The International Community towards the Israeli security fence

Résumé du document

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been taking place for a long time, pushing the Middle-East into circles of violence, and therefore needing the intervention of the United Nations. The wall built by Israel on its alleged border is one of the main manifestations of the conflict nowadays. A short historical of the conflict over the past sixty years is welcome for a better understanding of the problem nowadays. After the Zionist movement has emerged, the League of Nations decided to mandate Great-Britain to build a national home for the Jewish people. This willingness was then strengthened after World War II and the Holocaust, and many Jews immigrated to Palestine. In 1947 the United Nations created a Jewish state, Israel, next to a Palestinian one. As the Arabs didn't agree, a war broke out. Israel won, which led to the extent of its territory and the emigration of many Palestinian from Israeli occupied land. Since this first armed conflict between Israeli and Palestinian, the situation doesn't seem to have changed a lot: wars regularly broke out, for instance in 1956, 1967, 1973 and 1982. Both sides don't have the same approach of their common history what necessarily lead to a misunderstanding. On the one hand Israel has a logic of extent and settlement, for example it has occupied the West Bank and the Gaza strip since the 6-day war that occurred in 1967. On the other hand the Palestinian urge Israel to withdraw and ask for a real state, with stable borders and its original territories. On both sides extremists are acting, in particular through bombings and suicide attacks from extremist Palestinian groups, which makes the initially complex situation more difficult to solve. The United Nations has tried to bring peace through agreements concluded between the Israeli state and the Palestinian Authority. Many proposals were elaborated. The main steps in the last decade were firstly the Oslo Accords in 1993, officially named the Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements or Declaration of Principles (DOP). It called for the withdrawal of Israel from part of the occupied territories in the West Bank and in the Gaza strip, and the self-government of the Palestinian within these territories for a five year interim. Secondly, the Camp David's negotiations, led by Bill Clinton in 2000 with Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat, should go ahead on the road traced by the Oslo accords to come to a final settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But these solutions haven't been successful so far. The question of the partition of Jerusalem and the pressure put by extremist groups on the both sides through violence (the murder of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, suicide attacks…) has regularly led to the failure of negotiations. The second Intifada has occurred since 2000 and the security situation is nowadays very critical, even though democratic elections took place in Palestine.

Extraits

[...] The opponents to such a wall are numerous and various. It includes the Arab countries, the majority of the European countries, Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) such as Amnesty International, and of course the Palestinian population, the Fatah, the Hamas and extremists armed groups. In fact, the majority of the members of the United Nations are against the building of the wall, still it doesn't mean that concrete and coercive decisions has been taken, as we will see later in my second part. [...]

[...] Furthermore Israel should compensate the damages caused by the security fence. At last, it is interesting to see what the ICJ's advisory opinion has changed, seeing that it had no constraining influence, and to analyze the consequences that this situation has highlighted concerning the UN towards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Indeed, three things are to notice : first, the reaction of Israel, second the internal problems of the UN that explains this blockade, and third the nature of the actions undertaken by the UN after the advisory opinion of the Court. [...]

[...] The numerous explosive-rigged vehicles and suicide bombers committed by Palestinian terrorists groups are justifying the Israeli military plan. Since the beginning of the conflict, Israel always responded to the Palestinian attacks with state violence: raids into the Palestinian land and in the occupied territories, destruction of the houses of the supposed terrorists, etc. This time its project was to enclose the Palestinian territories so as to control their movement and that way to hinder the extremists to come into Israeli territories to commit attacks. [...]

[...] The layout of the fence has regularly changed and will probably keep on changing, since it adapt itself to the opinion delivered by the Israeli Court of Justice concerning some part of the wall that are criticized, and to the general context of the conflict. Whatever may be decided by Israel on the security fence, it seems like the UN don't have the real capacity to put pressure on it, but rather the United States. This illustrates one of the biggest problems that explain the blockade of a common intervention of the International Community. [...]

[...] This estimation leads us to the second main argument. The construction of the wall is highly prejudicial for the Palestinian because it isolates some villages, cut them off from the rest of the population and that way from fundamental services and goods. This represents an attempt to the fundamental human rights, like the freedom of movement. Farmers that had fields near the border don't have any income anymore. The water sources are also less accessible. People who needed to travel for their work lose their job and so their financial resources. [...]