There is a rising, bloody Palestinian death toll in the West Bank after two days of Israeli attacks by helicopters, drones and ground forces. In July, the line between law and politics had been sharply drawn when the UN’s top court – the international court of justice (ICJ) – declared that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip, is against international law and should end. Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said that this was a “decision of lies”. He knows power flows from the barrel of a gun. Illegal Israeli acts in the occupied territories are hardening, mostly with complete impunity, into political developments.
The war in Gaza has become a breaking point for the rules-based international order. That is also true in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Israel argues that it has to take action to protect itself from what it claims are attacks using Iranian-supplied arms. Yet bombing civilians from the skies looks like a way of terrorising a people into submission – and it is increasing. Between 2020 and October 2023, six Palestinians in the area were killed in airstrikes. This week, the UN said that 136 Palestinians in the West Bank have been killed in Israeli airstrikes since October 2023 – a sharp increase. These numbers are obviously dwarfed by the 40,000 dead Palestinians in Gaza, with the majority of those identified being elderly people, children or women.
One obvious distinction between the two theatres of Israeli military occupation is that in Gaza there has been no re-establishment of Israeli settlements. Nor is there a political consensus in Israel to do so. In the West Bank, things have taken a very different turn. The hope remains that a Palestinian state can be created in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, with its capital in East Jerusalem. Yet the day before the historic ICJ opinion, the Israeli parliament voted overwhelmingly to pass a resolution – co-sponsored by parties in Mr Netanyahu’s coalition together with support from his rightwing and centrist opponents – rejecting the establishment of a Palestinian state.
This may be a reflection of where Israeli society finds itself. But it is self-defeating and shortsighted. It is true that Israel had difficulty evicting 8,000 Jewish settlers from Gaza in 2005. There are now nearly 90 times as many in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Even if wiser heads had prevailed years ago, it still would have been a tough ask: there were about 65 times as many settlers in its eastern occupied territories in 2012 as there were uprooted from Gaza in 2005.
But the ICJ’s call for Israel to evacuate all of its settlements and pay reparations to Palestinians for damages caused by the occupation should not be lightly dismissed. Israel can barely recognise the national existence of the Palestinians. But it is an admission that the world should encourage Israel to make.
The world’s powers must ask why they seem incapable of finding an agreement to end the current bloodshed. Without a deal, faith in the global institutions risks withering away. The 57-year-old story of the Israeli military occupation is not yet over. Only through diplomacy can the longer-term resolution of this conflict be achieved to enable two peoples to live side by side in peace. Yet as long as international legal principles are not respected, no political accommodation will have permanence.