A wall that should be torn down

by Musa Keilani

As expected, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has ruled that Israel's construction of a "security" wall - we prefer to call it "apartheid wall" - in the West Bank is illegal and is a de facto annexation of occupied territories.

Regardless of the Israeli rejection, which came even before the ICJ made its ruling, it is now up to the Arabs to garner international support and challenge Israel at the United Nations.

We know that not much will happen at the UN, given the international support behind Israel. But that should not stop us from getting it on the UN record that Israel is in violation of the UN Charter and international conventions by constructing the wall that is nothing but the Jewish state's self-designed border with the West Bank.

The high-tech complex of high concrete walls, electronic monitoring, razor-wire fences, trenches and watchtowers preempts the Palestinians aspiration for an independent state by truncating the territory and taking away a large chunk of the West Bank. The Israeli contention that the 100-metre-wide fence is aimed at checking Palestinian infiltration to carry out anti-Israeli attacks does not hold much water; after all, its illegal occupation of Palestinian land and brutal crackdown on Palestinian resistance against occupation are behind the "security" threats that it faces in the occupied land.

We have seen Israel consistently ignoring UN demands, including mandatory Security Council resolutions. The world has not been able to do much about it.

We have also seen the US belittling or ignoring the UN, varyingly rejecting, soliciting and, more often than not, simply compromising the world body's paramount role in international affairs whenever it suited Washington to do so. The US' illegal invasion, occupation and now de facto control of Iraq is the most outstanding example of the American approach. It rejected the UN stand against invading and occupying Iraq, thus compromising the role of the world body, and then solicited and secured UN approval for the US role in Iraq, conditioned in such a way that Iraqi oil seems destined to remain under the American control for the foreseeable future.

Against that backdrop, it is naive to expect any effective UN action against the US prot