According to an article in Jpost print edition, the security fence as currently constituted will incorporate 15000 West Bankers on the Israeli side.  The figure of 237,000 mentioned by the ICJ includes East Jerusalemites who hold Israeli residency.

Terrific article by Yossi Klein Halevi on the ICJ opinion.  Some excerpts (emphases added):

...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.

...

In determining that Israel has no legitimate claim to any territory it won in 1967, including, presumably, Jewish neighborhoods built in east Jerusalem, the court has, in effect, overturned UN resolution 242, the basis of the land for peace formula, which doesn't refer to Israel's return of "the territories" but merely "territories."

...

IN DETERMINING the route of the fence, Israel needs to be guided by four considerations. The first is security. If topography, say, dictates that the fence be built on a hill rather than in a valley, then that is the army's decision. Security is also the logic for walling off Jerusalem and preventing the city from being "shared" with - and destroyed by - an armed Palestinian authority.

The second consideration is demography: ensuring there are as few Palestinians as possible on our side of the fence.

The third is also demography-related: ensuring as many settlers as possible on our side of the fence. In the absence of a peace agreement, only isolated settlements caught on the Palestinian side of the fence should be uprooted.

The fourth is psychological: preventing the Palestinians from perceiving our withdrawal as a victory for terrorism. In losing part of the West Bank, the Palestinians and the Arab world generally will understand that terrorism has a price.

If those considerations are followed, about 10 percent of the West Bank will be incorporated into Israel by the fence.

Until Ehud Barak proposed ceding 92% of the territories at Camp David and then 96% at Taba, most observers took for granted that Israel wouldn't return to the 1967 borders. One plan popular on the Israeli Left envisioned a Palestinian state on only 89% of the territories. Tom Friedman was even less generous. Before Camp David, he wrote a column called "75 for 75" - by which he meant that 75% of Israelis would support withdrawal from 75% of the territories. At the time, Friedman considered that formulation a reasonable basis for ending the conflict.

Two competing views of the 1967 borders have now emerged within the international community. Along with the Hague decision is the American position, formulated by President Bush and endorsed by Congress (with a few exceptions, such as John Kerry, who didn't show up for the Senate vote). According to the new Bush Doctrine, Israel will not be expected to withdraw to the 1967 borders. And Palestinian refugees will return only to a Palestinian state.

That doctrine undermines the two key elements of the Palestinians' long-term strategy to undermine Israel's viability: first, forcing Israel back to the Green Line, and then overwhelming the Jewish state with refugees - through international pressure on Israel to increase the number of refugees it willingly accepts and through an invisible "return" of Palestinians slipping across the border and settling in Arab Israeli communities, as tens of thousands have already done in recent years.

The fence puts a brake on both those processes. It marks the security line that may well become Israel's political border. And it prevents the infiltration of Palestinian refugees into Israel.

That is the real reason why Palestinian leaders see the fence as a disaster and why they have mobilized their politicized allies on the international court to stop it. And that's precisely why Israel must cling to the fence and its current route.

The point about Thomas Friedman's "evolution"  is interesting because it illustrates how the often monolithic  perspective of the "elites" gets shaped.  If the Palestinians demand something for long enough and violently enough, sympathy and understanding will erupt, and in not too long the press and the European governments will fall into line.

Good analysis of the ICJ deliberations here.  Particularly interesting are the shamelessly unobjective remarks by the Egyptian judge, and the British judge's offhand remark that the ICJ didn't actually consider the issue seriously.

It would probably good to wait until I have a better informed opinion before I write about the ICJ ruling. But here goes anyway...

a) The ICJ makes no pretense to being apolitical, yet the Europeans think that it can still administer "justice". That's bizarre - justice is supposed to be "blind".

b) I really doubt that the ICJ looked particularly closely at where the fence goes, what it's supposed to do, whether it is effective.

c) I've heard that in American law, it's considered unjust to prosecute someone for an offense that generally goes unenforced. Not that I think the fence is an "offence", but the ICJ's clucking at us rather than India's fence in the Kashmir (to take one example), is an example of its manifest unfairness. "We can't create Utopia everywhere, but let's start in Israel" seems to be their attitude. They don't mind if their unrealistic dogmas create chaos - provided that the chaos is far from them.

Afterthought: One of the ICJ's clucks was that Israel should pay compensation to Palestinians whose property was confiscated. I wonder if the ICJ decision notes that Israel already did this (though payment was often refused).

Also, I wonder if the final decision will include some sort of patronizing remark about how "dialogue not fences" is the way to prevent terrorist attacks.

About 1 minute ago: Felt a minor earthquake (I'm in Tel Aviv).

Update: Haaretz online mentioned it about as quickly as me. 5 on the Richter.

