Editorial
The UN General Assembly asked the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in December 2022 to give its advice on the legal effects of Israel’s actions in the Palestinian territory it has occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem.
The court will look into the “long-lasting occupation, colonization and annexation of the Palestinian land and the steps taken to change the population, identity and status of the Holy City of Jerusalem.”
The court’s advice in this case will not be mandatory, but it is usually followed, as it was in the cases of Kosovo’s 2008 independence from Serbia and South Africa’s apartheid rule over Namibia.
The situation on the ground has worsened since then, with Israel’s continuous military assault on the Gaza Strip that has forced 85 percent of its people to flee and killed almost 30,000 people—mostly women and children. Its troops and armed colonists have also killed hundreds more in endless attacks on Palestinian villages in the occupied West Bank.
The ICJ is also dealing with another case brought by South Africa under the Genocide Convention. In its initial ruling last month, the highest UN court ordered Israel, based on the statements of its president and defense ministry, to “stop and punish the public encouragement of genocide” and take immediate and effective actions to deal with what it called a humanitarian disaster in Gaza.
The court’s ruling, unlike its ‘advice’, is binding on member states. However, Israel disregarded it, supported by the US military, financial, and diplomatic backing and the irrational idea of ‘exceptionalism’ that Washington often uses for its own and the Jewish state’s breaches of international law.
As a consequence, distressed Gazans are being brutally bombed to make them leave their ancestral lands as part of a plan to move them to Egypt and seize more Palestinian land.
Joining the growing worries expressed by UN officials, international humanitarian groups, and people around the world, Brazilian president Luiz Lula da Silva said on Sunday in Adis Ababa, where he had gone to attend an African Union Summit, “What is happening in the Gaza Strip is not a war, it is genocide.” He explained that it was not a war of soldiers against soldiers but “a war between a well-equipped army and women and children.”
Yet the US-led Western countries defend Israel’s terrible crimes in Gaza by pointing to the October 7 Hamas raid into Israel to claim Israel has the right to defense. Defence against what? Occupation?
There is a very likely context to what happened in October. The declared goal of what is happening in Gaza is to destroy Hamas. It and other Palestinian resistance groups can lose their purpose if and when the occupation ends. The real goal is to achieve the Jewish state’s military objectives while pretending to support the long-dead two-state solution.
The US is also working on a different strategy to strengthen the settler-colonial project by replacing Hamas’ rule in Gaza with that of a weak and obedient Palestinian Authority. That won’t stop Palestinians from fighting for their fair rights. The Jewish state cannot take other people’s land and have peace, too.
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