* Yossi Klein Halevi argues that the ICJ ruling changed the terms of the debate in favor of the Palestinians. The issue isn’t the security fence any longer, but Israel’s claim to the West Bank and Gaza:
The court, after all, hasn’t challenged Israel’s right to build fences along its borders with Lebanon or Gaza because those have been built on the 1967 lines. The real meaning of the court’s decision, then, is to delegitimize not Israel’s right to self-defense but its right to claim any territory, even for self-defense, over the Green Line.
The danger of that decision is to create the legal groundwork for an imposed solution that would force Israel back to the 1967 borders, even without a peace agreement – Yasser Arafat’s dream scenario.
And so the war Israel needs to fight now isn’t so much over the decision itself but its premise: that all land beyond the 1967 border belongs by right to Palestine.
* Dennis Prager lays out the key ‘moral arguments in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,’ via numbers.
* Boston Globe has an in-depth look at the Palestinian cement scandal.
* Palestinian academic Marwan Bishara wrote a carefully worded commentary in the International Herald Tribune calling on Arafat to reform the PA.
