Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued a blistering response to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on Friday after it issued an advisory opinion declaring Israel’s presence and policies in the “occupied” territories illegal.
The territories Israel “occupies” include the West Bank and Gaza, both taken in a defensive war in 1967. Israel does not consider the territories occupied, but rather “disputed,” since there was no legitimate sovereign governing them.
Both include sites holy to the Jewish people, especially the West Bank — known in Israel as Judea and Samaria — which includes cities like Hebron, where Jews lived for millennia until a pogrom in 1929 (they have since returned).
The ICJ decision also applied to eastern Jerusalem, which includes the Old City and the Jewish Quarter, where Jews have lived for thousands of years. In that sense it echoed United Nations Security Council Resolution 2334, which the lame-duck Obama administration allowed to pass in 2016. The absurdity of that policy — which prohibits Israel’s presence on land holy to the Jewish people — led the Trump administration to adopt the opposite approach.
Netanyahu said in a statement released Friday: “The Jewish people are not occupiers in their own land, including in our eternal capital Jerusalem nor in Judea and Samaria, our historical homeland. No absurd opinion in The Hague can deny this historical truth or the legal right of Israelis to live in their own communities in our ancestral home.”
Israel considers the ICJ one-sided and biased, and did not participate directly in the proceedings at the Court. The decision brushes aside many of Israel’s considerations in maintaining control of the territories, including terrorism.
The effect of the ICJ’s decision is to hand Hamas terrorists and their Iranian sponsors a significant propaganda victory, and adding to Israel’s political struggles in the West, even though the opinion of the court is only advisory
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of “”The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days,” available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of “The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency,” now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.