| SOVIET-STYLE JUSTICE Editorial Jerusalem Post, January 05, 2004 |
| Does the international community wish to continue the systematic destruction of its institutions on the altar of the Arab-Israeli conflict? This, not Israel's security fence, is the question that will shortly be before the International Court of Justice in the Hague. First the UN General Assembly let the tyranny of tyrannies reign when automatic majorities routinely treated one nation, Israel, as a pariah, "racist" state. This deterioration is so complete that the UN routinely ignores its own rules in its zeal to condemn Israel. It has, for example, called "emergency" sessions to condemn Israel even when the GA itself is in session. Next the politicization spread to humanitarian bodies and human-rights issues. At the UN Human Rights Commission, Israel was the only country singled out for condemnation by the agenda itself, before the annual session began, and 30 percent of the resolutions condemned Israel alone. Just weeks ago, Israel felt compelled to abstain on an annual GA resolution condemning religious intolerance when the sponsoring nation, Ireland, refused specifically to mention anti-Semitism, and a separate resolution condemning anti-Semitism had been blocked. This was small potatoes compared to Israel's singling out as the only country in 53 years to warrant the condemnation of the contracting parties of the Geneva Convention, who slept peacefully as Cambodians, Sudanese, Rwandans, etc. were slaughtered. Similarly, at the 2001 Durban conference, a gathering "against" racism was transformed into a hatefest against Israel, thereby committing the crime it was set to combat. So far the perversion of international political and human-rights bodies into cudgels against the region's only democracy has largely escaped the judicial sphere. Now the question is whether the venerable International Court of Justice, its predecessor established by the League of Nations, will fall victim to the same plague. If the ICJ were a fair court, it would have rejected the UN'S attempt to politicize it on multiple counts. First, that the UN did not bother to wait to pronounce and condemn Israel on the very question for which it sought the court's "advisory opinion," namely the legality of the security fence. Second, because the UN entirely ignored the suicide terrorism that necessitates the fence's construction. Third, because the court is not even supposed to involve itself on "contentious issues" without the express consent of the parties. And fourth, because the Geneva Convention itself, which the fence supposedly violates, either does not apply at all, or allows for self-defense and even for the confiscation of land for "imperitive military necessity." Yet the ICJ is expected not only to consider the question, in blatant violation of its own precedents and rules, but to rule against Israel. As a result, the march to declare Israel an international outlaw state will continue. If so, the nations of the world, through the UN and its bodies and court, will be committing another act of what Canadian Justice Minister Irwin Cotler calls "genocidal anti-Semitism." The context of the court's action is that Israel, as Cotler wrote in a November 2002 paper of the Jewish People Policy Planning Institute, is "the only state in the world today ... that is the object of standing threats from governmental, religious, and terrorist bodies seeking its destruction. The UN, and now its judicial arm, are not only failing to combat this fundamental breach of international security and human rights; they are central parties to it. The fence is not the real issue here. The ICJ is letting itself be used in a campaign to brand Israel as an "apartheid state" which, of course, has no right to exist. Israel is not the only victim of this crime. By selecting Israel as the paradigm of the outlaw state, the international community is abandoning the millions of people who live under real tyrannies and whose governments are the real threats to peace and security. "I say to my wife and my people, Next Year in Jerusalem," said Natan Sharansky, standing before the Soviet court that sentenced him to 13 years in prison. "To this court, which has only read a sentence prepared long ago -- to you I have nothing to say." That something called the International Court of Justice is poised to put Israel in a similar position is not just a tragedy for this country, but for the world. |
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