By Annie Domini
The much-awaited order from the International Court of Justice (ICJ) at The Hague in the case of genocide by the State of Israel against the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip, brought before the world court by the Republic of South Africa, came out on 26 January 2024 and it’s crystal clear: Tel Aviv must stop its genocide of the Palestinians immediately. The court, in a set of near unanimous decisions from 17 judges, including two ad-hoc ones each from Israel and South Africa (by 15-2, and/or 16-1 majority decisions) instructed Israel to adhere to its obligations under the ‘Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.’ The Hague asked Tel Aviv to stop the killing of Palestinians, stop inflicting serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, stop “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”; stop “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group”, among other provisional measures.
While some pro-Palestinian activists both within the besieged Gaza Strip as well as in the world at large expressed disappointment that the ICJ stopped short of explicitly calling for a cease-fire, which the Gazans have been demanding for almost four months now, international human rights lawyers explained that the matter before the court pertained to acknowledgement and prevention of genocide, which the court has lived up to. Moreover, important Palestinian voices have underscored that cease-fire involves two equally capable warring parties, while in this case, it’s Israel’s indiscriminate massacre of Palestinians, numbering at over 25700 being killed, 60000 wounded and 2 million displaced, that’s under the scanner.
Not only did the ICJ acknowledge that the South African appeal had incredible merit, it refused to accept a single legal argument from the paltry Israeli defence, which relied on blaming the ongoing decimation of Palestinian lives, children, men and women included, on the attack by the Hamas militant group on October 7 of 2023.
It must be noted that Holocaust historians, including reputed Israeli ones such as Norman Finkelstein, Ilan Pappe, Raz Segal, Avi Shlaim, as well as psychologist Gabor Maté, have variously described the October 7 attack by the Hamas as a “slave revolt”, “cry of desperation”, “a prison break”, among other metaphors, underlining the 75 years of Palestinian trauma since the Nakba of 1948, in which over 700000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes in what suddenly was declared by the Anglo-Saxon world as the State of Israel, a homeland for the Jews.
While it was beyond the pale of the current ICJ hearing, the decades-long occupation of Palestine existed as an unstated but inferred subtext of The Hague’s provisional order on the humanitarian catastrophe imposed by Tel Aviv via its incessant brutalization of the Gazans. That it’s also carrying out indiscriminate killings, abduction and destruction of property in West Bank and East Jerusalem is a matter that will surely be taken up at a later point, now that Israel is officially under trial for carrying out genocide in Gaza.
Importantly, the court noted that the “Palestinians appear[ed] to constitute a distinct ‘national, ethnical, racial or religious group’, and hence a protected group within the meaning of Article II of the Genocide Convention”. It quoted various UN bodies, such as the UNRWA, WHO, OCHA, among others, that have documented the massacre and misery, including the decimation of healthcare services and access to basic medical care via the targeted destruction of each one of Gaza’s 36 hospitals, all of its universities, media offices, etc., in a frenzy of systematic extermination of the Palestinian way of life.
In order to establish genocidal intent via rhetoric, the ICJ quoted the President of Israel, Issac Herzog, its defence minister Yoav Gallant and the energy minister Israel Katz, whose words, flaunted on public forums such as X (formerly Twitter), TV channels etc., reeked of assumed imperial, settler-colonial impunity. The ICJ also took note of a press release of 16 November 2023, issued by 37 Special Rapporteurs, Independent Experts and members of the Working Groups part of the Special Procedures of the United Nations Human Rights Council, in which they voiced alarm over ‘discernibly genocidal and dehumanizing rhetoric coming from senior Israeli government officials’.
The ICJ in its order on provisional measures to be taken by Israel with immediate effect has asked it to ensure that its military does not commit any bodily or mental harm to the members of the Palestinian ethnic group in the besieged Gaza Strip, to prevent and punish the direct and public incitement to commit genocide of Palestinians, to enable access to basic services and humanitarian assistance, to prevent any destruction of evidence related to the allegations under Genocide Convention levelled against it, and to report back in a month to the ICJ on how it has adhered to the provisional orders.
India’s Judge Dalveer Bhandari, in addition to fully supporting the majority order by the ICJ that read out the provisional measures asked of Israel, also included an extra two-page note that ended by emphasizing that all hostilities must end with immediate effect and the remaining hostages with either side should be released unconditionally. This is as close to calling for a cease-fire as a world court can possibly come to, given it’s bound by the scope of the dispute it’s adjudicating at present. While New Delhi, under the current dispensation led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has made much of its public bonhomie with Tel Aviv, including indulging in questionable exchanges such as the alleged purchase of the Israeli spyware Pegasus, among others, it’s laudable that India’s representative at the world court, Judge Dalveer Bhandari, stuck to upholding the integrity of international human rights law, and clearly elucidated what was at stake in the South Africa vs. Israel case.
Ironically, Israel’s response to the ICJ ruling has been one of utter denial and dismissal, saying on the one hand that it doesn’t care about the order [“the Hague cannot stop us”], to claiming that the ICJ has not asked for a cease-fire, therefore there’s no need for it to stop its militarism in Gaza. In fact, on the very day the order was read out, Israel carried out fresh massacres in the refugee camps and assassinated another Palestinian journalist in his home along with his whole family in a targeted air strike. In addition, the United States, Israel’s chief supporter in the world stage, has tried to equivocate its way out of the definitive ICJ ruling, as has Canada led by Justin Trudeau, while France and Germany have (reluctantly?) said they would respect and abide by the ICJ order.
It’s also important to note that the vile public utterances and the video recording of the genocidal acts by the Israeli forces, often by themselves in manic hateful frenzy, against the Palestinians have come back to haunt and indict them not just in the court of world opinion, but also in the highest global court of justice. The impunity and arrogance with which Israel has carried out its barbaric actions, egged on, supported and armed by none other than the United States, as well as by the United Kingdom, and also, often, member states of the European Union, such Germany and France, underlined the ageing imperial order that’s now seeing the sun set on its empire of reckless neocolonial militarism.
On a sobering note, while Palestine is deservedly a lightening rod for many of the liberation/decolonisation struggles going on in various parts of the world, it must be noted that echoes of Israeli hate against Palestinians find parallels in India’s rabid Hindutva fundamentalism, reaching its political crescendo with the inauguration of the Ram Temple atop the debris of Babri Masjid and constitutional justice. And just like the Israeli government officials are being gradually held accountable for their incitement to hate and violence, the poison-tipped words of BJP-RSS leaders, including chief ministers and members of the Modi cabinet, too might one day find themselves under such an unforgiving spotlight. India must immediately course-correct and revert to good old secular constitutionalism to avoid seeing the harsh light of that unhappy dawn. (IPA Service)
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