“It is a conflict between two equal sides, both with legitimate grievances”

Symmetry is a claim about structure, and structure is measurable. Begin with sovereignty. Israel is a state with an army, a currency, a border regime and a seat at the United Nations. Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza have none of those things and have lived since 1967 under the authority of a state in which they cannot vote. On 19 July 2024 the International Court of Justice held, by eleven votes to four, that “the State of Israel’s continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory is unlawful,” and that Israel is “under an obligation to bring to an end its unlawful presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory as rapidly as possible.” By fourteen votes to one the Court held that Israel must “cease immediately all new settlement activities, and to evacuate all settlers from the Occupied Palestinian Territory,” and that it “has the obligation to make reparation for the damage caused to all the natural or legal persons concerned.” There is no reciprocal finding, because there is no reciprocal situation: one party occupies, the other is occupied.

Land tells the same story with numbers. Area C, under full Israeli civil and military control, covers more than 60 per cent of the West Bank. The figures that follow come from the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs’ Area C factsheet, and they need their dates attached, which are not all the same: the counts of Palestinian residents and communities in Area C are labelled 2013 on the sheet’s own charts, the permit approval rate and the demolition total cover 2009 to 2016, the demolition series runs to October 2017, and the file itself was produced in October 2018. They describe Area C alone, not the West Bank as a whole, and should not be set beside West Bank-wide settler totals — including the Court’s 2023 figure of approximately 465,000 settlers in the West Bank — as though the two counted the same thing. OCHA recorded that some 300,000 Palestinians lived in Area C in 532 residential areas — its pie chart is headed “Palestinian residents in Area C by type of community (2013)” and its table of communities gives a grand total of 532 communities and 297,900 residents, both sourced on the sheet to “OCHA 2013” — alongside 400,000 Israeli settlers in approximately 230 settlements; that less than 1 per cent of Area C was covered by a planning scheme for Palestinian communities approved by the Israeli authorities; that the average approval rate for Palestinian building permits between 2009 and 2016 was under 3 per cent; that Israel demolished over 4,000 Palestinian-owned structures in that same period on the grounds of lacking permits, with more than 12,500 demolition orders outstanding; that Palestinian entry to or residence in nearly 30 per cent of Area C was prohibited as a designated firing zone, placing 6,200 Palestinians in 38 communities at risk of forcible transfer; and that more than 70 per cent of communities located entirely or mostly in Area C were not connected to the water network, with consumption in some falling to 20 litres per person per day — a fifth of the recommended minimum. The ICJ recorded the planning position in its own terms in July 2024: Palestinian construction is “entirely prohibited in 70 per cent of Area C and severely restricted in the remaining 30 per cent.”

Law is asymmetrical too, and by design. Basic Law: Israel — the Nation State of the Jewish People, adopted by the Knesset in 2018, provides at clause 1(c) that “the realization of the right to national self-determination in the State of Israel is exclusive to the Jewish People,” and at clause 7 that “the State views the development of Jewish settlement as a national value.” The ICJ observed that as a result of the partial extension of Israeli law to the West Bank and East Jerusalem, “settlers and Palestinians are subject to distinct legal systems in the Occupied Palestinian Territory” — the settler under civil law, the Palestinian under military order, in the same territory, sometimes on the same road.

Casualties follow the same slope. OCHA has maintained a casualty database since 2008 covering the occupied Palestinian territory and Israel, entering an incident only when it has been “validated by at least two independent and reliable sources”; the running totals it publishes have shown Palestinian deaths exceeding Israeli deaths by an order of magnitude in every year of the record, and the figures for the hostilities that began on 7 October 2023 are published separately in its Humanitarian Situation Updates as they are verified. Anyone invoking symmetry can consult the database directly; the archive links it below rather than fixing a number that changes.

None of this settles who is right about anything. Palestinians and Israelis both make moral and historical claims, and those claims deserve to be argued. But “two equal sides” is not a moral position; it is a factual description, and as a factual description of who holds sovereignty, who controls land and water and movement, who is subject to whose courts, and who is dying, it does not survive contact with the record.

Sources

• International Court of Justice, advisory opinion of 19 July 2024 — operative paragraph 285 and findings on Area C (PDF)
• West Bank — Area C: Key Humanitarian Concerns — UN OCHA occupied Palestinian territory (PDF; population and community counts labelled 2013, permit and demolition figures 2009–2016, demolition series to October 2017, file produced October 2018)
• Basic Law: Israel — the Nation State of the Jewish People, English text published by the Knesset (PDF)
• Data on casualties — UN OCHA occupied Palestinian territory