Notes on the ICJ ruling, Palestine and Israel

The ICJ ruling in South Africa's accusations against Israel committing genocide is novel, but what will it accomplish?

Since Hamas’s October 7th offensive against Israel, I’ve been trying to write something, anything about the atrocities Israel is currently committing and has historically committed. We should first understand that, from a post-colonial perspective proffered by thinkers like Frantz Fanon, it should come as no surprise that Palestinian resistance to settler-colonial rule would eventually turn violent. In his words, “We have seen how the government’s agent uses a language of pure violence. The agent does not alleviate oppression or mask domination. He displays and demonstrates them with the clear conscience of the law enforcer, and brings violence into the homes and minds of the colonized subject.” The colonizer, the state—in this case, Israel—brings violence into the home of the colonized people—the Palestinians. Regardless of what we believe of the potentialities or feasability of a non-(or at least less) violent Israel, the current reality on the ground is that Israel is conducting prolonged and vicious violence against the Palestinian subject.

Enter South Africa and the International Court of Justice (ICJ). On December 29th, 2023 South Africa officially levied accusations against Israel of genocide on Palestinians in Gaza in the international court. Less than a month later, we have a ruling. On January 26th, the ICJ ruled that Israel must “do all it can to prevent death, destruction and any acts of genocide in Gaza.” However, the court did not rule that Israel was or is committing genocide, only that, as Ellen Ioanes states in Vox, “the body finds it possible genocide is occurring or could in the future.” The Vox piece continues to point out that the case levied by South Africa against Israel is a preliminary one and that an investigation into “potential” genocide could take years. Further, even if the verdict ruled more firmly in favor of South Africa’s claim, the mechanism by which the ruling would be enforced is the UN Security Council under which, the US—Israel’s chief ally and financial backer—has a “permanent veto”. If you live in the US of have been paying attention to the politics of this country, you would quickly understand how little such a ruling materially means.

Though I am, personally, fairly pessimistic on the issue, all is not lost. The verdict, and, particularly international responses to it, carry rather far-reaching implications. From an American perspective, it seems that US diplomatic relations are beginning to stray along these lines. Up until this point all US political mechanisms have appeared to be unwavering in their support of Israel even as Israeli officials like Benjamin Netanyahu have clearly told US officials that they will do what they want. During a news conference on January 18th, for example, Netanyahu stated, “In any future arrangement … Israel needs security control all territory west of Jordan. This clashes with the idea of (Palestinian) sovereignty. What can you do?” A heretofore unnamed “person familiar with the conversation told CNN” that in a private phone call to President Biden, that the Israeli Prime Minister backpedaled on this previous statement, but all we seem to have is anonymous sources and conversations, with no evidence of change from Israel. Tiny glimmers pop up here and there. According to Economist/YouGov, over one third of respondents polled in the US believe that Israel is carrying out a genocide against Palestinians. As of January 28th the Biden administration has discussed slowing weapons shipments to Israel to leverage the country to slow its assault on Gaza. It is no doubt that the ICJ ruling influenced this—slight—pivot.

And this has further-reaching implications. Many Latin American countries have come out in support of the Palestinians, with ambassadors in Chile and Mexico signing referral letters for the International Criminal Court (ICC) to investigate possible war crimes in Israel. While they explicitly state that the ICC should investigate both Israel and Hamas, it is clear that they would not be doing so if Israel wasn’t committing to Palestinian slaughter. In the midst of the ICJ hearingYemen’s Houthi Fighters began “disrupt[ing commercial] shipping” in the Red Sea over Israel’s war on Gaza. This roped US war ships into the mix as there is nothing the prime director of the global economy hates more than disruptions in international shipping—especially if they are also potentially sending arms to their allies.

