Israel must face charges of genocide at the World Court
The International Court of Justice, the United Nations’ highest judicial body, will begin hearings this week in a case brought by South Africa accusing Israel of committing genocide in Gaza.
The hearings, the first step in a lengthy process should the case proceed, will mark the first time Israel has chosen to personally defend itself in such an environment, demonstrating the seriousness of the charges and the high stakes for its country. international reputation and reputation.
Genocide, the term first used by a Polish lawyer of Jewish descent in 1944 to describe the systematic murder by the Nazis of approximately six million Jews and others on the basis of their ethnicity, is among the most serious crimes a country can commit. are accused.
In its submission to the court, South Africa quoted lawyer Raphael Lemkin, who explained the definition of genocide. South Africa, whose post-apartheid government has long supported the Palestinian cause, accused Israel of actions in Gaza against Hamas that are “genocidal in nature.” It says Israel has killed Palestinian civilians, inflicted serious physical and mental harm, and created “living conditions for Gazans designed to bring about their physical destruction.”
According to health officials in Gaza, more than 23,000 Palestinians have been killed in the past three months, the majority of them women and children. And most of the enclave’s 2.2 million residents have been displaced since the war began, increasing the risk of disease and illness. hungryaccording to international organizations.
The accusation, which Israel categorically denies, has particular significance in Israel, a country founded in the wake of the near-widespread destruction of European Jewry and which soon after became a refuge for Jews expelled by the hundreds of thousands from Arab countries. .
Israel, a signatory to the 1948 International Convention against Genocide, is keeping the details of its defense in court. But Israeli leaders say South Africa’s accusations distort the meaning of genocide and the purpose of the convention. They say a more appropriate case could be brought against Hamas, an internationally labeled terrorist organization that is the target of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza.
“There is nothing more heinous and ridiculous than this claim,” Israel’s President Isaac Herzog said on Tuesday. “In fact, our enemies, Hamas, call in their charter for the destruction and annihilation of the State of Israel, the sole nation-state of the Jewish people.”
Ayelet Shaked, a former Israeli justice minister, called the genocide allegations a “blood libel,” a reference to the age-old anti-Semitic trope that Jews kill non-Jewish babies to drink their blood, and claimed that the South African government to distract their own public from their country’s domestic problems.
The International Court of Justice rules on disputes between states, and the first hearings in the Israel case will take place in The Hague on Thursday and Friday.
The case brings the popular condemnation of Israel’s warfare in much of the developing world to a public forum. In December, the UN General Assembly adopted a non-binding resolution, put forward by the Arab Group and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, calling for a ceasefire; and the Security Council adopted a binding resolution, also promoted by the Arab countries, calling for the provision of more humanitarian aid.
South Africa has submitted an application 84 pages filed a petition with the court in December outlining its claims and citing statements by Israeli officials, which it said constituted “a clear, direct and public incitement to genocide, which has gone unchecked and unpunished.”
Israelis have pointed out that some of the evidence South Africa cites is limited. One example is a comment made in a television interview by an Israeli pop star, Eyal Golan, who said that Israel must “erase” Gaza.
In a statement released late Tuesday, Israel’s attorney general and public prosecutor said any call for intentional harm to civilians could amount to the criminal offense of sedition. “Several such cases are currently being investigated by Israeli law enforcement authorities,” the statement said.
South Africans have long empathized with the Palestinian people and equated their lives in Gaza and under the occupation of the West Bank with the oppression under apartheid. Nelson Mandela explicitly expressed this connection by speaking a speech from 1997“We know all too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.”
That sentiment is driving South Africa’s case, said Ronald Lamola, the country’s justice minister, who will lead the delegation in The Hague. “We believe it is important for a state like South Africa, which has faced apartheid discrimination, to stand up for the people of Palestine,” he said in an interview.
