Israel – Palestine
Why in news :
- The United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) ended 2022 by passing a resolution that asked the body’s highest court, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), to render its opinion on the legal consequences of Israel’s prolonged occupation of Palestinian land.
- The resolution was passed with 87 member countries voting favourably, as opposed to 26 countries, including the U.S. and Israel, voting against it.
- India was one of the 53 countries that abstained from the vote.
Historical background of the issue :
- Official Israeli statistics show that Jewish settlers existed in historical Palestine even before the state of Israel was declared in 1948.
- A UNGA resolution had earlier sought to partition British mandate Palestine.
- But the UN partition plan was rejected by the Arabs.
- After the first Arab-Israel war, Israel had captured more territories than what the UN plan had proposed and some 7,00,000 Palestinians were displaced.
- Historical Palestine was divided into the State of Israel (including West Jerusalem), the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) that was taken over by Jordan and the Gaza Strip (controlled by Egypt).
- Tensions kept rising between Israel and three countries in the region — Egypt, Jordan, and Syria — which led to the six-day war of 1967.
- The war resulted in Israel capturing the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem, along with Syria’s Golan Heights and the Sinai Peninsula of Egypt.
- While the Sinai Peninsula was later returned to Egypt, other captured areas of Palestinian and Syrian territory remain under Israel’s military control.
- Later, Israel also declared the whole of Jerusalem as its “eternal, undivided capital”.
- While Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, its external borders are still controlled by Israel and Egypt.
- While the UN Security Council passed a resolution in late 1967 stating that Israel must withdraw from the territories it seized in the war, it is not yet happened.
- Palestinians seek the West Bank as the heartland of a future independent State.
- However, in the decades since the 1967 war, Israel has constructed dozens of Jewish settlements in West Bank, alongside the three million Palestinians living under Israeli military rule.
- Most of the international community considers Israel’s West Bank settlements illegal and an obstacle to peace.
The current UNGA resolution and the road that lie ahead :
- The resolution passed by the UNGA on December 30 asked the ICJ to provide its advisory opinion on the legal consequences of Israel’s “occupation, settlement and annexation … including measures aimed at altering the demographic composition, character and status of the Holy City of Jerusalem, and from its adoption of related discriminatory legislation and measures.”
- While the U.S. rejected the resolution and major European powers abstained, the vote got unanimous support from the Arab nations.
- There are two possibilities when a referral is made to the ICJ, it can either lead to a settlement with a party withdrawing its case or it can lead to a trial followed by a verdict.
- While the rulings of ICJ are binding, the ICJ has no power to enforce them.
Syllabus : Prelims + Mains; GS2 – International Relations
