ICJ Judge Julia Sebutinde Caught Plagiarizing from Israeli Lobby Sources

In July 2024, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued a landmark advisory opinion on the legal consequences of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories. The Court ruled that both the occupation and Israeli settlements violate international law and that Israel must dismantle the settlements immediately and end the occupation as soon as possible. It also stressed that other states are legally bound to neither recognize the occupation nor provide any form of support that sustains it. The ruling sparked an immediate and aggressive backlash from pro-Israel advocates, who launched coordinated attacks on the Court and its judges.

The attack on the International Court of Justice

The attacks on the Court focused not on legal arguments but on discrediting its judges. Critics dismissed Judge Hilary Charlesworth as an extreme left-wing witch, while ICJ President Nawaf Salam faced accusations of bias due to his Lebanese nationality and past diplomatic roles. The most recent allegation claimed he was already campaigning to become Lebanon’s next prime minister while still serving as a judge. On January 14, 2025, Salam resigned to assume the premiership, and Vice President Julia Sebutinde succeeded him as ICJ president.

The Israel lobby welcomed Sebutinde’s appointment. “Where Salam was outspokenly anti-Israel, she is seen as an advocate for the Israeli position,” wrote the Center for Information and Documentation Israel (the Dutch version of AIPAC). Nieuw Israëlietisch Weekblad (conservative Jewish magazine) went even further, running the headline: “Will the International Court in The Hague Get a Pro-Israel President?”

The Israel lobby and its influence

John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, in The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, describe the Israel lobby as a loose coalition of individuals and organizations working to steer U.S. foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction. This influence operates through think tanks, media figures (like opinion writers), and political organizations. I adopt their definition as well. However, it is important to note that this does not imply the existence of a coordinated conspiracy network.

The American historian Zachary Foster, who specializes in the history of Palestine, discovered that Sebutinde used historical falsehoods in her dissenting opinion (Dissenting opinions are dissenting opinions of judges who disagree with (parts of) the majority opinion and explain their legal reasoning separately). Foster examined her sources and concluded that she had taken a lot of material directly from the Israel lobby without citing the source. His findings inspired me to further analyze her text, discovering that she had copied some paragraphs from an article by lobbyists Abraham Bell and Eugene Kontorovich: “Palestine, Uti Possidetis Juris and the Borders of Israel.” My full analysis can be found here.

Bell and Kontorovich: The Architects of Israel’s Legal Narrative

Bell and Kontorovich are leading figures in the Kohelet Policy Forum, a conservative-libertarian Israeli think tank with significant influence over Israeli legislation. Kohelet played a central role in pushing the controversial judicial reforms of 2023. One of its key ambitions is the passage of a law that would retroactively legalize settlements on privately owned Palestinian land—even in cases where settlers established them in violation of Israeli law.

Eugene Kontorovich himself lives in an illegal settlement, plays an key role in anti-BDS legislation in US,¹ and actively works to create legal arguments that allow settlers to take over land from Palestinians. One of his most controversial claims is that Israel has a legal right to the entire area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea under the principle of uti possidetis juris. However, this interpretation is dismissed by most legal scholars and is taken seriously by only a handful of lawyers.

For instance, in Occupation in International Law (Oxford University Press), leading jurists Eliav Lieblich and Eyal Benvenisti mention the work of Bell and Kontorovich only in a footnote—merely to acknowledge its existence. Most academic publications on the subject do not reference them at all. Their fringe status in the legal community makes them, in my view, the “wappies” of international law.² Yet, despite this lack of credibility, Julia Sebutinde plagiarized their arguments to support her legal reasoning.

The uti possidetis principle is a rule in international law that stipulates that former administrative boundaries of colonies or dependent territories are converted into state borders upon independence to ensure stability.

Sebutinde’s Further Plagiarism Sources

In addition to Bell and Kontorovich, Sebutinde copied arguments from Mitchell G. Bard’s website “Myths and Facts: A Guide to the Arab-Israeli Conflict.” Bard is director of the American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise, a pro-Israel lobbying organization. His publications often contain factual inaccuracies and fallacies that reinforce the Israeli narrative.

Another source was a YouTube video by PragerU. PragerU is an American media organization that disseminates ultraconservative and Christian Zionist propaganda. Their publications are full of misleading information and are actively promoted in American schools. The CEO of PragerU, Marissa Streit, is a former member of the Israeli intelligence unit 8200, which is known for cyberwarfare.

Sebutinde also plagiarized a 2021 blog post by Douglas J. Feith, published by the Hudson Institute, a staunchly pro-Israel think tank. Feith, a key architect of the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, played a central role in drafting A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm (1996), a policy document for Benjamin Netanyahu that advocated a more aggressive Israeli foreign policy, such as removing Saddam Hussein. For years, Feith has insisted that Israeli settlements are legal, and that Israel has no obligation to relinquish occupied territory. As an advisor to Ronald Reagan, he attempted to sanitize his legal position on settlements, framing them as legitimate under international law.³

A commenter on Zachary Foster’s site discovered that Sebutinde had also copied text from the website of the Israeli diplomatic mission to the UN in Geneva.

Conclusion: An opinion from the Israel lobby

Julia Sebutinde’s dissenting opinion is not an independent legal analysis, but a compilation of arguments from the Israel lobby. Her text could just as well have been written by an intern at AIPAC in collaboration with an intern from Christians United for Israel. The next few years will show whether the ICJ will be guided by international law, or whether lobbying influences such as Sebutinde’s set a dangerous precedent.

Lawyers have completely refuted Sebutinde’s opinion, such as David Kretzmer and André de Hoogh.

Footnotes:

1
“Progressive groups have used bogus constitutional arguments as prerexts to protect the discriminatory treatment of primarily Jewish groups. Embarrassed to publicly defend BDS itself, they have claimed to oppose such laws out of legal scruple. Today that pretext has been removed, and Congress can move forward with confidence to pass federal anti-BDS legislation,” said Professor Eugene Kontorovich, who has helped draft many state anti-BDS laws and participated in the 8th Circuit litigation.
2
A wappie is a derogatory term originating from Dutch, primarily used to describe individuals who hold strong opinions that are not based on factual evidence, often related to conspiracy theories or pseudoscience. The term has gained prominence in recent years, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, where it was used to label those who deny the seriousness of the virus or believe in conspiracy theories surrounding it.
3
“In June 1981, Feith drafted a memorandum for Richard Allen, the national security adviser, insisting that Israel’s settlements were “legal” despite the views of the State Department’s legal adviser. Compare this to Douglas J. Feith, “Notes on Legality of Israel’s West Bank Settlements,” June 16, 1981. Collection: Executive Secretariat, NSC, Near East and South Asia [Middle East]. Contents: Israel/IraqIsrael. Box: 68. Ronald Reagan Library. Feith continued to argue in favor of the legality of Israel’s settlements into the 1990s during the negotiations between Israel and the PLO. See Douglas Feith and Eugene Rostow, Israel’s Legitimacy in Law and History: Proceedings of the Conference on International Law and the Arab-Israeli Conflict (1993). See also, Douglas Feith, “A Mandate for Israel,” National Interest 33 (1993): 43–58, at 56.”, Cuddy, Brian, and Victor Kattan, eds. 2023. Making Endless War: The Vietnam and Arab-Israeli Conflicts in the History of International Law. University of Michigan Press. p.200

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