After three days of hearings, last Wednesday, The International Court of Justice in The Hague went into deliberations over the security fence being built by Israel. It could take months before the tribunal reaches a verdict and although the decision may be a public relations disaster for Israel, it will not be a binding one.
Just like several other decisions by international organizations, including United Nations resolution 242, which requires Israel to withdraw from the territories it occupied in 1967, the decision in The Hague will place no pressure on Israel beyond social pressure to change its tactics, and with the support of the world's superpower, social pressure will be insignificant.
As the conflict continues, the chances for a viable two-state solution have already become slimmer, but the security fence will make it impossible. The fence will cut into the pre-1967 borders and the entire West Bank Palestinian population will be forced into three ghettos on only 12 percent of historic Palestine.
Since 1948 Israel has slowly acquired more and more pieces of the land that was allotted to the Palestinians for a state by the United Nations. As Israel has continued to take land away from the Palestinians, it has become clear it has no intention of coming to a peaceful or just agreement over the land they illegally occupy. The realities of this loss of land for the Palestinians are much more practical than percentages but the facts are simple.
In 1948 the United Nations took more than half (51 percent) of Palestine away from the Palestinians to make a Jewish state, leaving thousands of people homeless. Then in 1967 Israel occupied the other half, which had been allotted to a Palestinian state. Since then, the Israelis have been gradually taking pieces of this occupied land away from Palestinians to build settlements, Israeli-only by-roads and military bases.
Now that the wall is being built, nearly 50 percent of the West Bank will also be annexed. The human implications of this are catastrophic. Eleven thousand five hundred fifty people (16 villages) who will be isolated from the West Bank and stranded in the \security zone"" between the wall and the 1948 border. Twenty thousand Palestinians will be separated from their farmland, leaving them with no livelihood, and 50 illegal settlements will be annexed, making them a permanent part of the Israeli ""side."" Beyond this, vital water wells are being taken, families are being separated and everyone's freedom of movement is being controlled by an occupying military force.
History has shown that a wall will not solve a conflict but only render the peace process impotent until it is torn down. But what makes this wall particularly unjust is that it does not only separate Israelis from Palestinians but it surrounds the Palestinian areas so they share no borders with any other nation and are caged into an area by a foreign military which controls all of their borders.
Several nations had representatives speak at the hearing in The Hague, including the South African Deputy Foreign minister Aziz Pahad who alluded to the similarities with South African Apartheid when he condemned the wall. ""The separation wall is anathema to the peace process as envisaged in the road map as it eliminates the prospect of a two-state solution,"" he said.
Israel argues that the wall is a defense measure but will not take responsibility for the crimes they have committed which have put them in the position of needing such defense. The vast majority of Palestinians have not committed any crimes against Israelis. Yet the Israeli Defense Forces continue to punish the population as a whole for crimes committed by the their extremist fringes.
The wall will cause so much suffering among innocent people that it will reinforce the hopelessness of many Palestinians which has driven some to commit the suicide bombings. The wall will not stop these attacks; it will only normalize another generation of Palestinian children to the conflict and reinforce, on a daily basis, the idea that Israel is their greatest enemy.
All the Palestinians and Israelis who want peace are suffering at the hands of their religious ideologies. The construction of the wall makes it clear this is not a religious conflict, but a conflict over land. There are both Palestinian and the Israeli victims of this illegal occupation and the conflict it has preserved, which has pitted two populations against each other who could easily live as peaceful neighbors if given the chance.
