Yes, it would have been nice if the headline act had happened. I’ve been watching the International Court of Justice hearings on South Africa’s genocide charges against South Africa. As expected South Africa is laying out a compressed version of the devastating case it made in its filing.
One interesting wrinkle is at the top of the hearing, the registrar read into the record a new element submitted by South Africa, not contained in its 84 page case, that of a detailed list of the “provisional measures” that is it asking the court to impose on Israel. Recall that the form of this filing was an “Indication of Provisional Measures,” that is, that the evidence of genocide was so overwhelming that the Court should impose provisional measures with the intent of halting Israel’s genocidal conduct while the case continued on the normal (time consuming) course. This list is comprehensive and well thought out, ranging from a cessation of formal military and irregular forces action against Palestinian, ending conduct designed to cause physical and psychological harm and prevent births, to stop forced displacement, to provide access to food, medical care, fuel and other necessities of life to preserving evidence with respect to genocide and not restrict access to fact-finder regarding this type of evidence. This is an approximate recap; I will append a transcript of this section when one becomes available.
Israel does not have any good cards to play, not just with respect to the South Africa genocide case but in its campaign against Palestinians. It seems to be relying on the fact that no one has been able to stop the slow-motion extermination of Palestinians, and that all it needs to do is stay its vicious course of action. But that sort of win is not going to make Israel safer.
Israel is running into the considerable limits on its and US power, and the resulting costs. Israel looks unable to achieve its stated aim of destroying Hamas. Israel has pulled ground forces out of Gaza, in effect confirming that clearing Gaza of Hamas fighters is not its aim. As we have regularly pointed out, the lack of food shipments, limited water supplies. destruction of hospitals, and the flattening of shelter means everyone in Gaza will die in not that long a time in the absence of an intervention. But the Houthi blockade of shipping to and from Israel is damaging not just the Israeli economy (see reports of imminent food shortages) but global shipping, witness the hissy fit by the US and 11 other countries trying to intimidate the Houthis into backing down. But the Western threats are pure noise-making. It’s not realistic for a Western coalition of the willing to subdue Yemen, particularly with its stockpile of weapons to deploy against any landing parties. And if they could subdue the Houthis otherwise, they would already have done so.
Israel similarly has only lose-lose choices as far as Hezbollah in concerned. Their pattern of tit for tat attacks picked up in severity and a bit in range, leading to evacuation of border towns. Israel has committed to getting Hezbollah to pull back from the border…with no agreement from Hezbollah to do so and doubtful means to make that happen by force. Most experts believe that the Israeli army is so poorly prepared that were it to push into Lebanon, Hezbollah could and likely would occupy northern Israel, potentially as far as Galilee. Perhaps Israel hopes to pull the US in more deeply, but it’s not as if it would do any better with US help (Scott Ritter has stressed that war game have consistently shown the reverse).
Israel media and statements by official show the country is still operating on blood lust and not realism. The country’s statements so far suggest that rather than attempting a dignified response to the serious South Africa charges, Israel, in keeping with its refusal to file a written answer, looks primed instead in the hearing tomorrow will attack the legitimacy of the court and the charges. That would only serve to further isolate Israel, even if it plays well on domestic TV. Or perhaps is has made a nose count and has come to the same conclusion as Norman Finkelstein, that it will prevail because Russia and China will not vote for the South Africa charge due to their own exposure to similar filings (there is already a case against Russian lodged with the ICJ). In keeping, CommonDreams posted a new piece on Israel’s continued insistence that it is perfectly within its rights to eradicate Palestinians. From the piece:
Two Israeli lawmakers from right-wing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party doubled down Wednesday on calls to destroy or depopulate Gaza, prompting an admonition from the country’s attorney general on the eve of an emergency hearing in the South African-led genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice.
In an interview with Hakol Baramah radio, Deputy Knesset Speaker Nissim Vaturi said he did not regret his November call for Israel to “stop being humane” and “burn Gaza now.”
“I stand behind my words,” Vaturi said, according toThe Times of Israel. “It is better to burn down buildings rather than have soldiers harmed. There are no innocents there.”…
Meanwhile, Haaretz reported that Danny Danon, a former United Nations ambassador now serving in the Knesset, said in a Wednesday radio interview that Israel must “not do half a job” in Gaza.
That, Danon said, means “voluntary migration” of Palestinians from Gaza—a euphemism, critics say, for an ethnic cleansing campaign akin to the Nakba, or “catastrophe,” in which more than 750,000 Arabs were forcibly expelled from Palestine during the war to establish the modern state of Israel in 1948.
In November, Danon co-authored a Wall Street Journal opinion piece suggesting the ethnic cleansing of some of Gaza’s population to Western countries that would accept the refugees.
Admittedly, only one of the two of the officials is calling explicitly for genocide, although as we have observed, ethnic cleansing when so far no country is willing to enable the Israel scheme means its continuing program to make Gaza uninhabitable amounts to the same thing.
Israel is presumably running a “How many divisions does the ICJ have?” calculus. The ICJ is toothless and the UN, which would be the venue for action, compromised. From a new article by CAGE:
The ICJ is unlikely to make a decision on whether Israel is carrying out genocide for several years. This week’s hearing is only to determine whether it should make an interim order for Israel to halt its offensive and withdraw from Gaza. Even if it were to do so, the ICJ has no effective means of implementing the order save by way of a resolution from the UN Security Council. The US has vetoed Security Council resolutions critical of Israel no less than 89 times and is unlikely to veer away from its function as Israel’s political shield. Like Russia in relation to the ICJ ruling on its invasion of Ukraine, the US has itself refused to comply with ICJ judgments against it in cases brought by Nicaragua (1986) and Iran (2018).
In recent decades, we have witnessed the demise of the so called “rules based international order“ because the UN Security Council has failed to effectively intervene to prevent acts of genocide and war crimes in Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and against the Uyghurs in China. On the contrary, the Security Council itself voted to impose genocidal sanctions on Iraq causing the deaths of approximately half a million children, a price deemed ‘worth paying’ by then US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. More recently, international institutions have failed to hold senior political figures such as Dick Cheney, Tony Blair, and George Bush, the architects of these invasions, accountable, raising serious questions about their credibility. Too often they serve to uphold Western domination rather than to deliver justice.
Again in theory, a preliminary ruling by the ICJ against Israel could pave the way for criminal cases in the International Criminal Court. It is over my pay grade as to who would have the standing to file them. But as we have seen with the ruling against Putin, key countries, including the US, do not recognize the authority of the ICC. So the effect even of (seemingly unlikely) ICC rulings against key Israeli leaders would be to limit there travel.
Could a ruling for South Africa give new grounds for reversing anti-BDS laws in the US? For challenging the very aggressive campaigns against shows of support for Palestinians in the US? It may be the biggest practical effect of a ruling for South Africa would be to further undermine Israel’s legitimacy in the US. But how many Palestinian lives would that save?