On July 19, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took to the pages of X to respond to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruling, “Legal Consequences Arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Including East Jerusalem.” Netanyahu wrote: “The Jewish people are not occupiers in their own land, including in our eternal capital Jerusalem nor in Judea and Samaria, our historical homeland. No absurd opinion in the Hague can deny this historical truth or the legal right of Israelis to live in their own communities in our ancestoral home,” bad spelling and all.
On July 16 the racist Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich demanded Netanyahu annex the West Bank, if the ICJ ruled against Israel. “‘I hereby call on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—if the International Court of Justice in The Hague does decide that the settlement enterprise is illegal—respond to them with a historic decision of applying sovereignty to the territories of the homeland,’ said Smotrich,” according to Al Jazeera.
“The far-right minister also promised to ‘thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state through massive construction, regulating settlements, building roads and other measures in the field’—all moves illegal under international law.” One should bear in mind that Israel, itself, was an artificial creation based on geopolitics, orchestrated by British colonialist interests, in a letter drawn up in 1917 by Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to Lord Rothschild, who was a leader in the British Jewish community, for transmission to the Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland, known as “The Balfour Declaration.” Israel became a nation in 1948.