Why Israel will almost certainly lose its war in Gaza (even if Israel exterminates all Gazans & steals all Palestinian land)
Eric Zuesse
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Why Israel will almost certainly lose its war in Gaza (even if Israel exterminates all Gazans & steals all Palestinian land)
Refugees in Khan Yunis, a zone heavily bombed by the Israelis. Khan Yunis is a city in the southern Gaza Strip; it is the capital of the Khan Yunis Governorate in the Gaza Strip. (Credit: Vanessa Beeley)
No country in the world (not even the United States) has violated as many international laws and Resolutions from the General Assembly of the United Nations as Israel has. Until now, nothing has been done to enforce international law upon Israel’s Government, because America’s Government is a permanent member of the U.N.’s Security Council and has always vetoed anything that would authorize such enforcement against Israel — and, consequently, America’s Government has granted carte blanche to Israel’s Government: complete immunity to do whatever it wants.
But that international legal immunity for Israel is almost certain to end soon, because the U.N.’s International Court of Justice (ICJ) is now considering whether what Israel is doing to Gazans constitutes “genocide” (planning, and carrying out, the extermination of a civilian population) — the most severe of all violations of international law. And, in the process of that consideration, the Court listened to testimony at hearings during from 19 February to 26 February, in which “Over 50 nations presented testimony to the ICJ on the legality of the Israeli occupation, with the majority offering stirring arguments for Israeli accountability, and justice for the Palestinians. An Advisory Opinion is expected sometime this summer.” Almost certainly, that advisory opinion will recommend international trials to be held at the International Criminal Court, in which trials Benjamin Netanyahu, and maybe even his partner in this genocidal case Joe Biden, will be formally charged with the international crime of “genocide,” plus of “the acquisition of Palestinian territory by force” (the illegal Israeli expulsions of Palestinians and replacing them with Israeli settlers) as well as of other violations of international criminal laws. Since these are not merely national laws, but are international ones, it would create entirely new worldwide legal precedents, which — for example, the Nuremberg Tribunals after WW2 failed to do (they were instead victors’ ‘justice’ parading as-if they were authentic impartial international-law tribunals carrying out the laws of a worldwide Governmental system that didn’t actually exist prior to the creation of the United Nations — which wasn’t yet up-and-running at that time).
On the final day of these genocide-by-Israel hearings, David Kattenburg, an independent journalist based in the Netherlands town of Breda, reporting from the Court at The Hague, headlined on the #1 website covering the Israeli operation to exterminate the Gazans, “Mondo Weiss”, an article titled “World Court hearing on legality of Israeli occupation ends following week of testimony”. He provided there a breathtakingly good summary of the six-day-long hearings — everyone should read it, because it is clear that not only will Israel become an international pariah nation and face vastly more comprehensive legal international sanctions than any (all of which are illegal under international law) of the sanctions that the U.S. Government has imposed and enforces against countries such as Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela and North Korea, but he also showed that the U.S. itself will become, at the very least, enormously isolated internationally, as being, if not a co-defendant alongside Israel, then close to being as much of an international pariah as Israel itself will become from this (no matter what its verdict will be). As Kattenburg’s lengthy summary makes clear, the economic damage to the United States, even from merely a conviction of Israel (but none against America), would be enormous. However, if the U.S. itself will be a target in its verdict, then either the existing international legal order will collapse, or else the U.S.’s empire will. And the U.S. Government’s proposal to replace existing (U.N.-based) international law, by instituting a U.S.-generated “international rules-based order,” in which the U.S. Government will determine those “international rules,” would be not only dead, but finally and ignominiously buried. Finally just gone. So, this case could turn out to be the one in which international law will — at long last — assert itself against the U.S.-and-allied efforts to replace it by America’s “international rules.”
Donkey carts have often replaced cars in Gaza as there is practically no fuel available. The starving animals, also targets of snipers and bombs, have suffered as much as humans.
The Middle-Eastern journalist Steven Sahiouni was factually correct in his February 23rd statement that “The moral authority of the US has been ripped from Washington, DC, by the power of the genocide and war crimes in Gaza, carried out by Israel while using weapons sent to Tel Aviv from the US State Department. Biden’s fingerprints are all over the murder weapons.”
Kattenberg’s article quoted from the “six days of oral pleadings and 57 written statements filed by UN member states and three organizations – the League of Arab States, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, and the African Union.” He noted that “With a few exceptions, Israel’s allies seem to have accepted the inevitability of an ICJ Advisory Opinion, and are now in damage control.” He also pointed out that:
Israel’s allies push court to not render an opinion
Having concluded oral sessions, the International Court of Justice can either accede to the General Assembly’s request for an Advisory Opinion or — exercising its discretionary power — it can decline to do so, something it has never done.
The U.S., Canada, UK, and a handful of other states – among these, Zambia, represented this morning by its lavishly wigged Solicitor General, and Fiji, clearly a friend of Israel, who referred to the General Assembly’s Advisory Opinion request as a “distinctly one-sided” “legal maneuver” to side-step the ‘Peace Process’, assigning legal consequences on just one of the parties to the ‘conflict’ – are hoping for a first.
If the court does issue an opinion about Israel’s occupation, the U.S., Britain, Zambia, and Fiji argued, it should refrain from delving into the exceptionally complex root causes of the situation.
