The United Nations general assembly’s resolution on Wednesday advanced a dramatic legal shift, begun by the international court of justice (ICJ) in July, in how we understand Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory. The US government’s response suggests a refusal to recognize the new legal reality in which Israel now finds itself.
The general assembly resolution, which largely tracked the ICJ ruling, was adopted by an overwhelming vote of 124 to 14, with 43 abstentions. The tally was even more lopsided than the numbers suggest, given that the “No” votes were limited to Israel, the United States, a group of small Pacific states, and a handful of outliers such as Viktor Orbán’s Hungary and Javier Milei’s Argentina. Britain abstained.
The ICJ had found Israel’s prolonged occupation to be unlawful and ordered it to end “as rapidly as possible”. The headline on the general assembly resolution was that it ordered Israel to withdraw from occupied Palestinian territory within one year. But that is only the beginning.
The general assembly confirmed the ICJ ruling that Israel’s prolonged occupation constitutes a de facto annexation and hence a violation of the “principle of the non-acquisition of territory by force”. In other words, although the term was not explicitly used, the endless occupation is an act of aggression – no different from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
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Until now, most analyses of Israeli conduct in the occupied territory have focused on particular war crimes – say, the starvation or indiscriminate bombing in Gaza or the settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem – or the crime of apartheid throughout the occupied territory. From now on, we should also recognize the occupation as a forcible violation of Palestinians’ right to self-determination….
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/sep/20/un-resolution-against-israeli-occupation
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