[On Monday, February 26, Dr. Ralph Wilde, representing the Arab League, made a presentation before the ICJ detailing how “[t]he Palestinian people have been denied the exercise of their legal right to self-determination through the more than century-long violent, colonial, racist effort to establish a nation State exclusively for the Jewish people in the land of Mandatory Palestine.” You may see his entire presentation here. The following is my summary of the highlights of that presentation.]
Dr. Wilde opened by stating, “The Palestinian people have been denied the exercise of their legal right to self-determination through the more than century-long violent, colonial, racist effort to establish a nation State exclusively for the Jewish people in the land of Mandatory Palestine.”
Establishing “a nation-state exclusively for the Jewish people” in a land with an 11% Jewish population … has necessarily involved the extermination or forced displacement of some of the non-Jewish Palestinian population.” When the League of Nations established mandatory Palestine it was for the purpose of establishing self-determination for its current inhabitants. The incorporation of the Balfour declaration into the covenant was without any legal basis. The crystallization after WWII of the general right of colonized people to self-determination “corresponded to and supplemented” the Palestinian people’s “pre-existing right to a single territory” and the UN proposal to partition that territory contradicted this and the Arab rejection of the proposal confirmed the legal status quo. Yet, 78% of this land was declared to be part of an exclusively “Jewish state” in 1948.
Palestinians residing in the illegally ceded territory but not displaced and their descendants are “forced to live as citizens … of a state conceived to be of and for another racial group.” Those “displaced from that land and their descendants cannot return.” In 1967 Israel captured and has since extended the apartheid regime to all of Palestine, supplemented by violations of norms of law applicable to occupied territory. In East Jerusalem, Palestinians have no citizenship but Jews, including illegal settlers, do.
“Israeli policy that Israel should be not only the exclusive authority over the entire land from the river to the sea, but also the exclusive sovereign authority” violates both Palestinians right of self-determination and the prohibitions on the acquisition of territory through the use of force. The notion of trusteeship in which colonized people “are to be granted freedom only if and when” the colonizers deem them ready for it has been replaced by the “right based on the automatic immediate entitlement of all people to freedom without preconditions. … Israel cannot lawful demand concessions on Palestinian rights as the price for removing its impediments to Palestinian freedom.”
“Israel captured the Gaza strip and West Bank from Egypt and Syria by the war it launched against them and Syria.” Israel’s action was illegal, despite its claim that it was in anticipation of an attack on them because “states can’t lawfully use force in non-immediately immanent anticipatory self-defense.”
The current war in Gaza did not start in October 2023. It is a “a drastic scaling up of the force exercised there and in the West Bank on a continual basis since” 1967. Attempting to justify increasing the illegal use of force on the grounds of violent resistance to the illegal use of force is “circular logic with a perverse outcome.”
Imad-ad-Dean Ahmad, Ph.D.
Minaret of Freedom Institute
www.minaret.org
Leave a Reply