It makes sense for them to wait until after a possible

It makes sense for them to wait until after a possible change of presidency to secure a vote in the UN Security Council to give the court decision any teeth. The sad truth is that attacks like yesterday’s make it even less likely that international opinion will start to focus on that imbalance.For in international diplomatic terms, the moral high ground is precisely where the Palestinians should now be located. You don’t have to believe that the ICJ ruling is flawless to recognise that it marks the moment at which 37 years of brazen dismissal of the obligations of international law have caught up with Israel.The barrier, certainly as routed at present, is already making the chronic, day-to-day misery of the occupation dramatically worse for hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.Israel’s insistence that the route, which cuts deep into Palestinian territory, is reversible takes no account of the businesses closed, the lost jobs, the seized farmland, the suddenly inaccessible schools or the large-scale movements of population from their homes, which are already happening. Scarcely a week goes by without a seemingly indefensible cases of civilians being killed by the army during an operation. The fatal shooting at Qalandia of a wheelchair-bound paraplegic man and the gunning down in Nablus of a university professor and his son as they tried to leave their home under army orders are two of the more flagrant cases that come to mind But they are far from isolated. The recent rocket attacks on Sderot apart, this is the first bombing of civilians in Israel since March. But there is no sign, for example, that the leadership, however fragmented and floundering, has been prepared to sanction, let alone seek to enforce, the proposal by more than 60 Palestinians intellectuals, politicians and civic leaders back in March in effect to forswear attacks on the Israeli side of the 1949-67 Green Line, and in effect rethink the nature of the intifada.Palestinians often complain that civilian deaths in the occupied territories receive less attention than those of Israelis And justly so.

But the leadership can’t escape some responsibility for the tactic, for which Yasser Arafat’s protracted ambiguity on the issue of attacks inside Israel continues to provide cover. It could even help the government’s intensive lobbying of European capitals against further UN ratification of a judgment which formally they all, including Britain, agree with.Of course, the bombing may well have been a freelance operation planned and executed locally. In Israel, the bombing is bound, in part, to swing the immediate spotlight back to where the Prime Minister and his colleagues have always thought it should be focused: on security and the use of the barrier to prevent attacks of this kind And, perhaps, not just in Israel. By the standards of previous attacks, the death toll from the bomb which killed a 19-year-old Israeli woman soldier and injured 20 other people in Tel Aviv yesterday, was mercifully low. It came, too, at a time when for all the unbridled critiques here on its perceived one-sidedness, the judgment had begun to provoke some real heart searching, even among some right-leaning commentators, about the fast-growing and illegal privations visited on Palestinians by the barrier and its route. The Americans want civil war – but they will fail because the Iraqi people will refuse to fall into civil war.”And what of Saddam’s first appearance in court? The Sheikh laughs again “Saddam said it was a theatre and that Bush was a criminal This was true. It came on the day that the leadership, elated at the spectacular vindication by the International Court of Justice of almost everything they have been saying about the Israeli-built separation barrier, was to begin its diplomatic struggle with Israel to maximise support in the United Nations General Assembly.
Instead the bombing played politically into the hands of Ariel Sharon’s government, which immediately seized on it to dramatise its contention that the judges had ignored the very threat of murderous attacks inside Israel by Palestinian militants, which the barrier is supposed to contain.

From the political point of view of the Palestinians, the timing could hardly have been less adept. Nevertheless the bomb, swiftly claimed by Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, the faction linked to Yasser Arafat’s Fatah, was presumably intended to kill many more people than it did. But when the judge talked about the gassings he committed at Halabja, this was also the truth.”
More from Robert Fisk. We have the right also to resist occupation in different ways and we do so politically.

They will have their rights when all the people of Iraq have rights. On the afternoon that he died, the consul had invited all the doctors in Mashad to a reception outside the city and so, when my grandfather became ill, no one could find a doctor and there was no one to care for him.” And now, I ask Sheikh Jouwad? What of Iraq now? He chairs the Iraqi Islamic Conference – which combines Shia and Sunni intellectuals – and which is demanding independence for Iraq, just as Sheikh Jouwad’s grandfather did more than 80 years ago.”The Shias will not separate and they will not isolate themselves from the Sunni. But my father always believed that the British consul in Mashad had Sheikh Mehdi poisoned. “They wanted to use difficulties in the international situation to help Iraq to become a really independent country There would be a revolution in Iraq That was the idea But then in 1925, he suddenly died They claimed he had a disease. Instead, he travelled to the north-eastern Iranian city of Mashad and established there an assembly “to protect the holy places of Iraq”, publishing treatises in Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Russian and Turkish.”There was even an indirect dialogue between my grandfather and the Bolshevik revolutionaries of Lenin,” Sheikh Jouwad says. “When Sheikh Mehdi al-Khalasi arrived at the Iranian port of Bushehr, he received a big welcome but an official of the Iranian Oil Company fired 10 bullets at him,” he says.