However, if, at this stage, after the ICJ has previously voted (on 26 January 2024) (by margins of — out of 17 judges — 15 to 2 and 16 to 1) as having found a credible case on which to try Israel’s Government possibly for violating severe international laws against genocide, permanent illegal military occupation, and other such laws, will then ultimately decide to advise the International Criminal Court to hold a trial of Israel on such charges, then here are what Kattenburg identifies as possible consequences of such a decision (a decision which is extremely likely to result):
It will “help set the stage, politically, for what is regarded as legitimate in the international community, at the halls of the United Nations, in capitals of states around the world, when they’re dealing with the question of Palestine,” Canadian international law scholar and State of Palestine legal advisor Ardi Imseis told Mondoweiss, on the first day of hearings.
“Most particularly, because the occupation is unlawful and an internationally wrongful act, third states would not be allowed to continue to engage the State of Israel, the occupying power, in relation to the occupied Palestinian territory, in the same way that they have done over the past 56 years,” Imseis said.
“[A] serious breach of a peremptory norm entitles states other than the injured state to take countermeasures against the responsible state as a legal consequence of that breach,” legal counsel for the Dutch Foreign Ministry, René Lefeber, confirmed to the ICJ last week. The Netherlands did this in late January, cutting off the provision of F-35 spare parts to Israel.
The U.S. government will also be under the gun. Recent U.S. sanctions against violent settlers, and Antony Blinken’s confirmation that Israeli settlements are “inconsistent” with international law, suggest increasing willingness to hold Israel accountable for its breaches of peremptory norms, as required under international law.
Strategic lawsuits promise to proliferate.
In response to the ICJ’s January 26 provisional measures order against Israel, U.S. District Court Judge Jeffrey White cited “undisputed evidence” that “the ongoing military siege on Gaza is intended to eradicate a whole people and therefore plausibly falls within the international prohibition against genocide.”
Judge White “implored” U.S. officials “to examine the results of their unflagging support” for Israel.
A decisive Advisory Opinion is certain to put wind in the BDS movement’s sails.
This past November, shortly after the start of Israel’s assault on Gaza, the Norwegian Pension Fund completed the withdrawal of its half-billion dollar investment in Israel Bonds.
Last week, four Norwegian universities reportedly terminated ties with Israeli counterparts.
And, as the ICJ drafts its Advisory Opinion on the legality of Israel’s occupation, it will also be building the factual basis for its genocide ruling two or three years down the road.
“I’m hopeful,” Giulia Pinzauti told Mondoweiss, in a café down the street from the Peace Palace.
“Everybody’s talking about genocide, as if that’s the only issue,” says Pinzauti. “Clearly, there’s a much bigger problem concerning the legality of the occupation and Israel’s discriminatory practices in the occupied territories. So that’s why I think this Advisory Opinion is extremely important … a good setup for hopefully the merits of the case concerning the Genocide Convention because it puts things in a much broader context.”
In the meantime, says Pinzauti — who teaches a course about the ICJ at Leiden University – the ICJ’s upcoming Advisory Opinion on the legal consequences of Israel’s prolonged occupation promises to transform the political landscape.
“It’s difficult for judicial decisions to change things on the ground, and that’s where impacts are really needed,” Pinzauti told Mondoweiss. “I’m hoping that judicial decisions or pronouncements or advisory opinions will help shape state policies in a way that can make effect on the ground where it’s really, really needed … I think it can provide the foundations for a just and lasting peace.”
Even just the visual evidence [MUST SEE: Compelling text and pictures] is hard to interpret reasonably in any other way than that Israel’s bombings of civilian neighborhoods and buildings are intended to kill as many of the residents of Gaza as quickly as possible.
In short: The U.S. Government would be faced with a choice either to join with Israel in being rejected by virtually all countries, or else to abandon Israel to the international judgment that Israel is a global pariah — for America to cease-and-desist its association with Israel.
However: if the latter — abandonment — is to be the outcome of this, then how would the U.S. Government justify the 25,000-tons+ of U.S.-made weapons-and-ammunition it has already donated to Israel to carry out this genocide? If America is already well past the point where it is clearly a participant in what Israel has been and is doing to Gaza, then won’t America clearly be in a damned-if-you-do, and damned-if-you-don’t, change its position on Israel predicament — where the world’s abandonment of Israel will then inevitably rub off irretrievably onto the U.S.’s own “brand”? If so, then what else would be the likely consequence of this, than the end of the period since 1945 during which America was the world’s leading nation? Not ONLY would Israel lose its almost-only patron, but that only patron would no longer carry the international cloutthat it formerly did. The entire Western World would be shaken out, to becoming reputational dust.
The ultimate end of this story, for Israel, seems likely to be the end of the nation of Israel. The entire Trumanite program would then be shattered. Whereas FDR (and his advisors) had been quietly planning to blockBritain’s creation of a Jewish nation in Palestine, Truman passionately supported the British plan. He was the anti-FDR.
America has sunk itself in — so deeply into — being Israel’s top (and often only) patron, so that if Israel goes down, then the U.S. empire itself could likely terminate. The ignominy to Israel could do that: terminate the American empire.
This seems likely to be the moment in history when either the U.N. will be reformed into the vision that FDR had of it, or else it will become whatever it will, with no real leadership, and perhaps just hobbling along that way.
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