewish state quickly defeated vast Arab armies on all sides and in less than a week hostilities were over and Israel had reunited Jerusalem, liberated Gaza and Judea and Samaria, and captured the Sinai and the Golan Heights. The event became known as the Six-Day War.
Unlawful occupation
Military occupations are not inherently unlawful.
The United States, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union and France militarily occupied Germany and Austria following the defeat of the Nazis. The Americans occupied Japan for seven years after Hirohito surrendered. Morocco has been occupying Western Sahara since 1975 while Northern Cyprus has been under Turkish occupation since 1974. Israel’s presence in East Jerusalem, the Golan and Judea and Samaria — and its former presence in Gaza and the Sinai — is closer in character to the Allied examples than to those of Morocco and Turkey. The territory involved was acquired from hostile states which were using it to launch attacks on Israel. Taking and holding the territory is surely an act of self-defence.
Now, some will say: fair enough, but it’s been 57 years. However, if a military occupation is necessary for self-defence then it remains legitimate for as long as the threat exists. Does anyone doubt that this is the case in Judea and Samaria, where Hamas has been expanding its terrorist activities in recent years?15 As a matter of mere topography, this elevated region, which looms over Jerusalem, is of vital strategic value. A rocket-propelled grenade fired from the Judean hills stands a good chance of hitting the Knesset (Israeli parliament), Supreme Court building or built-up civilian areas. As horrific as October 7 was, its 1,200 casualties would be dwarfed by the potential bodycount of a similar offensive launched from Judea and Samaria.
Why doesn’t Israel simply remove the threat by making peace with the Palestinians and transferring land for them to build a state on? Israel has tried that, multiple times, and each time the Palestinian side has either walked away from the negotiating table or refused to come to it in the first place.16 Jerusalem has shown itself willing both to make peace and give up territory. It has peace agreements with Egypt and Jordan, the former of which saw Israel hand back the Sinai to Cairo. In 2005, Israel unilaterally withdrew every last soldier and civilian from Gaza, leaving the strip to the Palestinians, whose terror groups swiftly began using it as a base from which to fire rockets at Israeli civilians. Israel withdrew from Jericho in 1994 and 80% of Hebron in 1997, as a result of the Oslo Accords, meaning that roughly 90% of West Bank Palestinians live in areas governed by the Palestinian Authority while 100% of Gaza Palestinians live under Palestinian control in the form of Hamas.
Levi Eshkol, Israel’s third prime minister, characterised his country’s attitude to Judea and Samaria as that of a groom who wants the dowry but not the bride. His analogy has been quoted down the years as proof that Israel is hypocritical or deluded in hoping to retain Judea and Samaria but not its Palestinian population, and that analysis might well be true, but Eshkol’s aphorism underscores another truth. Israel does not want to be responsible for a large population of hostile foreigners. Rightly or wrongly, it sees military control over Judea and Samaria as necessary to protect its security, a legitimate rationale, and its territorial interests, which is more debatable.
‘Debatable’? What a weasel word. Well, no, because there really is a debate here, albeit one you might not have heard before. This debate centres not on whether the occupation is lawful or unlawful but whether there is an occupation at all. The legal doctrine of uti possidetis juris holds that new states inherit the frontiers of the foregoing state, territory or administrative unit. Applying this principle would mean that, upon attaining sovereignty, Israel inherited the borders of the Mandate, which would include all of the territory between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea. Legal scholars Abraham Bell and Eugene Kontorovich examined the inherited borders principle, examples of its application and its pertinence to Israel. They concluded:
Applied to the case of Israel, uti possidetis juris would dictate that Israel inherit the boundaries of the Mandate of Palestine as they existed in May, 1948. The doctrine would thus support Israeli claims to any or all of the currently hotly disputed areas of Jerusalem (including East Jerusalem), the West Bank, and even potentially the Gaza Strip (though not the Golan Heights).17
This is the conclusion Judge Sebutinde arrives at in her dissenting opinion, which observes pointedly that the Court failed to conduct a ‘critical analysis of relevant issues, including the application of the principle of uti possidetis juris to the territory of the former British Mandate’.18 It is reasonable to come to a different conclusion from professors Bell and Kontorovich and Judge Sebutinde, but it is unreasonable to neglect or decline to consider Israel’s uti possidetis juris claim at all, and yet that is what the United Nations, non-governmental organisations and legal scholars in the main do.
