What a pleasant thrill to see the most commonplace prejudices confirmed by the august body of the International Court of Justice. The United Nations’ top court—so noted for its love for Israel—just reached the single most unsurprising ruling in history: That Israel is the illegal occupier of the territory of a non-existent Palestinian entity.
The ICJ, which appears indifferent to the encouragement and collaboration it offers to global antisemitism, had already decided a few months before that Israel might be guilty of a genocide that the ICJ invented out of whole cloth. It must have taken enormous pleasure in offering Hamas a new and generous gift. The Palestinian Authority, of course, declared the ICJ’s decision a historic turning point. If it was referring to the total self-abasement of the “international community,” it is quite correct.
“Occupation” is a remarkable word. In the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it means absolutely nothing. It is a buzzword that signals a self-granted if baseless moral superiority. By saying the magic world, one is suddenly a defender of the oppressed and dispossessed. You are in favor of self-determination, of course, though this elides the fact that, in this context, self-determination means Hamas’s “right” to determine itself on massacring civilians, taking hostages and digging tunnels beneath civilian areas—all with total impunity.
Indeed, the U.N.’s own Secretary-General António Guterres stood tall the day after Hamas’s genocidal attack on Oct. 7 to blame everything on “Palestinian suffering”—that is, the creation of the State of Israel.
That Israel’s existence is firmly based on international law means nothing to Guterres or anyone else in the “international community” because, despite their pious moaning, they do not believe in international law. For them, it is only a weapon they can use on behalf of Hamas—nothing more.
They justify this nihilism in a remarkable way: by saying things. Things like “colonialism,” “white supremacism,” “imperialism,” “apartheid” and so on. Of these defamations, “occupation” is the greatest of all.
It is a stunningly racist term, denying the ancient Jewish presence in the Land of Israel and that the Jews were never absent from it for a moment—even after multiple attempts at ethnic cleansing by Roman, Christian and Muslim empires. Yet even when Israel won its great victory in 1967, Israel offered to withdraw from the “occupied” territories in exchange for peace. The Arab world refused, responding with its famous “three no’s” that unequivocally rejected anything resembling peace with the Jewish state. Even those “no’s,” however, said nothing about the Palestinians.
Back then, when the U.N. had a vague semblance of sanity, the Security Council never demanded a complete Israeli withdrawal from the disputed territories. The Oslo Accords, so strongly hailed and so utterly disastrous, did not do so either. When Israel completely withdrew from Gaza in 2005, again so hailed and so disastrous, Oct. 7 became inevitable, even if few knew it at the time.
In short, all withdrawals by Israel only led to more violence and more death. Yet the ICJ now appears to want more violence and death. One wonders why… Perhaps the question answers itself: It’s what they do.
