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The War for the Holy Land

This section collects my texts on the legal and religious foundations of the war between Israel and its adversaries. This war began with an invasion of Israel's territory by enemy armies almost simultaneously with Israel's declaration of independence, and it has not ceased since. The participants changed, the intensity changed, the ideological toolkit changed, but its subject matter remained unchanged.

My legal analysis of this war contradicts, on fundamental points, the established legal and religious doctrines, in particular the positions of the UN General Assembly and Security Council, the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court and the Supreme Court of Israel, and it diverges from them not only in its conclusions but, importantly, in its methods, and constitutes, in essence, an alternative framework for describing this conflict and the ways of resolving it.

The key topics on which my framework is based are the following three fundamental ones:

  1. Where, from the standpoint of international law, do the borders of the State of Israel run, and by what legal instruments are they established?
  2. What, in the historical and legal sense, is the "Palestinian people", and why is it endowed with a wholly unique status within the UN system?
  3. Why does the term "State of Palestine" denote entities that are not merely different but legally incompatible?

In my view, the resolution of this conflict can be based only on the recognition that the body of norms actually in force, which governs the conduct of the parties, includes not only the norms of international conventions but also a religious body of norms. This war has at its basis problems of worldview and religion. And thus the resolution of the conflict is impossible without considering the norms of international conventions and normative religious texts as a single corpus applicable to this conflict.

Texts in this section​

Palestine — what this term actually denotes.

Palestinian people — how and for what purpose it came into being, and why it resembles no other people on Earth and has a wholly unique status within the UN system.

What is the "State of Palestine" and what, in legal terms, its recognitions by other states denote and to what they refer.

Occupation — what this term means in the 1907 Hague Convention and in the 1949 Geneva Conventions, and to which situations it is applicable at all.

Borders and Territory of Israel — what "borders" are in international law, where Israel's borders legally run, and by what they are established.

Al-Aqsa — what is actually meant in the Quran by the "Al-Aqsa Mosque", which has become the religious symbol of the war.

Tahrif — the Quran, Muhammad and the Torah. A religious-normative basis for reconciling the Islamic and Jewish conceptions of the Holy Land and for expanding the Abraham Accords.