Israel’s Subtle Threats at the International Court of Justice – The New Republic

In their often shambolic and occasionally hysterical appearance before the International Court of Justice last Friday, at no point did the lawyers representing Israel give concrete arguments or convincing evidence that Israel’s three-month siege of Gaza should not be considered an act of genocide. Faced with a credible accusation of a crime one of their own called the “epitome and zenith of evil,” “the crime of crimes,” “the ultimate in wickedness,” they produced no proof they were not guilty. 

Though they trumpeted the aid Israel is allegedly allowing into Gaza, Israel’s lawyers could not answer how it came to be that more than a million Palestinians will soon face outright famine. The Israel Defense Forces have to confront Hamas wherever they find its fighters, the lawyers insisted. But that cannot explain why a full 45 percent of Gaza’s housing stock is now a gray ruin or why entire city blocks are dynamited long after the area is cleared of the enemy; why indeed some of the oldest churches and mosques in the world are now husks. Proclaiming the high moral goal of rescuing hostages and insisting at every turn that the IDF obeys the rules of war, the lawyers gave no account for why Israeli soldiers felt able and entitled to shoot their own on sight: three men, shirtless, speaking Hebrew, waving a white flag. The leaflet drops, the text messages, the voicemails: This strategy of forewarning Gaza’s civilians was held up as an example of the army’s duty to international law, though no rebuttal was offered for why unguided “dumb” bombs are dropped on the very towns and villages and camps Palestinians were told were safe from strike—the same places those leaflets informed them would guarantee their lives.  

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Earlier, Tal Becker, a legal adviser to Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, stated that Raphael Lemkin—the deeply flawed and compromised architect of the theory of genocide—“witnessed the unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust.” Lemkin did not; he was in the United States by 1941. On such shaky ground, it was very brave for Becker to then argue that South Africa’s 84-page, tightly argued written submission to the ICJ, sourced and footnoted almost exclusively from U.N. documents, was “curated, decontextualized, and manipulative.”    

…The defects of the Genocide Convention run deep. Unlike a charge of common murder or even crimes against humanity, and contrary to our impression of the breadth of its protection, the Convention does not shield everyone: Certain groups, such as ethnic or religious minorities, can be victims, but anyone outside that boundary—political groups, say, or the disabled—do not qualify. Trickier still, it demands prosecutors prove the perpetrator’s “intent to destroy,” an almost impossibly high bar to clear, for a genocidaire rarely brandishes his own smoking gun. What South Africa had to demonstrate on Thursday was an equation: clear expressions of intent plus a persistent pattern of atrocity. Since October 7, and since the order was given for a bombardment without precision or mercy, Israeli leaders have been determined to make that equation easier to solve. …