Except for U.S. Judge, International Court Rules Against Israel's Wall

By Ian Williams

SOMETIMES ONE really does get paranoid about the media. I don't think I have read a single news report about the International Court of Justice ruling on Israel's Wall-both when anticipating it and then reporting on it after its delivery July 9-that did not stress that the decision was a "non-binding" one. Is there a non-binding gremlin that slips into all the texts, or have editors been visited by genies from Israel and the U.S. to blunt the anticipated rebuff for Israel's legal case?

Since, in fact, it is difficult to conceive of a more authoritative statement of international law, one wonders in what way it is "not binding." True, the Court did not award damages, and does not have bailiffs or police to enforce its decisions. In the larger sense, however, it has ruled definitively that Israel is breaking international law, and that the states that subscribe to the various charters, conventions and treaties that constitute that law have a duty to enforce it. It's hard to imagine a more binding decision than that.

Unless, of course, the U.S. and Israel deem themselves above and beyond the provisions of the law, and put themselves in the position of opportunistic criminals who only obey the law when there are police around to enforce it.

The ICJ decision, even more than anticipated, was a triumph for international law and the Palestinians, with every single judge on the 15-member panel-except, shamefully, American Judge Thomas Buergenthal, who basically followed the U.S. administration's line-agreeing to the total illegality of the Wall, and indeed of the occupation itself.

The decision, Buergenthal said, did not take into account Israel's need to protect itself against terrorism. This is nonsense, of course. The Court considered this issue in some depth in its 56-page opinion-and concluded that if Israel wanted to build the wall on its side of the Green Line, it could do so entirely legally. It could not do so, however, on illegally occupied territory.

So, in what Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) described as a display of prejudice, the Court first of all decided that, despite the U.S. and Israeli positions, it did indeed have the right to consider the question, and that the U.N. General Assembly indeed had the right to ask it to.

The Judges then voted by 14 to one, with the American Judge Buergenthal dissenting in each case,

The construction of the wall being built by Israel, the occupying Power, in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including in and around East Jerusalem, and its associated r