Israel has shown its disdain for global law
MEDIA commentary on the historic International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruling last Friday has underplayed some key factors namely:
1. None of the Israeli legal team’s arguments, including its lengthy right to self-defence in occupied territories – a specious trope wilfully parroted by Western political leaders – were accepted by the court. The ruling was a clear 6-0 win to South Africa.
2. All aspects of the ruling received a huge majority vote of either 16-1 or 15-2 in favour.
3. Even the Israeli judge voted for the rulings that called on Israel ‘to prevent and punish incitement to commit genocide against Palestinians’ and ‘to ensure the provision of urgent services and humanitarian aid to Gaza’; the former being accepted by the court as not just plausible allegations by South Africa, but facts that have already occurred.
Such a damning indictment of any country by the highest court in the world is unprecedented.
Israel has responded with two fingers to the ICJ and the world showing its disdain for international law by killing more than 373 Palestinians and injuring 643 within 48 hours since the court’s ruling while also ramping up efforts to starve and displace Gazans, according to the Swissbased Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor (Euro-Med Report). All of which is in clear breach of the temporary and immediate steps stipulated in the ICJ ruling.
Other countries’ governments, including that of Ireland, must now get off the fence and support South Africa’s case lest they are content to be legally and morally complicit in what is plausibly, if not undoubtedly, an ongoing genocide.
JIM ROCHE, Irish Anti-War Movement, Dublin 1.