Israel, for its part, says it did not choose war but was forced to do so after Hamas led a cross-border attack against the country on October 7. About 1,200 people, most of them civilians, were killed in the attack, according to Israeli newspaper The Guardian. Israeli authorities, making it the deadliest day in Israel’s 75-year history, and for Jews since the Holocaust. More than 100 of the 240 prisoners seized on October 7 are still being held in Gaza.
That’s what UN rapporteurs said a statement Monday that the Hamas-led rampage, which included murder, hostage-taking, rape and mutilation, could amount to war crimes and, given its scale, perhaps also crimes against humanity.
A final ruling could take years, but as an emergency measure, South Africa is calling on the court to order Israel to immediately halt its military operation.
“All South Africa needs to do to obtain an interim measures order is convince the court that its charge of genocide is ‘plausible’,” said William Schabas, former chairman of a UN commission of inquiry into Israel’s military operations in the Gaza Strip. in 2014, professor of international law at Middlesex University London.
South Africa, Professor Schabas said, had so far laid out only “a skeleton of its case”, and it would take months before it gathered all its evidence. “Only then can we truly assess the full strength of the South African case,” he said.
The court’s decisions are usually binding, although there are few means to enforce them. In 2004, the court issued a non-binding opinion that Israel’s construction of its security barrier in the territory of the occupied West Bank was illegal and that it should be dismantled. Twenty years later, the system of walls and fences still stands.
Even if Israel were to comply with an order, Hamas, which is not bound by the laws of war, would not be forced to stop fighting in the same way.
The Israeli military insists it is prosecuting the war in accordance with international law. Officials point to the millions of messages sent through various means telling Gaza citizens to evacuate to safer areas before the bombings, and say they are continuously working to increase the amount of aid entering Gaza.
They say the death toll in Gaza can be attributed in part to Hamas’ use of residential areas and civilian structures, including schools and hospitals, to carry out attacks, store weapons and hide fighters.
Vice Admiral Daniel Hagari, the military’s chief spokesman, categorically refuted the charge of genocide, saying the court should instead focus on how the war began on October 7. “We were the ones who were slaughtered,” Admiral Hagari said.
In Israel, the matter is being handled at the highest level. The government has appointed one of the country’s leading lawyers, Aharon Barak, as an ad hoc judge who will join the court on its behalf. (For the hearing of the Gaza case, the court’s regular panel of 15 judges will be expanded to 17, with one additional judge appointed by each side.)
Mr. Barak was given the job even though he criticized Israel’s right-wing government last year over a planned judicial review. Retired president of Israel’s Supreme Court, Mr. Barak, is a Holocaust survivor who fled Nazi-occupied Lithuania as a boy.
The Israeli legal team in The Hague will be led by Malcolm Shaw, a British expert chosen for his experience in trials at the World Court. The South African team will be led by John Dugard, a highly regarded scholar of international law and former United Nations Special Rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territory.
In a statement, Hamas welcomed South Africa’s decision to bring the case, calling on “all countries to file similar files and requests before competent national and international courts against this Nazi entity,” referring to Israel.
The United States, Israel’s main ally, rejected South Africa’s petition. National Security Council spokesman John Kirby described it as “meritless, counterproductive, completely without any factual basis.”
While the South African government insists it is continuing its case to stop a genocide, analysts say officials were more likely to be motivated by domestic and diplomatic political pressure.
In the two years that Russia has continued its war in Ukraine, South Africa has strongly resisted condemnation of Russia, a crucial ally. In taking that position, South African officials often pointed to what they say was a double standard: U.S. officials demanded support for Ukraine’s sovereignty but paid little attention to Palestinian demands, they said.
“South Africa wanted to make a very clear point – to point out these contradictions in the global, institutional, multilateral order,” said Priyal Singh, a senior researcher at the Institute for Security Studies, a think tank.
Support for the Palestinians has long been a popular rallying point in South Africa, and Mr Singh said politicians from the ruling African National Congress are exploiting this support ahead of a key national election this year.
Patrick Kingsley, Marlies Simons And Myra Noveck reporting contributed