Settlements
The opinion declares that Israel ‘is under an obligation to cease immediately all new settlement activities, and to evacuate all settlers from the Occupied Palestinian Territory’.
The discourse around settlements reeks of hypocrisy, double standards and pure prejudice. ‘No human being is illegal’ progressives cry, unless of course they’re a Jew living in Judea. ‘Illegal settlers’, as they’re claimed to be, are accused of being the primary cause of the century-long Israeli-Arab conflict, quite the achievement for a demographic that didn’t exist until half a century ago and whose removal from Gaza resulted in more, not less, Palestinian terrorism.
You will find no glossing over settler extremism here. Some of them — ultra-nationalists and ultra-religious — are fanatical and express their fanaticism in racism and violence towards Palestinian people and property. This subset of settlers, exemplified by lawless gangs like the Hilltop Youth, are little more than terrorist thugs and their destructive, sometimes lethal, behaviour is too often neglected by an army that doesn’t turn a blind eye to comparable Palestinian behaviour all that often. They shame the settlement movement, a noble endeavour to restore Jewish life and sovereignty in all areas of Eretz Yisrael. If I were a member of the Knesset, I would introduce a bill allowing the courts to impose lifetime residency bans on settlers convicted of violence against Palestinians or soldiers. Living in Judea and Samaria is not just a right but an awesome privilege. Those who abuse it should be forced to live on the other side of the Green Line.
But the criminal actions of a minority of settlers do not define all settlers and nor do they lessen Israel’s legal rights in these territories. As Judge Sebutinde states, the League of Nations Mandate ‘clearly confirmed the right of the Jewish people to settle, self-determine and live peacefully in the Mandate territory’. If Israel inherited the borders of the Mandate then it has the same right as any sovereign state to develop land and build communities. Of course, possessing a right and exercising it are very different matters, and there are circumstances where it might be wise for a state not to press its rights, in Israel’s case to strengthen its diplomatic position or to reduce the number of Israelis displaced in any future territorial withdrawal or peace deal. However, if Israel is the legal sovereign, these are political decisions for its government.
Let’s imagine, however, that Israel has no legal claim to Judea and Samaria. Let’s imagine that it is a military occupier, lawful or otherwise. That engages the Court’s finding that ‘the transfer by Israel of settlers to the West Bank and East Jerusalem, as well as Israel’s maintenance of their presence, is contrary to the sixth paragraph of Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention’. However, Israel does not ‘transfer’ its citizens into Judea and Samaria; they voluntarily migrate there themselves to join existing communities or build new ones, sometimes against the policies of the government of the day and sometimes against the laws of the state. Likud governments tend to be more sympathetic to settlers than their leftist or centrist counterparts, permitting more housing units to be constructed and in some cases regularising outposts originally erected in violation of Israeli law. The Court deems this a policy of transfer, reiterating its earlier Wall interpretation that when Article 49 says an occupying power ‘shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies’, it also includes the voluntary migration of civilians where the occupied power could be said to take ‘any measures’ to ‘organise or encourage’ that migration.19
Whether Article 49 should be read in this way and whether Israel facilitating settlement, with infrastructure and security, or failing to prevent it constitutes a transfer is one best left to the lawyers. As Professor Kontorovich points out: ‘No one has ever been prosecuted, or even indicted, for transferring settlers in violation of Article 49(6) in any domestic or international court.’20 But the Court advises that international law requires Israel to ‘evacuate all settlers from the Occupied Palestinian Territory’. Around half a million Israelis live in Judea and Samaria and if you count the eastern sections of Jerusalem as unlawfully occupied, which the ICJ does, the number of Jews to be expelled from their homes rises to 750,000. That is the equivalent of expelling the entire population of Seattle.
The effect of removing these Jews from their homes would be to render Judea and Samaria, as well as East Jerusalem, Jew-free. In the estimation of the ICJ, arriving at a just peace in the disputed territories means ethnically cleansing those territories of Jews. Oh, you don’t like such language? Yes, it’s unfortunate when legal terms are politicised. I thought so when governments, NGOs and legal academics did the same with ‘genocide’, but here we are. Isn’t rhetorical escalation fun?
