The International Court of Justice handed down two advisory opinions in 2024 and 2025 that should have ended the argument. Instead, Israeli officials and their legal defenders keep recycling claims that were already dead on arrival. The court ruled that the prohibition on acquiring territory by force is absolute, with no exceptions for self-defence, no exemptions for missing prior sovereigns, and no loopholes for ancient mandates or security anxieties. The law is settled. What remains is political theatre dressed in legal language.
The Doctrine That Failed
Israel’s most sophisticated legal argument rests on something called the “Missing Reversionary Sovereign” doctrine, cooked up by jurist Yehuda Blum and former Supreme Court Justice Meir Shamgar. Their claim runs like this: the West Bank and Gaza were not sovereign Israeli territory, but they were not sovereign Jordanian or Egyptian territory either. Jordan’s annexation of the West Bank in 1950 drew only two recognitions. Egypt administered Gaza as a military governor, never claiming full sovereignty. Therefore, Israel did not displace a recognised sovereign in 1967, so the laws of belligerent occupation do not apply. The territories are “disputed,” not occupied.
The ICJ’s July 2024 advisory opinion shredded this reasoning. The court ruled that the ban on territorial acquisition by force operates independently of whatever legal arrangements preceded the conflict. It does not matter whether Jordan or Egypt held perfectly clean title; Israel acquired control through military force, and that force cannot create sovereign rights. The Palestinian people retain permanent sovereignty over the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza. Their right to self-determination is inherent, not contingent on the administrative tidiness of previous decades.
This is not judicial overreach. It is the consistent position of the entire post-1945 legal architecture. The UN Charter’s Article 2(4) prohibits force against territorial integrity. Article 51 permits self-defence, but only as a temporary measure to repel attack. You may fight to stop an invasion, but you may not keep the land where the fighting happened.
The Self-Defence Alibi
Israel maintains that the 1967 war was defensive, initiated by surrounding Arab states. Some aligned scholars have tried to spin this into a doctrine of “defensive conquest,” arguing that territory acquired while repelling aggression may be retained for security purposes, for defensible borders, for long-term survival.
The ICJ’s October 2025 advisory opinion closed this door explicitly. Occupying powers have security duties within occupied territory, the court confirmed. They do not acquire sovereign rights. International law has no conversion mechanism that transforms military victory into permanent political title. The security justification is a functional responsibility, not a proprietary claim.
When South African forces crossed into Angola during the Border War, nobody suggested that successful defensive operations entitled Pretoria to permanent sovereignty over Namibe or Cunene. The proposition would have been laughed out of any legal forum. The same principle governs here, and the same principle has governed since 1945. Military necessity is temporally bounded. Political acquisition is forever. The law knows the difference.
Historical Claims and Dead Mandates
Beyond the missing sovereign argument and the self-defence alibi, Israeli officials and their supporters reach for deeper history. The 1922 League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, they argue, recognised Jewish national rights across the territory. The Balfour Declaration preceded it. Ancient kingdoms once stood where modern settlements now sprawl.
Modern international law treats these arguments as museum pieces. The mandate system was designed to shepherd territories toward independent statehood for their inhabitants, not to freeze demographic outcomes from the 1920s or the biblical era. The evolution of international law toward decolonisation and self-determination superseded whatever territorial ambitions the mandate period might have implied. The ICJ has been unambiguous: historical claims, however sincerely held, do not override the Palestinian people’s right to determine their own political future on their own land.
The Fourth Geneva Convention’s Article 49 reinforces this by prohibiting the transfer of an occupying power’s civilian population into occupied territory. Every Israeli settlement in the West Bank and East Jerusalem violates this provision. The transfer is systematic, state-sponsored, and intended to create facts on the ground that might one day support annexation. The international community, through the UN General Assembly and multiple Security Council resolutions, has consistently rejected this as unlawful. The ICJ’s advisory opinions merely restated what resolution after resolution had already established.
The Oslo Distraction
Interim agreements like the Oslo Accords introduced another layer of confusion that Israeli negotiators have exploited. The accords created Palestinian Authority control over fragments of the West Bank and Gaza, established joint committees, and postponed final status questions to later negotiations. Some Israeli politicians have treated these arrangements as implicit recognition of shared or divided sovereignty, or as evidence that Palestinian self-governance somehow legitimates continued Israeli military and civilian presence elsewhere.
The ICJ’s 2025 opinion addressed this directly. Interim agreements are interim. They do not transfer ultimate territorial sovereignty. They cannot be read as permanent arrangements by default, simply because final status negotiations have stalled or collapsed. The Palestinian Authority’s limited administrative functions under Oslo do not diminish the Palestinian people’s collective sovereignty over the whole of the occupied territories. The accords were a procedural bridge, not a legal terminus.
This matters for how we read diplomatic performance more broadly. Agreements that are explicitly temporary get treated as permanent when powerful parties find permanence convenient. We have seen this logic before, closer to home, in labour broker arrangements that were meant to be transitional, in land reform frameworks that became permanent excuses for inaction, in “interim” governance structures that calcified into enduring inequality. The legal form says temporary. The political practice says otherwise. International law, at least in this instance, has refused to ratify the bait-and-switch.
What the Law Actually Says
The accumulated legal position is not subtle. The UN Charter prohibits territorial acquisition by force. The Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits population transfer into occupied territory. The ICJ has ruled that prior sovereignty gaps do not create exceptions. It has ruled that self-defence does not create exceptions. It has ruled that security duties do not become sovereign rights. It has ruled that historical mandates do not override self-determination. It has ruled that interim agreements do not transfer permanent sovereignty.
Israel’s claims to the occupied territories rest on arguments that international law has examined and rejected. The rejection is not recent. It stretches across decades of General Assembly resolutions, Security Council resolutions, and now two definitive ICJ advisory opinions in consecutive years. What remains is not a live legal debate but a political choice to ignore settled law.
For South Africans watching this unfold, the pattern carries uncomfortable recognitions. We know what it looks like when a state creates legal categories to maintain domination over a subject population. We know the vocabulary of “separate development,” of “self-governing territories,” of administrative distinctions that mask substantive subjugation. The “disputed territory” frame is not so distant from the “self-governing homeland” frame. Both deploy legal language to describe arrangements that law, properly understood, condemns.
The ICJ has spoken clearly. The question is whether anyone with power to enforce will listen.