LGF linked to these photos of an anti-security-fence demonstration. Seeing those ISM "peace" activists throwing punches at patient IDF soldiers sends me into a rage.

I'm still busy with things.

Rte. 443 goes thru the West Bank and takes a few minutes off the trip from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv. At the northern (mostly perfunctory) IDF-manned roadblock there's now a large sign that says (approximately) "Welcome to Unit such-and-such - winning fighters."

Open thread (for general discussion)

Last night T. and I went to a bonfire with some friends at the treed area adjacent to the Jerusalem theater. Lots of other groups there with their own fires; also a lot of very wholesome looking teenagers.

Anne Bayefsky on Reed Brody and Human Rights Watch:

...What HRW did do was substitute the voices of alleged victims for universal human rights standards.

If leading international human rights organizations such as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights/Human Rights First, chose not to apply those standards when anti-Semitism stared them in the face, there is little reason to believe their claims that they now apply those standards to Israel in the same way they apply them to every other state.

Bret Stephens on the Israeli left:

...For those of my readers who politically are somewhere on the Left, here's what the Right thinks of you: Deep down, you have no red lines. You'd rather go down as the morally spotless victim than the morally encumbered victor. You'll sell your birthright not for a mess of potage, but for less: the retrospective pity of future generations.

I know this because it reflects my own suspicions. Because when Rabin and Peres and Barak spoke of red lines, the Right knew they weren't really red lines - and they were right. Because Beilin won't shut up about how close he was at Taba. Because I watched Avraham Burg sucking up to Yasser Abd Rabbo at Davos by cracking anti-Israeli jokes and pleading with his hosts to be invited to future conclaves of the great and good....

Bonfire for Lag B'Omer



Lag B'omer, the Hebrew calendar date which marks the anniversary of the passing of Kabbalist R. Shimon bar Yohai (and falls out next Saturday night), is observed by lighting bonfires.

In my largely yuppified Jerusalem neighborhood, there is a group of Hasidim that take the centuries-old tradition very seriously - and build a huge fire in a vacant lot.

A while back an acquaintance tried to enlist me into the Likud. I've lost touch with said acquaintance, but I'm sure that he opposes the disengagement proposal as he's a heavily ideological fellow.

Open thread (for general comments/discussion)

They put up roadblocks on Emek Refaim road tonite. That might mean a "specific warning".

Recently a number of blogs (British ones in particular) have gotten Draconian about comments.

I've thought about this a fair amount - my new criterion is that I will delete comments that in my view encourage discussions of the sort that most people won't want to read.

Update:

I have realized that I opened a real can of worms by considering comment moderation, and that I don't have the time or will to deal with it. Hence the new blurb at the top of the comment box says that comment moderation is up to you the commentor.

I'm grateful to the person who suggested open threads for ongoing general debates, and hope that as a consequence there will be informative on-topic discussion on the regular threads.

Sounds like the Likud rank & file is leaning away from the "disengagement" plan. On the radio this morning Roni Milo (former MK who rejoined Likud after cofunding a defunct centrist party) was making predictions of economic chaos if the plan is rejected. That's a sign of desperation on Milo's part.

If the plan is defeated then the Likud would be likely replace Sharon somehow (though Sharon has not said that he would resign). Netanyahu seems to played his cards pretty well recently by exhibiting lukewarm pseudo-tough-guy support for the disengagement.

A lot of people think that once the Likud has "voluntarily" accepted the plan, the US will be free to gradually water down its statements regarding Palestinian refugee campees and borders (eg. this very Haaretz-y article which mentions that European leaders have been uttering the words "right of return" a fair amount lately, incidentally demonstrating that siding with the Palestinians is the only guiding principle of their policies).

Take a look at how Reed Brody of Human Rights Watch tries to defend his group's actions at the 2001 Durban conference (here).

This article says that the US is now "soft-pedaling" Bush's stance on refugees and borders in discussions with Arab and European nations. But an anonymous source claims that the US is telling Israel that such talk is just "marketing". Cynics think that there will be gradual backpedaling on the part of the US.

A CNN crew was briefly detained for filming in the "no photography zone" near the Dimona nuclear reactor (report).

The billboard advertisements against the Sharon disengagement plan are well-done - in particular the one that says "You vote 'for', you get Peres" definitely strikes a chord. People do believe that Sharon is not Peres, Beilin, or Barak; but the ad makes you think twice about whether you really know for sure.

On Army Radio this AM, far-left MK Avraham Burg was going on and on about how the Rantisi hit would just create more Palestinian radicals, and how the real problem is that PM Sharon has no program (though Sharon's program is now crystal clear if you ask me).

Burg's every word exudes pompousness, but his most pompous remark was something about how there needs to be a US gov't that will "tell Israel what it needs" - ie. force Israel to do what Avraham Burg wants because Burg can never get elected.