The Court’s prescription is very much in line with repeated statements by Palestinian Authority leaders. Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas said in 2013: ‘In a final resolution, we would not see the presence of a single Israeli — civilian or soldier — on our lands.’21 The late Saeb Erekat, then the chief Palestinian negotiator with Israel, said in 2014 that ‘[n]o settler will be permitted to stay in a Palestinian state, not one’.22 Indeed, under the Palestinian Authority it is a crime punishable by death to sell land to an Israeli.23 Kontorovich notes: ‘No resolution to conflicts involving settlers has involved their removal from previously occupied territories,’ adding that ‘at least outside the Israeli–Arab context, the overwhelmingly dominant conception of “just peace” in the modern era does not contemplate the removal of civilian populations, even when their original transfer was wrongful under the Fourth Geneva Convention’.24 There should be a special keyboard for writing about international law that comes with a shortcut key for ‘at least outside the Israeli-Arab context’.
A matter of politics, not law
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a dispute on military and diplomatic fronts between a sovereign state and an emerging or at least aspiring state. There is undoubtedly a legal dimension but the International Court of Justice is only the latest institution to reveal itself to be unsuited to the fair, honest and disinterested application of law to this conflict. The notion that lawyers can solve one of the contemporary world’s most intractable conflicts naturally appeals to lawyers but it is hubris and will lead where hubris usually does. A state and would-be state locked in a bloody territorial dispute which both consider an existential national struggle are not civil litigants squabbling over a planning application. You cannot make an order from the bench and expect everything to be resolved in 14 working days. The resolution to this conflict will come through the agreement of the two parties to terms which, though ideal to neither, are tolerable to both. That is the only way of ensuring that any peace is enduring.
Any attempt to impose a resolution through the law — or, rather, political and institutional preference in the guise of law — will not only fail but is likely to prolong and even worsen the conflict. What’s more, the attempt will do more to undermine international law than its detractors ever could. Joshua Rozenberg warns that the ICJ ‘has put at risk its judicial character and integrity’. The barrister Natasha Hausdorff says that Nawaf Salam’s failure to recuse himself ‘damages the credibility of the UN’s highest court and tarnishes the reputation of international law more generally’.25 Sour grapes, you might say, but I’m not so sure. I am a supporter of Israel. I am also a believer in the liberal international order, its institutions and norms. In the past, I have found no difficulty in maintaining those two positions because I could tell myself that this body or that was misapplying or misstating international law out of institutional bias or the demands of world politics. It is more difficult to do so when the body in question is the International Court of Justice. If it misapplies or misstates international law, and the world nods along, then not only the legitimacy of the Court but of international law itself is called into question.
This leads me to some reluctant thoughts.
If the statute and rules of the ICJ permit its chief judge to preside in a case where he has demonstrated hostility towards one of the parties, then is that statute or those rules fit for purpose?
If international law deems Jewish history in the Land of Israel irrelevant, then is it perhaps international law that is irrelevant?
If uti possidetis juris can be discarded in the case of Israel, why should any doctrine of international law be taken seriously?
If Jews living in Judea is unlawful, what is the virtue of lawfulness?
If international law requires the total expulsion of Jews from the cradle of Jewish civilisation, then maybe we can do without international law.
Thus is the global rules-based order being undermined by those sworn to guard it.
Legal Consequences Arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Including East Jerusalem, Advisory Opinion, ICJ General List No. 186, July 19, 2024.
Rozenberg, Joshua ‘ICJ risks its reputation’ A Lawyer Writes July 22, 2024 [accessed: July 22, 2024].
Abraham Bell, Professor of Law, Bar Ilan University
‘Palestine, Uti Possidetis Juris, and the Borders of Israel’ Arizona Law Review Volume 58 Issue 3, 2016, pp. 633-692 (with Eugene Kontorovich).
Eugene Kontorovich, Professor of Law, George Mason University
‘Unsettled: A Global Study of Settlements in Occupied Territories’ Journal of Legal Analysis Volume 9 Issue 2 Winter 2017, pp. 285-350.
‘Resolution 242 Revisited: New Evidence on the Required Scope of Israeli Withdrawal’ Chicago Journal of International Law Volume 16 Number 1 Article 6, 2015.
