World Court Targets the Jewish State of Israel for Defending its Citizens A kangaroo court’s shameful rulings against the Jewish state. Joseph Klein
The globalist ideal of international courts such as the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Court (“ICC”) adjudicating disputes under “international law” impartially and fairly is at odds with their disgraceful decisions. Both international courts have turned into Kafkaesque tribunals that Israel-haters exploit to demonize, delegitimize, and discriminate against the Jewish state.
This article discusses how the ICJ, which is part of the United Nations system, has become a linchpin in the reprehensible lawfare strategy to handcuff Israel from defending itself against ruthless terrorists bent on its destruction. A subsequent article in this series will focus on how the International Criminal Court has been similarly weaponized for malicious purposes against Israel.
The International Court of Justice kicked off 2024 by issuing its scurrilous January 26th provisional ruling, which allowed South Africa’s complaint it filed accusing Israel of committing genocide against the Palestinians living in Gaza to move forward. The ICJ ruled that it had jurisdiction to hear South Africa’s accusations against Israel that it is violating the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide:
“The Court considers that, by their very nature, at least some of the provisional measures sought by South Africa are aimed at preserving the plausible rights it asserts on the basis of the Genocide Convention in the present case, namely the right of the Palestinians in Gaza to be protected from acts of genocide and related prohibited acts…and the right of South Africa to seek Israel’s compliance with the latter’s obligations under the Convention.”
By allowing South Africa to regurgitate anti-Israel propaganda advanced by Hamas and its supporters, as if these smears had any basis in fact or law, the ICJ has made a mockery of true justice.
Article II of the Genocide Convention prohibits its member states from committing certain acts with the “intent to destroy in whole or in part a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” (Emphasis added)
The acts that the Convention specifies include:
“(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; and
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”
However, committing any of these acts only becomes a Genocide Convention violation if the accused party is proven to have intended to commit them for the purpose of destroying, in whole or in part, a protected group.
Hamas, not Israel, is guilty of genocide. Its founding charter commits the members of this terrorist organization to destroy the Jewish state of Israel and to kill Jews wherever they are found.
Hamas’s invasion of Israel on October 7, 2023 and the barbaric rampage against Israeli civilians that followed was a deliberate military campaign of genocide. Hamas terrorists calculatedly killed, raped, maimed, and tortured Jews of all ages. At least one of the nearly 150,000 Holocaust survivors still living in Israel was killed during Hamas’s genocidal October 7th attack. The terrorists forcibly transferred children from Israel to Gaza, together with adults, whom the savages abducted and have held as hostages.
Israel’s military operations in Gaza following Hamas’s October 7th attack, by contrast, have constituted a legitimate exercise of Israel’s inherent right of self-defense pursuant to Article 51 of the United Nations Charter. Article 51 permits a member state such as Israel to take military action in self-defense when “an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations.”
The Palestinian terrorists launched their armed attack against Israel from Gaza, invading Israel’s sovereign territory and vowing to conduct more October 7thstyle attacks if given a chance. Israel has every legal and moral right to take whatever military operations it deems reasonably necessary to destroy Hamas’s capability to fulfill its bone-chilling vow and to ever conduct another such genocidal attack again.
That is not to deny that the war initiated by Hamas has brought suffering to civilians in Gaza caught in the war’s crossfire. But it is blood libel to claim that Israel has intentionally killed Palestinian civilians en masse for the purpose of destroying the Palestinian people collectively as an ethnic group. Quite the contrary. The Israeli military has gone out of its way, even putting its own soldiers at risk, to mitigate civilian casualties in Gaza. For example, the Israeli Defense Forces have provided Palestinian civilians advance warnings of attacks and the opportunity to evacuate along with safe passage where feasible.
The Geneva Conventions mandate the protection of civilians in time of war, while also recognizing that civilians caught in the line of fire are regrettably in danger of being killed or wounded inadvertently. Israel has fully abided by its obligations to minimize civilian casualties during its military operations. It is Hamas that has used Palestinian civilians as human shields and civilian facilities for military purposes, cold-heartedly sacrificing the lives of Gazan women and children and shifting the blame to Israel for propaganda purposes.
The International Court of Justice has disgraced itself by allowing Israel’s enemies to grossly abuse the ICJ’s judicial process to criminalize Israel’s legitimate defense of its own people from another genocidal attack by Hamas and other Palestinian terrorists. And the ICJ has disgraced itself further by electing a diehard Israel-hater, Nawaf Salam from Lebanon, as its president in February 2024 for a three-year term.
Salam was one of the judges listed on ICJ’s first order on South Africa’s request for Provisional Measures dated January 26th, 2024. He voted in favor of the order. After Salam was elected to serve as the ICJ’s president, he voted in favor of two more anti-Israel orders stemming from South Africa’s bogus genocide claims against Israel.
The ICJ came down hard on Israel again in its July 19, 2024 advisory opinion, which the UN General Assembly had requested the ICJ to render. The ICJ concluded in its nonbinding advisory opinion that Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories was “unlawful,” and that Israel violated international laws concerning “apartheid.” While delivering the ICJ’s advisory opinion, the Court’s President Nawaf Salam said that Israel must make reparations to Palestinians for damages caused by its occupation.
Electing Nawaf Salam as the president of the ICJ and allowing him to judge, let alone preside, at the Court’s star chamber proceedings against Israel is like selecting an arsonist as fire chief.
While serving as Lebanon’s representative to the UN, Salam voted 210 times to condemn Israel. One of these resolutions falsely accused Israel of “acts of terror, provocation, incitement and destruction” against Palestinians, without mentioning the horrible misdeeds of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. According to UN Watch’s July 18,2024 report entitled “Record of Bias: The Case of ICJ President Nawaf Salam,” Salam also used his UN perch to deliver “dozens of inflammatory speeches.”
In a 2008 speech, for example, Salam said that the “supreme Zionist leadership” pursued a plan of “ethnic cleansing” through “terrorism and organized massacres.” In November 2009, Salam claimed at the UN General Assembly that “for too long [Israel’s] war criminals have benefited from impunity.” On June 13, 2014, Salam accused Israel of “crimes against humanity” and “war crimes.” In November 2016 and on other occasions, Salam accused Israel of “apartheid.”
And so on and so forth.
Article 20 of the ICJ Statute requires that “Every member of the Court shall, before taking up his duties, make a solemn declaration in open court that he will exercise his powers impartially and conscientiously.” Nawaf Salam wears his extreme bias against Israel on his sleeve and is utterly incapable of exercising his judicial powers “impartially and conscientiously.” Nevertheless, the ICJ has elected Salam to serve as its president.
In sum, the International Court of Justice’s shameful complicity with the Israel-hating propagators of blood libel against the Jewish state has left whatever iota of legitimacy it may have once possessed in tatters.
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