The world’s highest court has confirmed what we Palestinians always knew: Israel’s settlements are illegal | Raja Shehadeh

Over the past 57 years, Palestinians in the West Bank such as myself have suffered the rise of Israeli settlements taking over our land, restricting our own development and destroying the natural beauty of the landscape. We spared no effort in describing how this aggression was contrary to local and international law. But it was like crying into the wind. No one was listening. Israeli defenders, meanwhile, spread spurious justifications for the country’s actions, raising doubts in the minds of many about the veracity of our position.

Last Friday, the highest court in the world, the international court of justice (ICJ) in the Hague, ruled on the matter . In its advisory opinion to the UN, made upon the request of the general assembly, the court stated that “the Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem … have been established and are being maintained in violation of international law”. But the real bombshell was the court’s assertion that what is required by Israel is the “evacuation of all settlers from existing settlements” and that it is also under an obligation “to provide full reparation for the damage caused by its internationally wrongful acts to all natural or legal persons concerned”. In this way, the court confirmed the well established principle that violations of international law do not lapse by time, and are not subject to a period of limitation.

For 25 years, I have studied the development of Israeli legal language in the West Bank. Along with the human rights organisation Al-Haq, I have monitored how the Israeli state expanded into the occupied territories by acquiring land and registering it with the Israel Land Authority. We witnessed the shrinking areas of territory available to us through discriminatory land-use planning , which dedicated the largest areas to Israeli settlements. Over the years access to our own land became perilous as settler brutality , supported by the Israeli army, increased. Even grazing sheep or picking olives from our orchards became heroic acts.

The process of entrenching the occupation has gone forward inexorably since the rightwing government in Israel took over, replacing the military authorities overseeing the occupation with civilian public servants .

It has always been the policy of Israel for its settlements to become facts on the ground. Facts that it hoped would be permanent, thus preventing the return of the territories to the Palestinians and the establishment of a Palestinian state there. Only last week, Israel’s parliament voted to affirm its opposition to the establishment of a Palestinian state “in the heart of the land of Israel”, stating that this “would constitute an existential danger to the state of Israel”.

It has also always been predictable that placing illegal settlements in land belonging to Palestinians would give rise to violence. In fact, under the cover of the war on Gaza, there has been an increase in settler violence in the West Bank, where more than 1,000 Palestinians have been forced to flee their homes since the start of the war.

If there was some restraint by previous governments, this rightwing administration – dominated by extremist settlers – encourages and provokes settler violence. After one such attack in 2023, Israel’s national security minister went as far as labelling the settlers suspected of murdering Palestinians in the West Bank as heroes.

The violence is used as a justification for Israel to hold on to the territories it occupies. In this sense, the current argument that Israel is using for retaining control over Gaza is not new. In the aftermath of the 2014 war on Gaza, Shimon Peres, who famously used the slogan “Settlements Everywhere” when he was defence minister in the 1970s, said in an interview with the BBC: “The extensive Hamas rocket fire from Gaza over the past month has made it difficult to justify withdrawing from the West Bank as part of a future peace deal with the Palestinians.”

Enough with the dissembling. This ruling by the ICJ lays bare the reality of the occupation as a colonial enterprise that is depriving Palestinians of their right to self-determination, exploiting their land and resources, driving them away from their land and leaving them with the only option of working as cheap labour in Israel, enduring the most deplorable conditions on the checkpoints on their way to work. All this has not gone without a persistent resistance from Palestinians that has taken many forms over the years, violent and non-violent. This has cost many lives and caused immense suffering.

But is the prescription outlined by the ICJ for ending this colonial regime – “evacuation” and “reparation” – feasible? This is not a legal question for the court to answer, but a political one.

Many of the arguments against the two-state solution for ending the conflict refer to the apparently immoveable presence of the large number of settlers in the occupied territories. Yet Israel is capable of absorbing these three-quarters of a million settlers. In the early 1990s, it was able to settle about a million Jews from the former Soviet Union who did not speak Hebrew and were unfamiliar with Israeli culture. Unlike them, the settlers speak the language and have jobs in Israel itself where they’re still considered as citizens subject to paying income tax. It would not be a high price for Israel to pay for peace.

In explaining what full reparations mean, the court asserted that it includes “restitution” and “compensation”. Restitution, for example, “includes Israel’s obligation to return the land and other immovable property as well as assets seized”. However, should this even take place, no amount of reparations could compensate for the way Israel has destroyed much of the Palestinian landscape, building cities in the midst of attractive ancient hills and connecting them with wide highways that are inappropriate for the unique and fragile geography, in the process uprooting thousands of ancient olive trees.

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Nor would it make up for the pain of those deprived of their land who were forced to accept work building the very settlements established on the land that was taken from them. Or the pain of living under an apartheid regime that the rest of us have had to endure over many decades.

The court also affirmed the significant point about the unity of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip. It said that the violations of international law in the occupied territories are the concern of all states who have an “obligation not to recognise as legal the situation in the occupied Palestinian territories (OPT), to work through the UN to bring an end of the occupation” and to “abstain from treaty relations, diplomatic relations, economic or trade dealings, or investment relations with Israel in all cases in which it purports to act on behalf of the OPT”.

On 19 July, a UN press release stated that the secretary general “will promptly transmit the advisory opinion to the general assembly, which had requested the court’s advice. It is for the general assembly to decide how to proceed in this matter.”

We Palestinians will be closely watching how the world reacts. Will international law finally prevail, and serve as an instrument for bringing lasting peace in the region?

• Raja Shehadeh is a lawyer and writer. His latest book is What Does Israel Fear From Palestine?

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