Julius Stone (1907-85), Challis Professor of Jurisprudence and International Law at the University of Sydney
‘Behind the Cease-Fire Lines: Israel’s Administration in Gaza and the West Bank’, in Shlomo Shoham (ed.) Of Law and Man: Essays in Honor of Haim H. Cohn, New York and Tel Aviv: Sabra Books, 1971 (pp. 79-110).
[Of Law and Man is hard to find. My hardback copy was procured from eBay years ago, but you can borrow a digital copy from the Internet Archive. You’ll be asked to register first but doing so is free and will give you access to a great many rare titles.]
Eugene V. Rostow (1913-2002), Dean, Yale Law School; Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, Johnson Administration
‘Agreements Don’t Bar West Bank Settlements’ New York Times March 18, 1992.
David M. Phillips, Emeritus Professor of Law, Northeastern University
‘The Illegal Settlements Myth’ Commentary December 2009.
United Nations General Assembly (2022) Resolution 77/247: Israeli practices affecting the human rights of the Palestinian people in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem A/Res/77/247.
United Nations, United Nations Charter, Chpt. XIV Art. 92.
Rules of Court, ICJ, Art. 4.1.
Statute of the International Court of Justice, Art. 24.1.
ICJ, ‘Judge Nawaf Salam elected President of the International Court of Justice’ February 6, 2024.
UN Watch, Record of Bias: The Case of ICJ President Nawaf Salam July 18, 2024.
United Nations General Assembly (2008) ‘Agenda Item 16: Question of Palestine’ November 25, A/63/PV.58.
United Nations General Assembly (2014) ‘Agenda Item 5: Election of the officers of the Main Committee’ June 18, A/C.4/68/SR.27.
Council of the League of Nations, The Palestine Mandate, The Avalon Project July 24, 1922.
Strauss, Barry ‘Jewish Roots in the Land of Israel/Palestine’ The Caravan Notebook, Hoover Institution, Stanford University, February 6, 2024.
Truzman, Joe and Schanzer, Jonathan, ‘Why the West Bank is in chaos’, Washington Examiner, February 24, 2023.
Cohen, Edy, ‘A Short History of Palestinian Rejectionism’ Begin-Sadar Centre for Strategic Studies, February 16, 2020.
Bell, Abraham and Kontorovich, Eugene ‘Palestine, Uti Possidetis Juris, and the Borders of Israel’ Arizona Law Review Volume 58 Issue 3 2016, pp. 633-692.
Sebutinde, Julia ‘Dissenting opinion of Vice-President Sebutinde’ Advisory Opinion, July 19, 2024.
Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Advisory Opinion, ICJ, General List No. 131, July 9, 2004.
Kontorovich, ‘The Jus Post Bellum of Illegally Transferred Settler Populations’ in Carsten Stahn and Jens Iverson (eds) Just Peace After Conflict, Oxford University Press, 2020, pp. 235-251 [p.236].
Browning, Noah ‘Abbas wants “not a single Israeli” in future Palestinian state’ Reuters, July 30, 2013.
Ahren, Raphael and Newman, Marissa ‘Sources in PMO slam PA for saying no settlers can stay in “Palestine”’ Times of Israel, January 27, 2014.
See e.g. ‘PA Court: Sale of Palestinian Land to Israelis Is Punishable by Death’ Haaretz, September 20, 2010; ‘Palestinian killed in Israel after accusations of selling land to Jews — report’ Times of Israel, December 8, 2018 [‘Ahmed Salama was said to have denied involvement in West Bank land sales to Israelis, a capital offense under Palestinian Authority law.’]; Daraghmeh, Mohammed ‘Palestinian gets life sentence over land sale to Israelis’ Associated Press, December 31, 2018 [‘Living in east Jerusalem, Akel has Israeli residency rights and is permitted under Israeli law to sell his property to whomever he wants. Akel also is a U.S. citizen. But the Palestinian Authority, which claims east Jerusalem as its capital, considers land sales to Israeli Jews to be treason and even punishable by death.’].
Kontorovich, in Stahn and Iverson [p.251].
Hausdorff, Natasha ‘Anti-Israel lawfare has reached a dangerous new low’ Daily Telegraph, July 20, 2024.