Following ICJ Ruling on Palestine: UNGA’s Failure to Sanction Israel would Condemn International Law to Oblivion

Urgent Policy Brief - 11 September 2024

Following ICJ Ruling on Palestine: UNGA’s Failure to Sanction Israel would Condemn International Law to Oblivion 

The UN General Assembly (UNGA) is coming to a historic vote on enacting the July 2024 Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) about the illegality of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory and its violation of the prohibition of apartheid under the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD). 

Palestinians call on all States to shoulder the legal and moral responsibility of safeguarding the rule of law, not just the rights of the Palestinian people, and to ensure they are not complicit in Israel’s decades-old atrocity crimes and grave human rights violations. This is particularly the case given Israel’s ongoing genocide against 2.3 million Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip, a livestreamed genocide armed, funded and shielded from accountability by the colonial West, led by the US.

The Palestinian delegation at the UN has circulated a draft resolution, and a vote is likely to take place within the next few days. 

The proposed resolution provides the absolute minimum of how the UNGA should implement the ICJ ruling in order to ensure the rule of law and accountability. Essential components of the resolution call for:

• Imposing a timeline of 6 months to end Israel’s illegal presence in the occupied Palestinian territory (OPT), including East Jerusalem;
• Third States to implement the measures necessary to comply with their erga omnes obligation not to recognize, aid or assist in Israel’s violations of international law and to take appropriate action to end them, starting with severing the military trade, research and cooperation, and restricting other trade relations, and imposing lawful and targeted sanctions on individuals and entities responsible for maintaining Israel’s illegal presence in the OPT;  
• The establishment of a standing mechanism for reparations;
• Establishing a UNGA committee to investigate and report on the ICJ finding that Israel is guilty of breaching the apartheid article of CERD. 

If the West attempts to bully, bribe or intimidate other States to drop or dilute these components, it would render the resolution meaningless and further erode the already hammered relevance and credibility of the UN and international law in the eyes of the global majority. 

The draft echoes some of the most important calls made by dozens of UN human rights experts following the ICJ ruling. Most importantly, according to the UN experts, in the ruling the ICJ refutes the dogmatic premise that, “Palestinian self-determination must be achieved solely through bilateral negotiations with Israel – a requirement that has subjected Palestinians to violence, dispossession and rights violations for 30 years.” 

The draft also reflects the UN experts’ call on all States to “review all diplomatic, political, and economic ties with Israel, inclusive of business and finance, pension funds, academia and charities.” 

If voted in its current form and content, while restricted to merely a subset of Palestinian rights as stipulated in international law–the subset ruled upon by the ICJ in July– the resolution in its current form presents a significant step in pressuring Israel, the US and their allies to end the genocide. It also meets some of the authoritative demands supported by the vast majority of Palestinian society in Palestine and in exile. Palestinian civil society recognizes that “Israel’s military occupation, settlement enterprise, and apartheid regime … constitute tools of entrenching Israel’s 76-year-old Zionist settler-colonialism.” 

To help end the genocide and hold Israel accountable for perpetrating it, States must fully support and strengthen the resolution, without any prejudice to the other inalienable rights of the entirety of the Indigenous people of Palestine, whether living under the 1967 occupation, citizens of the apartheid state of Israel, or living in exile and denied the right of return. Foremost among these rights are the right to self determination and the right of the Palestine refugees to return to their homes and lands and to receive reparations according to UNGA resolution 194. 

In particular, we call on all States to support the resolution’s call for ending Israel’s illegal presence in the OPT, including its entire settlement enterprise, within 6 months and immediately, completely and unconditionally withdrawing all of its military forces from the OPT, including Gaza and East Jerusalem (with the Old City being an integral part of it). We also call on all States to support the following provisions of the resolution:

1. End all direct and indirect forms of recognition and assistance to maintaining Israel’s illegal military occupation by: (a) Banning settlement products and ending all direct or indirect engagement with businesses operating in them; (b) ensuring that “their nationals, … companies and entities under their jurisdiction, as well as their authorities” do not recognize or assist in maintaining the illegal occupation; (c) implementing sanctions, including travel bans and asset freezes; and (d) supporting other accountability measures.
2. “Cease any direct or indirect transfer, sale, export and diversion of arms, munitions, parts, components, dual use items, surveillance equipment, technologies and any other military equipment to Israel, the occupying Power, in all cases where there are reasonable grounds to suspect that they might be used in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, and any military trade, cooperation and dual-use research which may contribute in the maintenance of Israel’s unlawful presence in the Territory, interfere with the exercise by the Palestinian people of its right to self determination, and violate the rights of the Palestinian people under international humanitarian law or international human rights law.”
3. “Undertake to prevent, prohibit and eradicate violations by Israel of article 3 of CERD” and on the UNGA to “to establish a Special Committee composed of Member States with relevant experience and expertise to examine Israel’s violation of article 3 of CERD and to report and make recommendations to the General Assembly in this regard.”