Israeli court rejects world court ruling

The Israeli Supreme Court today rejected an opinion by the International Court of Justice calling for the removal of Israel’s West Bank barrier, upholding the structure’s legality and also instructing the government to reroute a section to avoid encircling Palestinian villages.

In its first ruling on the world court opinion, the nine-member panel of Supreme Court justices said the July 2004 judgment by the tribunal at the Hague, Netherlands, did not sufficiently consider Israel’s security needs.

The world court delivered a non-bonding opinion calling the barrier illegal and recommending that it be torn down. Israel did not take part in the hearing, claiming that it was a political show.

In its decision discarding the world court ruling, the Israeli panel also determined two key parameters: The barrier can extend into the West Bank, but it cannot impose undue hardships on Palestinians.

“The court reached the conclusion that the reason behind the fence is the security consideration of preventing infiltration by terrorists into Israel and Israeli communities (in the West Bank),” the ruling said. “On the other hand is the consideration of the human rights of the local Arab population.”

The world court, it said, heard only arguments relating to the Palestinians’ plight, “without dealing with the factual basis regarding Israel’s security-military need to erect the fence”.

Welcoming the ruling, Israeli Cabinet minister Haim Ramon of the moderate Labour Party urged around-the-clock construction to finish the project. The barrier is about one-third completed.

“On the strategic level,” Ramon told Israel Radio, “the Supreme Court ruled that Israel has the full right to build the barrier to defend and protect the lives of its citizens.”

Palestinians say the complex of walls, fences, trenches and razor wire is a land grab. In several places it cuts into the West Bank, which the Palestinians claim as part of their future state.

Palestinian official Saeb Erekat said if Israel wanted to build a barrier, it should do so on its own territory and not on Arab land it captured in the 1967 Middle East war.

“Had it been built for Israel’s security, it should have been built on the 1967 borders,” he said.

Israel began building the barrier along the West Bank at the height of a wave of Palestinian suicide bombing attacks in 2002. Bombers were easily walking or driving across the unmarked and unfortified line between the West Bank and Israel and blowing themselves up in Israeli cities, killing hundreds.

The original path would have encircled the West Bank and cut off more than a third of the territory.

Successive suits by Palestinian villagers, isolated from schools, services and farmland by the snaking path of the barrier, forced the government to revise the path repeatedly, bringing it closer to the “Green Line,” as the 1949 cease-fire line between Israel and the West Bank is known.

By the time the Supreme Court ruled today, the barrier had been scaled back to the point it would cut off 6 to 8% of the West Bank, encircling main West Bank settlement blocs and some Palestinian villages between them and Israel.

The court ruling cuts the barrier back further, and legal experts said it would serve as a precedent for other disputed sectors.

The case before the court concerned a portion of the barrier complex that has already been in place for two years around the settlement of Alfei Menashe, four miles inside the West Bank, but also encircling five small Palestinian villages.

The court ordered the military to find ways to free the villages from the encirclement – dictating a “balloon” configuration around the settlement and a new road to be built directly to Israeli territory.

Alfei Menashe mayor Eliezer Hisdai welcomed the decision. “The court has stopped sanctifying the Green Line,” he told Army Radio. “It talks about security for the people.”

“I feel good,” said Imad Ouda, mayor of Wadi Rasha, one of the encircling Palestinian villages. “We will feel even better when we can get up in the morning and look outside for the fence, and there’s no fence,” he told Israel Radio. “Our children will go to school with no permit, no gate, no checkpoint.”