From within the belly of the beast, it appears to this observer that Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people is the bleeding heart at the center of an emerging global crisis. Unlike the COVID-19 pandemic, or the the ever-darkening horizon of impending anthropocentric climate destruction, this crisis seems to more immediately expose the precarity of the United States’ hegemonic power. The mask is beginning to slip. The seams of strain are beginning to show as hundreds and thousands of videos on both sides of this “war” expose to the world the abject suffering of the Palestinian people and the dead-eyed depravity of the Israelis. While we see videos like a Palestinian father being murdered mere moments after being interviewed, we are entreated to videos of Israelis from “all sides of the political spectrum” protesting humanitarian aid to Gaza, or mocking Gazans for not having running water, or putting on brown-face and blacking out their teeth to mock Palestinians. The world is watching and it is growing increasingly difficult, day by day to sympathize with the Israelies.

I’m part of the first generation of American Jews post WWII that didn’t grow up inundated with stories about family and family friends who are no longer here because of the Shoah (the Holocaust). I did hear those stories, but they were not the majority narrative growing up. Because of this, and because of my multi-ethnic, secular upbringing, I do not have the same zealous belief that the Jews need a home state to go to when the world is at our door. I grew up in a time where those stories that created that necessity were being recreated against another people, in our name. I find it perverse. I find it despicable. I find it selfish, evil and cruel, that those who would proclaim “never again” would turn around and do the very thing they said could never happen again to another people.

What hurts most is that I get it. I hate it and I wish it is something I could never understand, but I do. There is a reason why the Jewish community is not monolithic on this; why we could never stand as one on this… When a people go through a collective tragedy like a genocide—especially a tragedy whose survivors still walk among us—there are a couple ways to respond. One way, is to say that we must protect our people at all costs; there is no purpose greater, no sin more grave than failing that purpose. For those who take up this cause, no tactic nor strategy is off-limits. One might commend this as noble, as gallant and at times it may be. Pulling this thread, however, can leave you unraveled. It can twist you into the very thing that put you in this position in the first place. This, I believe, is the true root of Zionism.

Even before the Shoah, Jews were conceived, both by ourselves and by the people surrounding us, as different. I don’t think I need to recap the persecution—crusades, pogroms, the history is all there. Zionism forms as a melding of this outwardly reinforced self-conception alongside the newly-emergent form of the nation. Ironically enough, the specific formulation of national identity that Zionist movement takes on is, according to Ralph Leonard, of German Romantic origin. “Because nationhood is grounded in race,” Leonard writes, “therefore each ‘volk’ is fundamentally different from the rest, and thus should develop independently and separately in a land that ‘organically’ belonged to it, and in a state whose ‘character’ is a projection of the organic nation.” A paragraph later, Leonard states, “Zionism, as a sub-set of Jewish nationalism that was a product of the Jewish predicament in the 19th century, emphatically shares an affinity with the various romantic nationalist movements that flourished in post-Enlightenment Europe.” These were the same romantic nationalist movements that posited Jews as necessarily foreign to their lands. In its foundation, Zionism, the Israeli state-project itself, is birthed not only from the ideological underpinnings that forcefully excluded us but uses those very same underpinnings as its basis. Zionism, therefore, should be understood as a cruel mirror reflecting the “volkish” antisemitism that excluded us from Europe to begin with.

There is, as I previously alluded, another way. We do not have to live, nor should we live as if the world is our enemy. We cannot continue to treat the Palestinian people as our enemy, as our competition for land and resources. These people are our brothers and sisters. Our enemy is not the vast majority of people on this earth trying to survive what looks, day by day, to be careening ever-closer to destruction. Our enemy is a system which pits us in competition against one another for resources, for survival. Our enemy is a great heaving beast which magically creates abundance and yet forces scarcity upon us. It is a leviathan that compels us to act in accordance with our worst impulses; it plays on our greed; it keeps us desperate and barely-living. It is the same abyssal thing which starves our brothers and sisters, blockades them, corrales them into open-air prisons and bombards them. Our enemy is not people who look slightly different from us or practice different religions. Our enemy is that thing that compels us by scarcity and wraps its icy fingers around our hearts. When we say “never again” we cannot, must not, mean it just for Jews or we have learned absolutely nothing from history. When we say “never again” we must mean never again.