The Israeli strikes on Iranian forces in Syria: a case study on the use of force in defence of annexed territories

The extensive air strikes launched by Israel on Iranian forces and assets across Syria in the early morning of 10 May 2018 present a complex case study. The strikes were decided in retaliation for a rocket barrage fired some hours earlier from Syrian territory on IDF forward outposts in the Israeli-controlled Golan. The rockets were immediately attributed by the IDF to the Quds Force, the special unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards in charge of extraterritorial operations. The governments of the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany explicitly referred to Israel's right to act in self-defence against Iran. The Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu invoked 'Israel's obligation and right to defend itself against Iranian aggression from Syrian territory'. A self-defence argument raises in the present case a legal issue related to the status of the territory attacked: the Golan Heights, occupied by Israel after the Six-Day War in 1967 and annexed in 1981. Can an annexing state invoke Article 51 UN Charter to justify the use of force in self-defence against an armed attack directed exclusively at a territory that it annexed? This post submits that the answer to this question, which appears unsettled and largely unexplored, cannot overlook the situation of manifest illegality that a self-defence argument would purport to preserve and protract.