There is currently an ongoing case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague dealing with a Jordanian/Irish claim that Palestinian rights to have a state are denied by the “illegal” Israeli “occupation” of the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Israel is not attending. Therefore most of the current proceedings are a litany of accusations against Israel. When the ICJ does render a judgement, it will be only a non-binding advisory opinion, and will join a long list of other resolutions condemning Israel from various parts of the UN.
The principle problem with the case is that it is actually totally unnecessary. The ICJ could (should?) have rejected it because there are other resolutions, some binding, that deal with the problem and that have never been fully implemented. The ICJ is not supposed to hear or open cases of that nature.
Israel may be in occupation of the West Bank, but under the Hague conventions of 1907 and the Geneva conventions of 1949 regarding war there is no requirement for an occupying force to withdraw before a final peace agreement in concluded. Israel also has a claim to sovereignty over all that territory as the successor to the British Mandate.
The binding resolutions regarding such a final agreement (Security Council resolutions 242 and 338) both explicitly state that there must be recognition of Israel by the Arab belligerents, negotiated final borders (agreed by both sides), and a commitment to eschew violence. The continuous history of Arab terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians clearly shows that those conditions have never been met. Just this morning there was another attack from Hezbollah in Lebanon across Israel’s northern border. The 1967 cease-fire line has never been defined as a border. It has been mentioned as a possible basis for reaching agreed upon final borders. Despite this, some agencies in the UN refer to everything over that line as “Occupied Palestinian Territories” (OPT).
Hamas has never recognized Israel, and the charters of both Hamas and Fatah (ruling party of the Palestinian Authority) both openly state that Israel must disappear and be replaced by a unified Arab state.
Wetherhorn 