By Jeff Mackler [Photo above: South Africa’s International Court of Justice delegation at The Hague, Netherlands presenting charges of genocide against Israel]
The UN’s International Court of Justice (ICJ) at The Hague, Netherlands delivered its non-binding verdict on January 26 on South Africa’s multiple charges that Zionist Israel was guilty of genocide. The court’s 17 judges, in near unanimous decisions on a myriad of issues, rejected South Africa’s key demands that Israel immediately declare a ceasefire and stop its genocidal slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank and that Israel open its border crossings with Egypt to allow lifesaving medical supplies, food and water for Gaza’s Zionist-starved population.
Indeed, the day after the rulings, Zionist officials dismissed the ICJ proceedings with contempt and intensified its genocidal bombings, including airstrikes in Khan Yunis city in southern Gaza. Fifty Palestinians were killed, including several children near a school. Most were displaced persons who had been sheltering in refugee centers and were hit by live rounds, air strikes, or artillery fire.
The court also ruled that Hamas immediately and unconditionally release all 100 of the remaining Israeli hostages taken on October 7 during Hamas’s Al-Aqsa Flood attack. There was no mention of the Zionist Entity’s releasing its 8000+ imprisoned, beaten and often tortured Palestinians prisoners that Hamas aimed at exchanging for its captured hostages.
In its carefully crafted rulings, aimed at portraying the court as at least alert to the genocidal horrors inflicted on the Palestinian people, the judges included some language aimed at assuaging the world’s contempt for the actions of the racist, settler Zionist regime. It found “plausible” evidence of genocide, and called on Israel to “take all measures within its power to prevent the commission of all such acts.”
Israel was “ordered” to issue a report in a month’s time indicating that it had now refrained from killing Palestinians in accord with all nations’ obligations under the 1948 Geneva Convention on genocide. More than one observer noted that given the 26,000 Palestinians already murdered by the Zionist killing machine since October 7 and another 76,000 wounded, at the current rate, another some 8,500 Palestinians could be expected to be slaughtered and countless more wounded during the one-month timeframe that the court gave Israel to report back on its “progress.”
Meanwhile, 80 percent of Gaza’s buildings have been destroyed or damaged with Israel declaring that it would now literally plow through the rubble to construct roads to facilitate the passage of its military vehicles to better facilitate its slaughter.
Here I leave aside a detailed account of South Africa’s 75 pages of genocide charges and the court’s decisions, all of which fall into the category of politics and “diplomacy” played out on the world stage as opposed to binding decisions capable of enforcement by any international body or state. Neither the UN nor its ICJ, sometimes called the World Court, have the authority to enforce its resolutions or findings, unless, that is, they are unanimously approved by the UN Security Council, where any single permanent member has the unqualified right of veto. The US exercised this veto a few months ago in rejecting a UN Security Council “ceasefire” resolution. The Biden administration indicated in no uncertain terms that any World Court decisions condemning Israel and moving to stop its genocide would be similarly vetoed. The US subsequently voted against a UN General Assembly ceasefire resolution approved by a vote of 153 in favor, 10 against and 23 abstaining. Like all General Assembly resolutions it merely indicated the opinions of the UN’s member member states. No more!
No ICJ judge voted to demand Zionist genocide be stopped
Thus, the World Court’s “decisions” and especially its ambiguities and guarded formulations, instantly became the international format for every nation and international player to publicly state their views, interpreting the ICL’s report for their own political purposes. But the essence of the matter is that under US pressure, not a single judge voted to demand an immediate ceasefire and that the US-backed Zionist genocide be stopped immediately! The judges, selected by the world’s capitalist nations, were unanimous in bowing to US imperialism’s open and veiled threats to tow the US line.
US presiding judge leads the way
The ICL’s presiding judge, Joan Donoghue, a former top legal advisor to US State Department’s Human Rights Commission under the Obama administration, stated that South Africa did have standing to bring the charges in the first place and that there was in fact evidence that “at least some of the acts and omissions” charged by South Africa had been committed by Israel.
Donoghue stated that Palestinians had the right to be “protected from acts of genocide” but her double talk formulations, and the ICJ’s, refrained from designating Israel’s actions as genocidal! Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, she declared, could face “irreparable harm” from continued Israeli actions: “The civilian population in the Gaza Strip remains extremely vulnerable,” she asserted, as if the physical decimation of the entire Gaza strip and the forced departure of 80 percent of its 2.3 million people was not already and accomplished fact.
“Provisional measures “
The court ordered a number of “provisional measures” including recommending that Israel address the killing of “members of the group,” a euphemism for Palestinians, given that the Zionist Entity does not recognize Palestinians as a distinct national people with standing to come before the UN in the first place. The Zionist regime characterizes Palestinians only as Arabs, indistinguishable from all other Arab people in the Middle East!
In the same manner Donoghue stated that Israel’s actions could cause serious bodily or mental harm to “members of the group” and could be “deliberately inflicting on the group’s conditions of life, and calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” Imposing “measures intended to prevent births within the group” was also cited by Donoghue as a possible outcome of Israeli’s actions. Another adopted provisional measure held that Israel should “protect evidence of possible genocide convention violations.”
Two New York Times January 27 headlines captured the ICJ’s equivocating decisions: “Israel Must Shun Acts of Genocide, U.N. Court Rules: No Decree To End War” and, “U.N. Court Rules Israel Must Avoid Genocide, But Remains Mum on War.”
