July 9, 2025, marks the 21st anniversary of the ruling of the International Court of Justice (ICJ), declaring Israel’s Apartheid Wall and its “associated regime”, including the settlement project, in the occupied Palestinian territories, illegal. July 9 also marks 20 years of the Palestinian-led Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement for Palestinian rights.
The ICJ in its 2004 ruling on the illegality of Israel’s wall in the occupied West Bank stated that “the Court considers the construction of the wall and its associated régime create a “fait accompli” on the ground that could become permanent, in which case, and notwithstanding the formal characterization of the wall by Israel, it would be tantamount to de facto annexation.“
The ICJ called for Israel to dismantle it together with its associated regime. It found that by constructing the Wall, Israel is in breach of the prohibition on the acquisition of territory by force and the right to self-determination of the Palestinian people. These are peremptory norms that are binding on all States and from which no exceptions are permitted.
Most importantly, the ICJ confirmed the obligation of the international community not to aid or assist in the implementation of Israel’s construction of the Wall and its associated regime or the maintenance of it. It has reminded the international community of its duty to take appropriate action to ensure an end to this illegal situation.
The Wall in the West Bank has a Precedent
Since 1994 the Gaza Strip has been surrounded by a barrier that cuts off Palestinians there from the rest of the world. The wall built in 1994 around Gaza was a prototype for other Israeli-built walls, such as the one ripping through the occupied West Bank and ghettoizing Palestinian communities. In 2002 the Israeli government approved the construction of a 721-km long wall deep inside the occupied West Bank. The Wall winds through the landscape, slicing up Palestinian residential centers and further annexing Palestinian land.
The Role of the Apartheid Wall in Israel’s Strategy
Zionism, the ideological foundation of the Israeli settler-colonial project, strives to establish an exclusively ethnic-Jewish state in historic Palestine. The materialization of this project, through the establishment of the Israeli state in 1948, was only possible by ethnically cleansing the land of its Palestinian inhabitants. To further empty the land of its Palestinian inhabitants and exert control over those who remain on both sides of the Green Line, and to limit Palestinian resistance to their erasure, Israel has utilized a multi-layered system of violence, incarceration, segregation, surveillance and apartheid policies.
Militarized walls form part of this matrix of control and repression, fitting neatly with ideological Zionism. This was clearly articulated by Yitzhak Rabin, Israel’s former Prime Minister, hailed a peacemaker for his role in signing the Oslo Accords of 1993 signed between Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization. During a discussion on whether the Israeli government should build a wall around Gaza, Rabin stated: “We [Israelis] have to decide on separation as a philosophy.”
The Apartheid Wall itself is not defined by its physical infrastructure, but by what the Wall entails. The Wall is a system of control, domination, land theft, and Palestinians’ self-determination, including apartheid roads, the construction of settlements, and more. It is a core part of its regime of apartheid against all Palestinian people and its policies of annexation of Palestinian land:
1- The Wall is a tool of spatial engineering. By slicing through the West Bank, the Wall:
- Encircles and imprisons Palestinian towns and villages, turning them into isolated enclaves/ghettos.
- Prevents territorial continuity of Palestinian land, making not only a viable, sovereign Palestinian state geographically impossible. It makes Palestinian life impossible.
- Consolidates the map to force Israeli expansion and annexation imposed through physical infrastructure.
2- Approximately 85% of the Wall is built deep inside the illegally occupied West Bank. This has critical implications:
- It encloses illegal Israeli settlements within the “Israeli side” of the wall, while displacing Palestinian communities.
- Palestinian agricultural land and water resources have been absorbed into areas Israel is ethnically cleansing and colonizing.
3- The Wall is a tool of ethnic cleansing, fragmenting Palestinians, not just spatially but politically and socially.
- It intensifies the process of ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from key strategic areas, including East Jerusalem, by cutting them off from their social and economic networks in the West Bank.
- It underscores the architecture of apartheid, which institutionalizes two separate legal regimes in the same territory — one for Jewish Israelis, another for Palestinians.
4-The wall is part of a larger apparatus of surveillance, checkpoints, permits, and military zones designed to:
- Monitor and suppress Palestinian movement and organization.
- Restrict access to political, cultural, and economic hubs, attempting to break up Palestinian civil society.
- Create psychological pressure and dependency, especially when movement is only allowed via permits, which are revoked or denied without explanation.
As part of a wider settler-colonial project, the Wall reinforces a system where Israeli sovereignty expands, and Palestinian self-determination contracts. It transforms geography into a weapon — disciplining movement, enclosing communities, and reshaping the political landscape to entrench permanent Israeli control.
Significance of This Date Today
The current political situation in the occupied West Bank — from ethnic cleansing, displacement, ghettoization, the escalation of aggression by settler militias, and land confiscation—is a product of the construction of the Wall.
The Wall is an advanced step in Israel’s settler-colonial project in Palestine. Building the Wall in this form and at that time, determined the future of Palestine, which is the present that Palestinians live in now.
Our fundamental demand back then, and remains today, is that Israel and its accomplices be held accountable for its crimes, that impunity and complicity ends.
If the ICJ’s ruling had been implemented at the time, we would not have reached this stage of genocide in Gaza and the current brutal ethnic cleansing in the West Bank.
The international community, its institutions, and those in charge, especially in the colonial West, have provided full support and immunity to Israel for its violations of international law and Palestinian human rights.
Even though the obligations underlined in the ICJ’s rulings of 2004 and those in 2024 on the illegality of Israel’s occupation and its plausible genocide are legally binding and non derogable, especially Western states are ready to support the end of the rule of law for the sake of Israel.
This places a significant question on the entire system of international law: Does international law exist to achieve justice and prevent these crimes against humanity, or does it exist as a tool which colonial powers utilize? The answer depends on the power we can collectively build in our struggle for justice.
The language we use is also expression of the political positions we take. Even the terms used to describe this Wall have ignored the Palestinian narrative which has constantly insisted that this is an apartheid Wall – a fundamental tool in the overall regime of Israeli apartheid and ethnic cleansing.
Only 20 years after Israel started building the Wall, international human rights organizations accepted what Palestinians have said for decades, that Israel an apartheid state. The 2022 report by Amnesty International was groundbreaking in this regard. Yet, states have until now avoided taking any action to stop this crime against humanity, nor has any attempt been made to halt Israel’s Zionist project.
Israel will continue its ethnic cleansing and genocide of the Palestinians and will move from Gaza to the West Bank as long as the international community remains complicit.
July 9 reminds us of the responsibility of the peoples and governments of the entire world to end complicity, to hold this genocidal regime accountable and end it.