In its very essence, the International Court of Justice’s Order last Friday to Israel to prevent genocidal acts in Gaza and punish incitement for genocide accepts the possibility of Israel being a perpetrator of genocide and not just its historical victim. As it continues to investigate the plausible claim of genocide submitted by South Africa and to pursue it to a final ruling, which may take months (hopefully not years) to complete, it has already made history on this point.
Mouin Rabbani cogently remarked in his analysis thread on X:
“History – with a capital H – was made today. As of 26 January 2024, Israel and its Western sponsors can no longer mobilize the Holocaust to shield themselves from accountability for their crimes against the Palestinian people”.
Unsurprisingly, the Israeli judge ad hoc Aharon Barak desperately tried to save the monopoly on being victims forever.
Barak’s long dissenting opinion on the ICJ Order consists of 49 points, including a whole section titled “GENOCIDE: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL REMARK,” where he describes his own experience in the Holocaust as a child in Lithuania. He waxes emotional about how “the Nazis succeeded in murdering many of our people, but they could not take away our humanity.”
Barak goes through the tiresome hasbara claims that “Israel is a democracy with a strong legal system and an independent judicial system” (which is an apartheid state with a supreme court that has legalized its most central aspects, not least under his presidency), bizarrely claims there is a lack of evidence for Israeli “intent” for genocide (rarely has a genocide case been so explicit on that matter), and returns to the Holocaust in his last point:
“Genocide is a shadow over the history of the Jewish people, and it is intertwined with my own personal experience. The idea that Israel is now accused of committing genocide is very hard for me personally, as a genocide survivor deeply aware of Israel’s commitment to the rule of law as a Jewish and democratic State”.
That it’s hard for Barak to accept this is understandable. Nobody said this was supposed to be easy. Indeed, realizing that you have become a perpetrator of genocide after having lived a lifetime narrative of singular victimhood is indeed a difficult turn.
But Barak is a judge. Waxing emotionally and personally in this context is simply narcissistic, and it suggests that Barak is simply too emotionally involved to be judging such a case.
But I don’t think many people were expecting Barak to be impartial – he was, as expected, biased toward the Zionist ideology and the Israeli state.
It is, therefore, also unsurprising that he voted against the majority of the six provisional measures – except numbers 3 and 4 concerning genocidal incitement and humanitarian help. Those were no-brainers – Barak wants to be seen as a liberal, so he voted for preventing genocidal talk1, and who could be so unhinged as to literally vote against basic humanitarian help?2
The overwhelming unanimity of the voting in the 17-judge panel – it was either 15-2 or 16-1 in all votes – demonstrated how isolated Israel is among the unambiguous world legal consensus that Israel is plausibly committing genocide.
The Holocaust card no longer serves to shield Israel from scrutiny for the most grave crimes against humanity. That Israel commits the crime of Apartheid is already a consensus in the international human rights community. The ICJ has just recently said that it is not merely capable of genocide as well but that it appears to be actively committing it, and must desist from genocidal acts.
This is clearly a shock for Israelis. Not only did they expect to live a long life of impunity for their initial and cardinal crime of ethnically cleansing the Palestinians – they also expected to maintain the role of the historical victim, the victims of a singular genocide that would maintain their victimhood status forever. But the genocide of the Palestinians, which in truth has always been there as a part of the eliminationist, settler-colonialist Zionist project, is now being broadcast around the world.
The state of Israel has been so spoiled by impunity that its leaders had no concerns about spouting outright genocidal incitement; its soldiers are so used to doing whatever they want that they filmed themselves perpetrating grave war crimes. They don’t care anymore.
Golda Meir once told Shulamit Aloni that “after the Holocaust Jews can do whatever they want.” It seems, however, the day of judgment has perhaps arrived. The world hasn’t forgotten the Holocaust. It just turns out that “never again” applies to everyone.
Notes
1 This reminds me of Golda Meir saying, “simply do and do not talk [about it]… the main thing, as much as possible, is to talk less” – as she was ordering the poisoning of a Palestinian village during an ethnic cleansing operation.
2 Yes, well, the Ugandan judge Julia Sabutinde voted against all six provisional measures. Uganda found it necessary to distance itself from her voting, and people are wondering what could possibly bring a person to vote like that.
