Friday’s Historic Ruling by the ICJ
Asked by the UN in 2022 (ignoring a dissenting voice from the UK government) to give their opinion about the Occupation of Palestine, the International Court of Justice has given its non-binding opinion. To no-one’s surprise, Israel’s invasion and subsequent de facto annexation of East Jerusalem and the West Bank is illegal.
The fall-out from this judgement will emerge in due course, but Israel has been told to unwind 57 years of illegal activity and move 650,000 Israelis out of the settlements, withdraw completely from the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), and pay compensation to the people who have been subjected to Apartheid under Israel rule. Israel has angrily rejected the judgement, but other signatories to the various international treaties making up humanitarian law, including our own government, are obligated to enforce the ruling. They will find it more difficult to ignore the ICJ, the highest court in the world.
Gaza
During the general election campaign, mention of the Gaza war was avoided by the major parties, as was the plight of the Palestinians, but Israel’s destruction of Gaza and its people continued unabated, and the number of atrocities is still continuing to mount, while rumours of peace talks come and go.
Last Saturday 90 people were killed and around 300 injured in a targeted attack by Israeli fighter jets and drones on displaced people housed in tents in a “safe zone” west of Khan Younis. https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2024/7/13/israeli-air-raid-on-al-mawasi-kills-90-people-what-we-know-so-far Israel claims it was trying to kill two senior Hamas operatives, but Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu admitted it was “not absolutely certain” they were killed. He showed no contrition over the number of innocent people who died or were severely injured in the attack, and astonishingly concluded that it had still been “beneficial” to Israel. In fact, of course, killing 90 civilians in pursuit of two combatants is a war crime, as Francesca Albanese, the United Nations Special Rapporteur, subsequently made clear in a statement.
That event, nine months into the war, showed just how deep is the gulf between the Israeli understanding of their actions and the view of most of the rest of the world. Israeli public opinion is fed by a compliant media, and few are exposed to the horrific pictures and commentary we see on our TVs and in other media sources. A majority in Israel still support Netanyahu’s claim that Hamas is a terrorist organisation and can only be stopped from ‘destroying Israel’ by killing or maiming their fighters with bullets, bombs and other missiles, regardless of how many civilians die in the process. There are even those in Israel who rejoice in the killing of civilians in Gaza. This not only flies in the face of all the evidence that military superiority cannot defeat an idea, it miscasts Hamas, and fails to recognise the causes of the current conflict.
Respected international lawyer Conor Gearty has described terrorism as the use of violence as “a means of communication” in an “asymmetric” dispute – one in which an oppressor is too powerful to want to negotiate an end to its dominance, and can’t be defeated on the battlefield. Not all terrorist acts are justified, and the scale and brutality of the Hamas attack on October 7 certainly can’t be, but to deny the Palestinian people the right to rebel against 57 years of occupation and denial of their rights would be to say that in an asymmetric dispute the stronger side must always be right, and should be allowed to exploit its military capability to crush resistance. The United Nations has repeatedly told Israel the Occupation is illegal, and has repeatedly been ignored. The ‘communication’ embedded in the Hamas assault on Israel was aimed at us.
We have allowed Israel to punish the Palestinian people for the crime of owning a country it wants to colonise, and it is long past the time when we should have told Israel we are not going to allow its persecution of Palestinians to continue. First, the senseless killing in Gaza and the West Bank has to stop, and second, there has to be an end to the Occupation. We should also make it abundantly clear that the massively disproportionate Israeli retaliation for the actions of Hamas on October 7 has removed the last shred of moral authority Israel may have thought it had, and makes it unthinkable that it should have a role in deciding the future of Palestine, which will need to be overseen by a UN-headed team.
The role of the British government is now of huge importance. Decisions made by the US are the only way to stop Netanyahu, but their current president has been a life-long admirer of Israel, and we need our new government to stop listening to the opinions of a man demonstrably afflicted by encroaching senility, and start making common cause with those in the US administration who can see the need to rein in an Israeli war cabinet which has completely lost its way.
The Labour administration has not impressed on the Gaza issue, so far. We need to urge the sizeable number of Lib Dem MPs to speak up in parliament and join with others to put pressure on David Lammy to start reflecting the will of the British people, and we have written to all of our MPs to that effect this week. In addition, you need to write to your own MP and tell them you expect the demands of the British people to be reflected in government policy on Gaza. Not for the sake of our democracy, but for the sake of the Palestinian mothers and fathers who will be picking the remains of their children out of the rubble until Israel’s war machine is halted.