The International Court of Justice (ICJ) recently issued an “advisory opinion” on the “legal consequences of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories,” advising that Israel has effectively annexed parts of the historical, ancient and biblical lands of Israel known as Judea and Samaria and declaring this illegal under international law. This follows recent decisions by the ICJ in the matter of South Africa versus Israel and the International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor’s outrageous application for warrants for the arrest of Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.
Our law firm, Heideman Nudelman & Kalik, PC (Washington, D.C.) submitted briefs to the ICJ in 2004, 2023 and 2024—and the ICC in 2020—concerning Israel’s fundamental right and obligation to defend her people and today we issue this call for global action in defense of Israel, the Jewish people and Western democratic values:
The global community needs to recognize and clearly articulate that the sovereign State of Israel has the right and the obligation to defend her people. It must be acknowledged that citizens of 42 countries, mainly Israelis, were beaten, burned, beheaded, buried, murdered or taken hostage during the barbaric and heinous Hamas attacks perpetrated on and since Oct. 7, 2023 upon peaceful Israeli communities located along the Gaza-Israel border.
The United Nations and its world courts were founded to promote peace, justice and order. In dereliction of these duties, the ICJ and the U.N. incredulously injected themselves into this matter not in support of Israeli and other country’s victims, but rather in support of Hamas, a designated terrorist organization.
The international community must immediately stop emboldening terrorists by allowing them to hijack international organizations and international law and use them as diplomatic shields against being held accountable for their inhumane, barbaric, belligerent and unconscionable acts of maiming, murder and hostage-taking against people from countries around the world.
World leaders who fail to speak clearly and forcefully about the undeniable dangers of these international institutions will only continue to unnecessarily cede power to terror organizations and terror-states from the hands of their countries, their people and all who care deeply about human rights and respect for the rule of law.
We have over 20 year’s experience representing American victims of terrorism, including in terror attacks perpetrated by Hamas or the Islamic Resistance Movement; resistance being a pseudonym for the call to remove all Jewish people from the lands between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River; that means all of Israel; and further means Judenrein, “free of Jews,” an unconscionable discriminatory, bigoted and hateful attempt at genocide against the Jewish people.
We recently filed actions in U.S. Federal Court against Iran, the Syrian Arab Republic and North Korea on behalf of American victims of the brutal, barbaric and heinous terror attacks committed on and since Oct. 7. The rocket attacks launched by the Iran-sponsored terrorist organization Hezbollah targeting a soccer field in Majdal Shams, home to Israel’s precious Druze community, killing and mutilating over a dozen Druze children, makes it clear that acceptable terror targets are not just the Jewish community, but all of Israel.
Terror and hostage-taking tear apart the fabric of families, communities and peaceful world order. International organizations have no business impeding the affected countries in their dutybound responses.
The ICC
The ICC, of which neither the U.S. nor Israel are members, has been selective, rogue and inappropriate in threatening to arrest the duly elected leaders of the sovereign State of Israel.
For the ICC prosecutor to selectively target Netanyahu, the longest-serving prime minister of the State of Israel, and Gallant is morally and legally repugnant. So is the attempt to equate Israel’s defensive war to the Hamas Oct. 7 terrorist onslaught.
The demonizing accusation that Israel is committing genocide is false. This term, coined by Raphael Lemkin in the context of the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals, refers to the attempted annihilation of a race or people. The untold millions killed by the Nazis were targeted for persecution based on their religion, race, beliefs, sexual orientation and practices. This defines the Holocaust as a unique genocide.
In this context, the Hamas invasion of the sovereign State of Israel on the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah, the Shabbat of Oct. 7, and its attendant atrocities are properly classified by many as an attempt at committing genocide against the Jewish people in violation of all standards of decency and law.
Thus, Israel’s defensive and preventative military response to Hamas’s attempted genocide warrants not condemnation or unreasonable scrutiny but rather the support of international leaders in keeping with Israel’s right and obligation to protect her population. As Netanyahu stated in his recent address to a joint session of the U.S. Congress:
The ICC prosecutor accuses Israel of deliberately targeting civilians. What in God’s green earth is he talking about? The IDF has dropped millions of flyers, sent millions of text messages, made hundreds of thousands of phone calls to get Palestinian civilians out of harm’s way. But at the same time, Hamas does everything in its power to put Palestinian civilians in harm’s way. They fire rockets from schools, from hospitals, from mosques. They even shoot their own people when they try to leave the war zone.
