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3 Adar 5764 - February 25, 2004 | Mordecai Plaut, director Published Weekly
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NEWS
Hague Hearing Brings Jews from All Over
by Yated Ne'eman Staff

The streets of Holland became a lively ground of demonstrations and counter-demonstrations, as people came from all over the world to express their opinions about Israel and its separation fence.

On Monday the International Court of Justice began its hearings on Israel's security barrier. Some 2,500 Israel supporters from across Europe, Israel and the United States joined hands in their rally for Israel. Later, the same square was the site of a slightly smaller pro-Palestinian demonstration.

For the most part, Dutch police managed to keep the two groups apart, but the police's efforts did not temper demonstrators' vehemence toward each other, and for their cause.

Pro-Israeli demonstrators spoke of Israel's need for a security barrier in the face of Palestinian terrorism. Demonstrators from Israel led by Zaka brought with them an Israeli bus mangled in the Jan. 29 Jerusalem suicide bombing, in which 11 people were killed, just around the corner from the Israeli prime minister's official residence. Demonstrators said a hush fell over the crowd when the flatbed truck bearing the shattered bus rolled in.

To emphasize the point, 10 members of Zaka, the chareidi rescue and recovery service that collects victims' body parts after terrorist attacks in Israel, stood around the bus in their yellow work suits.

Iris Boker, director of Zaka in Europe, said the bus had such a strong effect that it would probably be sent to other demonstrations rather than returned to Israel. She said there were several requests from U.S. groups to use the bus.

Miri Avitan came to the demonstration at The Hague with a photo of her son Assaf, who was killed at his 15th birthday party in a suicide bombing in December 2001. Bridgit Kessler's daughter, Gila, was killed in a suicide bombing on June 19, 2002.

Around noon, hundreds of pro-Palestinian protesters began assembling, many bearing Palestinian flags, signs calling for the "end of occupation" and pictures of Palestinians killed during the current intifadah. Ahmed Tibi, an Arab member of the Israeli Knesset who is close to Yasser Arafat, spoke at the Palestinian demonstration.

Marie-Jose Van Overveld-Roosendaal, a Dutch woman who came to the pro-Palestinian demonstration, said her mother had rescued a Jewish woman during the Holocaust and was honored with a tree at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Israel. Nevertheless, Overveld-Roosendaal said she is so angry at Israel that she wants to uproot the tree and replant it in "Palestine."

The United States and Israel did not attend the court hearing. The United States said the international court was not the right forum to decide a political issue, and Israel said it would not attend because it does not the recognize the court's jurisdiction in the matter.

On Monday, testimony against the fence came from the Palestinian representative to the United Nations, Nasser Al- Kidwa, and several other Palestinian lawyers who spoke, uninterrupted, for some three hours; South Africa's deputy foreign minister; and representatives from Algeria, Saudi Arabia and Bangladesh, among others.

Outside, some pro-Israel demonstrators said that while they did not support construction of Israel's security barrier, they wanted to draw attention to the reason for it: terrorism. The president of B'nai B'rith International was there, as was U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler (D-Fla.). Wexler was joined by Rep. Steve Chabot (R-Ohio). Both are members of the U.S. House International Relations Committee.

Chabot said, "The people who ought to be on trial today are the people who are training children to aspire to be suicide bombers, not people who build fences to protect innocent lives."

Alan Sermonetta, 37, came to The Hague with a group of about 100 Jews from Rome. A contingent of students from Yeshiva University in New York carried a large banner. About 40 Jews came from Posnan, Poland.

Christians for Israel held their own pro-Israel march.

The Palestinian argument was that the security fence imperils the road map and destroys any hope of peace or an independent Palestinian state. It said that the wall is illegal and violates international humanitarian law.

Palestinian Authority envoy to the UN Nasser al-Kidwa said, "The wall is not about security. It is about entrenching the occupation and the de facto annexation of large areas of Palestinian land." He condemned suicide bombings, but blamed Israel for the violence, explaining that it is the result the of "occupation."

Observers noted that security barriers exist in Cyprus between the Greeks and the Turks and between India and Pakistan. The US has a security barrier on its Mexican border.

International lawyer James Crawford defended the court's right to hear the case. In so doing, he brought legal arguments written to the court by Israel and others disputing that right into the oral proceedings.

"The wall is an attempt by Israel to impose a unilateral settlement in relation to a multilateral conflict and to do so in violation of fundamental obligations. These relate to humanitarian law and human rights, including self- determination. The people of Palestine have an unfulfilled right to self-determination.

He added that the "wall is inconsistent with the road map, and the wall, if allowed to be completed, will destroy the road map."

In Jerusalem, Finance Minister Binyamin Netanyahu delivered a sharp message to the court.

"It is not the killers and their dispatchers who are put on trial, it is the victims. We shouldn't be in The Hague on trial. It's the Palestinian terror regime and terrorist organizations that should be there. That's the right order of things," he said.

Netanyahu said he had a message for those sitting on the court. "You have no right to serve as the moral conscience of the Jewish people. We have our own conscience. Now our conscience tells us that saving our own lives is more important than preserving somebody else's quality of life. Quality of life is always amenable to improvement. Death is permanent," he said.

He said Israel is working to save the lives of Jewish people. "However, respected judges in Europe are claiming that the Jewish state has no right to defend itself from murderers."

The second of three days of hearings at the International Court of Justice in The Hague on the legality of the separation fence inside Palestinian territory, will be taken up with arguments from Belize, Cuba, Indonesia, and Jordan in the morning, and from Madagascar, Malaysia and Senegal in the afternoon.

The Palestinians are saying inside the court and out that they have no objections to Israel building a fence on the Green Line or on Israeli territory.

A statement issued by Israel charged that the December 8 General Assembly resolution "reflects the gravest prejudice and imbalance." The resolution requested the court's opinion about a nonviolent measure designed to prevent terrorist attacks, but made no mention of the suicide bombings which led Israel to build the barrier in the first place, it argued, calling this a "travesty."

The General Assembly, Israel argued, can only request an opinion from the ICJ if the Security Council failed to act, which was not the case, because the Council had endorsed the road map less than three weeks before the Assembly resolution was passed.

 

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