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Some years ago we were enjoying a spaghetti dinner at our brother’s house, and by the end of the meal, his then-almost-three-year-old’s face was smeared with Donald-Trump-bronzer levels of tomato sauce, and we, ever the glass-is-half-full sort, said, “At least it’s not in his hair,” whereupon the toddler picked up a handful of spaghetti and mashed it into the top of his head, really massaging it in there like it was a handful of Prell and giggling the whole time, whereupon our brother glared at us and took the kid for a bath, thus ending a nice dinner on a hilarious but nonetheless somewhat down note.
So it is with ending our week, which has been a relatively nice and quiet and conflict-free stretch of our life that we can now bring to an abrupt end by writing something about the situation in the Gaza Strip. In this analogy, think of Gaza as a handful of spaghetti, our nice week as our toddler nephew’s hair, and the subsequent screaming that writing about this subject always invokes as our brother glaring at us just before he yanked his son out of his high chair and carried him off to the tub.
Recently, South Africa brought a case accusing Israel of committing genocide to the International Court of Justice and asked the Court to order Israel to “immediately suspend its military operations in and against Gaza.” The ICJ is the highest court of the United Nations, so its rulings are binding, although the Security Council has to vote on some sort of mechanisms that can be used to enforce the rulings. As the Washington Post notes, with the US having a long history of vetoing Security Council resolutions against Israel, such mechanisms are highly unlikely to come about.
You can read South Africa’s initial filing here. Besides deaths, some other examples of the genocide it accuses of Israel perpetrating include the destruction of various cultural centers and mosques, historical sites, and a museum of Palestinian heritage that held hundreds of artifacts. Since genocide as legally defined includes not just wiping out people but also the physical manifestations of a culture’s existence, Israel’s actions here could be considered genocide if its targeting of these sites was intentional and not an unintended byproduct of its war against Hamas. Legally speaking.
On Friday, the Court delivered its ruling, and boy, there’s something for everyone to get mad about. The folks at JustSecurity tried to warcrimesplain:
The Court stated explicitly that it is not deciding on the merits whether Israel’s actions in Gaza amount to genocide. As the Court said in a previous case at the provisional measures phase of proceedings, “The Court is not called upon, for the purposes of its decision on the Request for the indication of provisional measures, to establish the existence of breaches of the Genocide Convention.”
What the Court is being called upon at this point is whether South Africa’s claim meets “the test of plausibility.” In other words, does South Africa have standing to bring a genocide case against Israel? The Court says that yes, it does. Establishing whether what’s happening in Gaza meets the legal definition of genocide under international law comes much later, during the “merits” stage of the investigation, when South Africa presents a fuller case and Israel has the opportunity to respond.
PREVIOUSLY!
But not ruling on the question of genocide right now does not mean Israel is somehow off the hook in the court of international law. Backers of South Africa had hoped the Court would call for an immediate ceasefire. Israel would like everyone to get off its back and let it do whatever it wants. One of the international law scholars JustSecurity consulted explained it like this:
“[T]he Court told the world that it is not implausible that Israel’s military operations in Gaza and its months-long siege of the strip violate the [Genocide] Convention. Neither did the Court find it implausible that public statements by senior Israeli politicians amount to incitement to genocide. This is a significant rebuke of a democratic country that sometimes claims to have the most moral army in the world.”
Furthermore, the Court voted on measures that Israel must take next, including refraining from taking any actions in Gaza that might violate the Genocide Convention, punishing anyone trying to incite genocide (which at this point is most if not all of Bibi Netanyahu’s cabinet), allow humanitarian aid, and preserve evidence. Failing to comply will be taken into consideration when future proceedings really get rolling.
It should also be noted that the votes on these measures were nearly unanimous among the 17 judges who considered them. Even Israel’s own ad hoc judge voted against his country on a couple of counts. The only nation to vote for Israel on everything was Uganda, which indicates that if nothing else, they’re over that whole Entebbe thing.
The Court’s ruling also puts any government supplying Israel with arms *cough the United States cough cough* on notice that it may be assisting a “serious internationally wrongful act,” which is also presumably a breach of the Genocide Convention that most of the world’s nations have agreed to abide by.
Of course as anyone who pays attention to war crimes cases in international courts knows, this whole process will take years to play out, which does nothing to help end the conflict now. At best, it puts pressure on various nations, Israel most of all, to recognize they may be violating treaty obligations, and then to decide if they want to keep doing so.
Having said all that, we’ll note that this is simply the legal case against this war that we’re talking about. The political and moral cases against it are a whole other story, for which there is depressingly no resolution or agreement in sight.
[Washington Post / JustSecurity / JustSecurity again]
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