Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Friday fired back at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) after it issued an advisory opinion finding that Israel’s presence and policies in the “occupied” territories are illegal.
Israel’s “occupied” territories include the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which it seized in a defensive war in 1967. Israel does not consider these territories occupied, but rather “disputed territories” as they have no legitimate sovereign authority over them.
Both are holy places for the Jewish people, particularly the West Bank, known in Israel as Judea and Samaria, which includes cities such as Hebron, where Jews lived for thousands of years until the 1929 Holocaust (after which they returned).
International Court of Justice decision This provision applies to East Jerusalem, including the Old City and Jewish Quarter, where Jews have lived for thousands of years, and is reminiscent of UN Security Council Resolution 2334, passed by the lame-duck Obama administration in 2016. The absurdity of this policy, which would have prohibited Israel from having a presence in land sacred to the Jewish people, prompted the Trump administration to adopt the opposite approach.
“The Jewish people are not occupiers of our eternal capital, Jerusalem, or our land, including our historical homeland, Judea and Samaria. No unreasonable opinion in The Hague can deny this historical fact or the legal right of Israelis to live in their own community in our ancestral homeland,” Netanyahu said in a statement on Friday.
Israel does not directly participate in the International Court of Justice’s deliberations, which it considers to be one-sided and biased, and whose rulings ignore many of Israel’s considerations in maintaining control over its territory, such as terrorism.
The impact of the ICJ ruling is to hand a significant propaganda victory to Hamas terrorists and their Iranian backers, and to intensify Israel’s political struggle in the West, even though the court’s opinion is merely advisory.
Joel B. Pollack is executive editor of Breitbart News. Breitbart News Sunday The show airs Sunday nights from 7 to 10 p.m. (4 to 7 p.m. ET) on SiriusXM Patriot. He is the author of “Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days,” which is available for preorder on Amazon. He also wrote,Trumpian virtue: The lessons and legacy of Donald Trump’s presidency” is available on Audible. He is the 2018 recipient of the Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter. Joel Pollack.