Israel is losing its eternal victim status even in the mainstream press. The Los Angeles Times just published this essay by Raz Segal – it’s remarkable that a newspaper of record is willing to print this:
Opinion: Why International Court of Justice ruling against Israel’s war in Gaza is a game-changer…The exceptional status of the Holocaust rendered the new Jewish state that was established in May 1948 also exceptional, especially in view of the many Holocaust survivors who chose to try to rebuild their lives there....Israel’s exceptional status led to a willful blurring of its foundational crime, the Nakba: the mass expulsion of more than 750,000 Palestinians and the destruction of hundreds of villages and towns in the 1948 war. That Israel could commit any crime under international law immediately became, in this exceptional framework, almost unimaginable. Impunity for Israel was thus baked into the international legal system after World War II. The urgent need to obscure the Nakba also emerged from the broader impetus to deny the nature of the Israeli state as a settler-colonial project. Paradoxically, Israel’s creation reproduced the racism and white supremacy that had targeted Jews for exclusion and, ultimately, destruction in Europe….The concept of genocide functioned to protect the exceptional status of the Holocaust and Israel in the international legal system and to enable rather than challenge this long-held view. Until now.
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2024-01-27/icj-israel-south-africa-gaza-genocide-court-ruling
I’ve been pondering the profoundly negative effects of a sense of victimhood recently, and wonder how others feel.
One can easily think of several historical crises/disasters fuelled by a sense of victimhood, complicating the ethnic nationalism which so often has a sense of victimhood at its core.
Victimhood often gives the self-perceived victims a sense of ethical purity and/or superiority and inoculates the group from having to deal with criminal acts perpetrated by the group. It becomes the sole descriptor of the group, and eclipses any nuance which might more accurately describe the group, or the actions of the group.
For your consideration, I offer post-WW1 Germany, where claims that the army had been stabbed in the back, and the strictures of the treaty of Versailles, created a sense that Germany had been ill-treated by the victors of WW1. This fuelled Hitler’s rise, his expansion of “blood and soil” ethnic nationalism, and, doubtless, crippled the facility for self-evaluation of many German people who, as victims protecting the “volk” from a threat, permitted themselves horrific atrocities.
Serbians have, reportedly, nursed a sense of victimhood related to a defeat in Kosovo many centuries ago. It has been suggested this may have contributed to the ethnic violence in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s.
Thirdly, Historians discuss the current genocide perpetrated by an ethnic-nationalist Russia against Ukraine. This genocide includes the expected denial of the existence of a Ukrainian people or Ukrainian culture distinct from the Russian people, and denies the right of Ukrainians to chose their own course in History. Deeply included in the mix of ideas supporting Russia’s atrocities is a deep sense of victimhood directed against the West/NATO/Democracies.
Finally, much of this appears to be an ingredient of the now century-old Zionist assault on the people of Palestine, the justification for which shares much in common with the other genocides mentioned above.
I’ll be most interested in comments on the above.
January 29, 2024
Netanyahu and the IDF Provided All the Evidence the ICJ Needed
by Melvin Goodman
“The International Court of Justice in The Hague ruled last week that Israel must prevent genocide in Gaza and provide greater assistance to the Palestinians. Sadly, the ICJ did not call for a cease-fire, which is desperately needed, but it demonstrated genuine understanding of the Israeli war crimes that point to genocidal intentions as stipulated by the Geneva International Genocide Convention in 1948.
The Court not only ruled that South Africa can continue its case against Israel over charges of genocide, but it acknowledge the risk of genocide against the Palestinian population. As a result, the Court issued a preliminary order barring Israel from killing members of the Palestinian population; causing serious bodily or mental harm; and creating conditions to create the “physical destruction in whole or in part” to the Palestinian population.
The Court even implied that Israel was “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.” ‘
https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/01/29/netanyahu-and-the-idf-provided-all-the-evidence-the-icj-needed/
Hope the author is correct. Unfortunately, this does little to save Palestinians from the cruel, industrial-scale killing it continues to carry out in Gaza. I can’t get out of my head the hundreds of images of Israeli victims, especially children traumatized, injured, many orphaned, scavenging for water and food in the rubble and destruction. So much for the West’s Responsibility to Protect. Here in Canada, supposed human rights champions like Irwin Cotler are silent.