After more than three months of Israel’s merciless assault on Gaza, Friday’s judgment from the international court of justice (ICJ) has come as some vindication for the 2.3 million Palestinians trapped in the hell that the enclave has become. Fifteen out of 17 jurists, legal experts from around the world, found it plausible that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians.
But this is not the first time Israel has been accused of genocide – and what happened last time is instructive. In 1982, the UN general assembly found Israel responsible for an act of genocide against the Palestinian people living in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut, Lebanon. The vote was 123 to 0. The US abstained. The three days of killings, of mostly women and children, were overseen by Ariel Sharon, a man who would later become Israel’s prime minister. Though an Israeli independent commission found Sharon indirectly responsible for the massacre, no one was ever held to account.
Whether this new ruling becomes another footnote in UN lore will depend on what other UN member states – in particular, the US – do in response.
The US has been trying very hard to not acknowledge what has been taking place in Gaza since 7 October. The 25,000 Palestinian dead – mostly women and children – are, in the US administration’s eyes, just the unfortunate and unavoidable cost of Israel exercising its right to defend itself. Israel’s deliberate starvation of Palestinians is treated like an act of God; its refusal to allow sufficient life-sustaining supplies into Gaza framed as a logistics problem. Now, in addition, the US, UK and other countries are freezing their funding for UNRWA, the UN’s Relief and Works Agency for Palestine, while it investigates allegations that 12 members of its 13,000 staff took part in Hamas’s 7 October attack on Israel. Meanwhile, questions about whether Israel is violating international humanitarian law and the laws of war are brushed away.
US officials say they have no reason to even make an assessment since they see no evidence to suggest a genocide might be taking place. This despite the numerous UN rapporteurs and agencies, international organisations and legal experts that have raised the alarm since Israel began its bombardment of Gaza. Even as the Israeli prime minister has every interest in prolonging the war on Gaza to avoid a public accounting for his failure of leadership, the White House continues to be unwilling to rethink its unconditional support for Israel’s campaign in Gaza – at least until now.
The ICJ’s ruling should make it much harder for the Biden administration to continue to look away. The administration took the reins of government promising a reset and recalibration for itself and the international community, one that would strengthen international institutions and uphold the rights contained in the UN charter and international treaties including the genocide convention and human rights conventions. It has committed itself to monitoring for and preventing genocides, adopting a whole-of-government approach. And it has taken the position in other ICJ cases involving provisional measures, including with respect to the conflict between Ukraine and Russia, that the world court’s rulings are legally binding and must be complied with.
In the genocide case involving Israel, the court has effectively ordered the government to stop the mass destruction of Gaza, end the killing of Palestinians, and to take action against those engaged in incitement against them and their dehumanisation. Israel can’t do that while focused on “maximum damage” in Gaza. In any case, the Israeli prime minister has already said Israel has no intention of abiding by an ICJ ruling.
The US has the power to take decisive action to change Israel’s approach. Instead of blocking UN security council resolutions calling for an immediate ceasefire, it must now lead the council to that end. Instead of bypassing Congress to ship arms or proceeding with new military aircraft sales to Israel, it must suspend all offensive arms transfers. As a retired Israeli major general reportedly said about Israel’s dependency on the US to prosecute its war on Gaza: “All of our missiles, the ammunition, the precision-guided bombs, all the planes and bombs, it’s all from the US. The minute they turn off the tap, you can’t keep fighting … Everyone understands that we can’t fight this war without the United States. Period.”
As the death toll in Gaza mounts, the US is losing any credibility as a normative actor. Unlike its position on the 1983 UN genocide resolution, it isn’t enough for the US to sit on the sidelines. Given the level of support the US has shown Israel over the course of the past three and a half months – including by participating in its war cabinet meetings – to avoid the charge of complicity and the potential stain of genocide from bleeding on to the US, the Biden administration must act swiftly to support measures to restrain Israel. That means no more targeting civilians as they shelter in UN facilities, no more controlled bombings of schools and universities to create buffer zones, no more attacking Palestinians as they line up for food and water, and no more bombing them as they flee to so-called safe zones.
The entire conduct of Israel’s war on Gaza must change. The only way for Israel to make that change is to stop doing almost everything it has been doing since 7 October – while the court stopped short of calling for a ceasefire, that is effectively what is required. Failing to use its leverage over Israel as it continues to destroy Gaza and its people will be something that haunts the conduct of US foreign policy for decades to come.
Zaha Hassan is a human rights lawyer and a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
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