In short, rhetoric aside, all serious legal observers agreed that any ICJ deliberations regarding any final findings of Israeli genocide would take multiple years to litigate. And again, whatever the “final outcome” of such deliberations the US is all but pledged, in advance, to veto any proposed UN action to remedy the situation. Indeed, US imperialism today is Israel’s chief benefactor, supplying state-of-the-art weapons, at $3.8 billion annually – plus a special additional $10 billion approved this past year. Israel, US imperialism’s chief military enforcer in the Middle East, has long ranked first in the world in receipt of US military funding.
[For a detailed account of the ICJ’s findings and commentaries from every quarter, see Jeffrey St. Clair’s extensive January 29 CounterPunch review entitled, “Genocide When You See It.”]
Genocide and climate catastrophe
I will only add here, briefly, that the UN’s abject failure to order a ceasefire and fully condemn Zionist genocide in Gaza is no different from its despicable record with regard to addressing the present horrors associated with fossil fuel-induced global warming and the resultant ever-intensifying and soon to be irreversible life-threatening climate changes. The recently concluded UN-organized COP28 conference once again failed to approve a single binding resolution aimed at reducing, even in the most minimal ways, the use of fossil fuels. After 28 COP recent Dubai international conferences, not a single measure to address what the scientific community considers an immediate threat to all humanity has been approved. Indeed, virtually every major capitalist nation over this period has increased its production and or use of fossil fuels!
Here, it is sufficient to conclude with the following by way of informing our readers and supporters of the gravity of the situation and the way forward.
- The UN is and has always been an institution subordinate to the major world powers. Established in 1945 in the post-WWII era, its five-member Security Council, which then included representatives of the Soviet Union, the US, UK, France and China, operated with the right of any single member having veto power over any and all critical decisions. Thus, the key issues in world politics, from 1945 to this day, rarely came before the UN for resolution. This never prevented the US, in particular, from pursuing its imperialist agenda with impunity, including endless support for or direct initiation/engagement in monstrous wars around the world.
- The list is endless, from Vietnam to Laos and Cambodia, to Indonesia, Guatemala, Bolivia, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Chile, Honduras, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Libya, Syria, Argentina, Ukraine, Cuba and beyond, the US imperial war machine has been central to the slaughter of literally tens of millions of workers and peasants whenever and wherever they resist repression and colonial domination. The UN stood silent with regard to every US atrocity, genocide, coup, or deadly US-imposed blockade, embargo and sanctions.
- The liberation of oppressed people everywhere was never decided by or facilitated by the UN but rather by the collective organization and mobilization of imperialism’s victims.
- That South Africa rose to the defense of Palestine in initiating the ICJ’s charges of genocide, while an important political contribution to exposing Zionist genocide, could in no way lead to a UN resolution of the ongoing Israeli horror. That South Africa’s voting ICJ delegate retreated from its original proposals to damn Israel’s genocide and call for an immediate ceasefire is a telling indication that its capitalist minor-imperialist government – the role it plays in Africa – is far from breaking from the clutches of US imperialism. South Africa’s president Cyril Ramaphosa, today a multi-billionaire sitting on the board of several leading white-owned and/or US-controlled corporations, was afforded the opportunity to showcase his corrupt and strike-breaking African National Congress government before the world, burnishing the ANC’s decayed image as still acting as a leading national liberation force today. Tragically, the ANC’s national liberation credentials were marred from the beginning when it negotiated a “settlement” with the white racist apartheid government of FW de Klerk (who shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Nelson Mandela) that formally ended racist apartheid rule but left de Klerks’s capitalist state economy intact, plus or minus a myriad of Black faces masking the old white racist institutions of the unchanged capitalist state.
- Today US imperialism’s chief heads of stte, whether Biden or Obama, Trump, Clinton or Bush, insist on a “rules-based world order” which they describe as consisting of the UN plus the key financial institutions the US dominates, from the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, to the World Trade Organization. These supposedly constitute the basis of the “liberal, democratic,” free trade, world order they seek to preserve, especially in the face of rising international capitalist competition led by capitalist-imperialist China and its associated capitalist partners.
- Today, the courageous freedom and national liberation struggle of the Palestinian masses has aroused, almost instantly, the passionate solidarity of the world’s people, especially the youth. The tens of millions, if not billions, in the streets worldwide demanding “Free Palestine, From The River to The Sea” is the sole reason why, for all practical purposes, the near defunct UN was compelled to hear the case in the first place. The internationally publicized UN genocide trial exposed the Zionist state’s base horrors as never before while affording an escape valve to release at least a portion of the pressure mounting against the US-backed Zionist Entity.
- Palestine’s future rests centrally with Palestinian masses and their continued capacity to inspire worldwide solidarity via ever-increasing united mass mobilizations everywhere. It rests with a broadly reconstituted, united and democratically-organized US and international antiwar movement that demands an immediate end to all US aid to Zionist, apartheid Israel. It rests on our collective capacity to force via mass mobilizations, as we did during the Vietnam War, the immediate and total withdrawal of all US forces from the Middle East and everywhere. And finally, it rests in the capacity of socialists and serious antiwar fighters around the world and especially in the Middle East and Palestine to unite to bring down the Zionist, colonial, settler Israel entity and organize toward the establishment of a democratic secular socialist Palestine and a socialist federation of the Middle East. Join us! socialistaction.org socialistaction@lmi.net