The ICC’s Pre-Trial Chamber must reject the request of its prosecutor Karim Khan, issued on the very day of his scheduled but canceled fact-finding investigative trip to Israel and Gaza, and reject his wrongly requested arrest warrants.
The ICJ
Equally incredulous, outrageous, ludicrous and inhumane is the ICJ order that demands Israel immediately halt her efforts to obtain the release of and bring home the remaining Oct. 7 hostages of various nationalities. Israel has the right and moral obligation to take whatever actions she deems necessary to rescue both her civilians and all others, including Americans, who have been held apart from their families for more than 300 days and are reportedly being continuously and frequently subjected to rape, abuse and torture because they are Jewish.
As to the most recent advisory opinion that Israel has effectively annexed parts of Judea and Samaria, it is worth noting that the ICJ’s decision is ultimately grounded in the U.N.’s 1947 Plan of Partition resolution, wherein it acknowledged the “Jewish population accepted” and the “Arab population of Palestine and the Arab States rejected.”
After walking through the history of Israel’s Declaration of Independence, issued in the context of the end of the British Mandatory Period dating back to the end of World War I, and Israel’s victories in the wars launched against it in 1948-1949, 1956, 1967 and 1973 by the Arab states, the ICJ acknowledges that the Oslo Accords (“Accords”), the primary operative treaty between Israel and the Palestinian representative government, legitimizes and even calls for Israel’s presence in and across her ancient, historical and biblical homelands constituting mostly of Judea and Samaria.
Although the Accords under international law are the most authoritative legal instrument, the ICJ effectively casts them aside as irrelevant, citing instead biased political documents that carry no force of law, such as its own prior “advisory opinion” and a collection of biased U.N. General Assembly resolutions issued by a body that is based on one country-one vote and always stands against Israel in favor of the interests of the various Arab states.
This is just one of countless legal and logical fallacies that the ICJ employs to support its otherwise unsupportable conclusion: That Israel is somehow illegally occupying Judea and Samaria.
A call to the global community
The silence from presidents, prime ministers, foreign ministers and ambassadors regarding the hostages held by Hamas has been and continues to be increasingly deafening with each passing day. We call upon all to demand of Hamas and its terrorist leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, to release the hostages.
Other democracies—including the United States, Canada, France and Australia—have never and would never tolerate the mass murder, maiming and kidnapping of their citizens by a designated foreign terror organization or its operatives. They, too, would respond with force and determination to seek justice for their citizenry.
Hamas must be held fully accountable for its taking and treatment of the hostages and its unconscionable attack upon the people of Israel. It must also be held accountable for its inhumane treatment of the residents of Gaza in usurping their humanitarian aid and repurposing it to initiate and perpetuate a violent conflict, as well as Hamas’s unconscionable placing of civilian lives in danger as human shields.
The U.N., ICC and ICJ must be castigated for their selective prosecution, sham proceedings and other grave miscarriages of justice, law and order, and the threats they pose to democracy. By having singled out Israel for multiple decades, they have played right into the hands of Iran, the worst sponsor of terror in the world that continues to directly attack Israel, the world’s only Jewish state.
Only months ago, the Islamic Republic of Iran launched hundreds of rockets and drones in a direct attack upon the sovereign State of Israel and surely will strike again, this time more forcefully. Iran continues to advance its nuclear capabilities; magnify its sponsorship of terror through its proxies Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis; repeatedly threaten to annihilate the people and the State of Israel; promote and illegally practice economic, academic and multi-pronged diplomatic boycotts of Israel; and support demonstrations in the U.S. and around the world to rally fervor against Israel and the Jewish people. The silence of the world on Iran’s innumerable crimes is dangerously deafening.
The global community and leaders of the Jewish community itself must use their strong voices, express their vision and assert their leadership in support of the strongest democracy in the Middle East. For decades, Israel has demonstrated its just commitment to international human and legal rights, including those of the Jewish people, whose proud tradition deserves praise and protection, not scapegoating.