Accused of genocide, Israelis see a reversal of reality. Palestinians see justice.
Whatever the outcome, the charge of genocide leveled against Israel this week by the world’s highest court is a groundbreaking intervention imbued with profound symbolism for both Israelis and Palestinians.
In detail, the case at the International Court of Justice is an opportunity to assess three months of devastation in Gaza. Israel is accused of committing genocide against the Palestinian people during a military campaign that has killed about 1 in 100 Gazans and displaced nearly two million others.
But the Hague case has also had broader resonance: Among both Israelis and Palestinians, it is seen as a proxy for a much older struggle over the legitimacy of their respective national causes.
For many Israelis, the case is the culmination of a decades-long effort to turn Israel into a pariah by subjecting the country — itself founded in the wake of a genocide of Jews — to a much higher level of scrutiny than other countries.
They see their invasion of the Gaza Strip as a defensive war against an enemy, Hamas, which carried out its own genocidal attack on Israel on October 7, prompting the Israeli army to pursue Hamas into Gaza, just as any other army would have done.
“It is a major blow to the Zionist effort to normalize the Jewish people and make us a nation among nations,” said Yossi Klein Halevi, author and fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute, a research group in Jerusalem.
“What we feel today is that we are the Jew of the nations,” he said.
By contrast, many Palestinians feel a momentary sense of catharsis at the thought that Israeli officials would be forced, as they were on Friday, to defend their country before a panel of international judges.
In Palestinian eyes, Israel is only now being treated like any other country in a courtroom in The Hague – after being protected from United Nations surveillance for so long by the United States and, as Palestinians see it, by most other countries. world news media.
“In this one case, the Palestinians are able to overcome the enormous asymmetry that exists between Israelis and Palestinians just for this fleeting moment,” said Khaled Elgindy, director of the Center Program on Palestine and Israeli-Palestinian Affairs East Institute. a research group in Washington.
The charges were brought by South Africa, which has filed a report 84 page application December in court. It quotes inflammatory statements from Israeli officials saying it “constitutes a clear, direct and public incitement to genocide, which has gone unchecked and unpunished.”
Israel’s defense team began presenting its case to the court on Friday, a day after South Africa’s lawyers presented their case.
“There can hardly be an accusation more false and malicious than the accusation of genocide against Israel,” said Tal Becker, an Israeli lawyer who opened Israel’s response in court on Friday. “Israel is waging a defensive war against Hamas, not against the Palestinian people,” he added.
The war began on October 7, when Hamas-led attackers invaded Israel, killing an estimated 1,200 people and kidnapping some 240 others, according to Israeli officials. In response, Israel launched one of the most intense military campaigns in modern history, one that Gaza officials say has killed more than 23,000 Gazans and expelled more than 80 percent of the enclave’s surviving population, according to the United Nations.
It could take years before a ruling is reached in the trial. For now, the court is expected to rule only on whether Israel should be ordered to comply with the interim measures, specifically the suspension of its campaign in Gaza, while it deliberates on the case. The court’s decisions are usually binding, but still essentially symbolic in nature: the judges have few means to enforce their rulings.
But Mr Elgindy said: “For the Palestinians it will be a moral victory regardless of the legal outcome.”
For Israelis, it is a perversion of history to be confronted with claims of genocide, both because of the brutality of the October 7 Hamas-led attacks and because of the long history of oppression of the Jewish people.
Their state was founded in 1948 in the wake of the Holocaust, and its founders sought to protect Jews from the same kind of violence Israel is now accused of. The concept of genocide was coined in response to the Holocaust by a lawyer of Jewish descent, Rafael Lemkinwho later promoted the creation of the international convention that Israel is now accused of violating.
And the judge Israel sent to join the judges reviewing the case, Aharon Barak, 87, is a Holocaust survivor who escaped from the ghetto of Kovno, now Kaunas, Lithuania, by hiding in a bag .
“For most Israelis, this is the culmination of a long process of reversing the Holocaust — of accusing Jews of being the new Nazis,” Mr. Halevi said.
But if the Israelis feel a historical irony in this case, the Palestinians feel a historical justice, however temporary.
As a stateless people, Palestinians retain a deep sense of trauma from the wars surrounding the creation of the State of Israel, when approximately 700,000 Palestinians – most of the Arab population in the country then divided into Israel, Gaza and the West Bank – fled or were driven from their homes, in a forced displacement known to Palestinians as the Nakba.
That trauma worsened in 1967, when Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza during that year’s Arab-Israeli war, capturing the territories from Jordan and Egypt.
And since then, Palestinians’ pain has been compounded by the gradual erosion of their dream of statehood. Israel has built hundreds of settlements in the West Bank and maintains military control over it.
Even after withdrawing its troops from Gaza in 2005, Israel kept the territory under a grueling blockade when Hamas took control there in 2007, and successive Israeli governments have exacerbated political and logistical divisions between Palestinians in the two areas.
The case in The Hague does not address any of these grievances and does not bring Palestinians closer to the state. But regardless of the outcome, it suspends what Palestinians see as a lack of accountability for Israeli misconduct.
“Israeli officials are finally being put in a situation where they have to think about their actions,” said Nasser al-Kidwa, a former Palestinian envoy to the United Nations.
In general, Mr al-Kidwa said: “They feel like they are above the law and they feel like they are not accountable to anything. And now you suddenly see them trying to answer and putting the best face on their answers. And that is rare.”
For Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, a Gaza-based writer and analyst who lost many family members in a strike in December, the case will do little to ease his sense of loss or the pain felt by those still in Gaza.
“From my point of view, it’s hard to see how this directly addresses what happened to my family, what happened to the homes I grew up in, and the suffering that my friends and community and people experience every day. said Mr. Alkhatib, who moved to the United States in 2005.
Still, Mr. Alkhatib, a fierce critic of Hamas and its terrorism, said he hoped the notoriety of the case could prompt more Palestinians to seek diplomatic or legal routes to improve their lot, rather than resorting in despair to attack Israeli civilians.
“It’s actually helpful for Palestinians to feel that there are alternatives to violence,” he said.
That, in turn, could push both sides toward “a different strategy, a different future, one based on mutual respect, mutual humanity and based on dialogue and engagement and based on sidelining those extremist voices that have become so dominant in both parties,” he said. said Alchatib.
It was a thought echoed in part by Mr. Halevi, the Israeli author. While rejecting the premise of the genocide charge, he nonetheless acknowledged the role that insulting statements by far-right Israeli politicians, some of whom have called for a second Nakba, had played in the case against Israel.
“The inflammatory statements of far-right politicians have brought us here,” Halevi said.
“There has to be an internal settlement for that,” he added. “We will not begin the process of healing Israel until this government is replaced and the far right is relegated to the margins of Israeli politics.”
Rawan Sheikh Ahmad contributed reporting from Haifa, Israel.