Israel To Counter Charge Of Genocide In Gaza

A finding in World Court would be blow to moral standing

• South Africa brings case of genocide against Israel in the Hague

• The ICJ meets on Jan 11-12 at 10 a.m. Netherlands time

• Streamed in English and French on the Court’s website and on UN Web TV

• The ICJ can tell Israel to desist: only advises UN Assembly and Security Council

• Finding of genocide would morally condemn Israel and any who enabled it

• Could constrain corporate investment decisions, treaties and alliances

• Case has broad support from Islamic countries; West, EU, remain shtum

• Brazil latest to back case, with ICJ panelists Morocco, Lebanon, Somalia, Uganda

• Once elected, ICJ judges do not represent their countries but are independent

• U.S. calls case “meritless, counterproductive” - Nat Sec spokesman

• Unlike ICC, the ICJ does not issue warrants or try individuals

• ICJ Bulletin: Public hearings on Thursday 11 and Friday 12 January 2024
  

For the trajectory of events in Gaza and Israel, see these articles:

Israel-Gaza Clash Is More Than Bad Neighbours - Security failure points to bigger agenda (Oct 8, 2023)

Gaza, An Open And Closed Case (Oct 10, 2023)

'Beheaded Babies' Is A Century-Old Trope (Oct 12, 2023)

Gaza's Fate Holds A Warning (Oct 16, 2023)

Hospital Bombings, Denial And Blood Sacrifice (Oct 18, 2023)

The Bottomless Pit - Israel Digs In (Oct 23, 2023)

Gaza Is A Micro-War Testing Ground (Oct 24, 2023)

Gaza Ground Invasion Begins (Oct 28, 2023)

Gaza Depopulation Plan Revealed By Intel Leak (Oct 30, 2023)

Globalists Plan Ban On Any Critique Of Zionism (Nov 6, 2023)

How -Isms Make War (Nov 10, 2023)

Politicians In A Zionist Death March (Nov 14, 2023)

Bin Laden Cameo Role In Gaza Mind War (Nov 16, 2023)

From New Zealand To Gaza; The Coof Shot And Genocide (Dec 4, 2023)

Gaza's Toll Weighs Heavy On Israel and Palestinians (Dec 10, 2023)

Victory Is An Illusion In Israel's War (Dec 23, 2023)

(3,000 words or about 14 minutes of your company.)

Jan 10, 2024

UPDATE Report of the hearing: The West's Answer To Genocide Case (Jan 12, 2024)

By any standard a finding of genocide against Israel at the World Court, as the International Court of Justice (ICJ) is also known, would be a ground-shaking event.

We defer on the legal case to those qualified to comment. This article takes a broad look at the issue of genocide, a guide to what exactly is the ICJ, the context of its establishment and its survival despite efforts to marginalise it.

Time to retire the word ‘genocide’

“On 9 and 10 December 2023 the international community will celebrate the 75th anniversaries of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”

So there we were, on the eve of the 75th Anniversary of the Genocide Convention, and the U.S. again vetoed a ceasefire in the UN Security Council. The press even declared it might be time to retire the term genocide. [1]

As the Palestinian envoy was speaking at the UN Security Council on an ‘immediate ceasefire’ resolution, the U.S. deputy ambassador was not even listening; he was fiddling with his cell phone, or taking orders from his handlers.

Two articles from leading newspapers denied there are innocents in Gaza: one from The Times of Israel titled “Innocents in Gaza? Don’t be naive,” and another from Town Hall titled “There Are No ‘Innocent Palestinians’.”

The state corporate media never fails to surprise. We saw during the Covid response the attempt to demonise references to the Nuremberg Code, let alone the holocaust. “Never again” came to mean an unrepeatable event, to which nothing compares and from which nothing is learned.

Instead of a universal constraint on future atrocities, it thus became a blank check for unrestrained action by one party: not a prohibition but a justification. The ultimate “whataboutery.”

Now Israel reaches for a similar carte blanche to reject accusations of genocide. The foreign minstry says the mere accusation from South Africa is a “blood libel.” [2]

Former British ambassador Craig Murray: “The world has been jolted, suddenly. Masks have been ripped off. Almost the entire political establishment of the West have outed themselves as enthusiastic proponents of a racial supremacism, prepared to give active assistance to a genocide of indigenous people.”

State corporate media took the opposite view, condeming United Nations Secretary General António Guterres for his decision on Dec 6th to invoke the rarely-used Article 99 to trigger a vote for a ceasefire in Gaza (the US was the only country to vote against it.)

Four days later 153 members of the UN General Assembly did adopt a resolution demanding a ceasefire, as well as immediate and unconditional release of all hostages, with only 10 including the US, Israel and Austria voting against, and 23 including the UK and Germany abstaining.

Genocide in history

In 1948, genocide was defined by the United Nations as the intentional destruction of a people by any of five methods: constraining living conditions, preventing births, forcibly transferring children out of a group, causing serious bodily or mental harm, and killing.

Without provable intent it is considered ethnic cleansing or a crime against humanity, rather than genocide.

Though there have been many examples in history some have been reassessed only recently such as the Irish famine of 1845 to 1852, and those of Bengal in 1770 and 1943.

Inevitably the term was politicised from its inception, when the lawyer Raphael Lemkin coined the term in 1944 to describe Germany’s reoccupation of land assigned to Poland after WWI.

What were genocides called before then? Turkey calls the death of about a million Armenians “the events of 1915.” It accused them of conspiring with the enemy of the time, Russia. Armenians call it a forced population transfer that was in practice a death march.

Allegations of genocide are tendentious; they are the most heinous one can make against a nation except perhaps for democide. The difference is that genocide may be committed without all factions in the state being aware; democide is the State’s active killing of its own people.

There is also a question of political and historical perspective. Genocide involves questions of ethnicity, borders and war.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union allowed access to primary sources, Yale University published a series of books that overturned the conventional narrative.

The Bolshevik famines were caused not by nature but primarily by collectivisation, which in turn was an attempt to subdue the countryside.

In 1917 the putschists controlled only the cities containing about three per cent of the population. The vast majority were subsistence farmers or peasants.

The New York Times has since the 1930s denied the famines even took place. It ran a series of articles by William Duranty, a Scottish-American who was NYT’s long-term Moscow correspondent and champion of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin.

See Ukraine's Suffering Highlights Pulitzer Lies - The New York Times helped to cover up a genocide; now famine looms once more (May 17, 2022)

A second line of defence has been to obscure any ethnic feud between the perpetrators and victims. For example many leading lights of the Bolsheviks hailed from present day Ukraine (or had recently returned from the U.S. and Germany), while the 15 million dead were Cossacks, Russian peasants and subsistence farmers in the Volga and the Kirghiz of present-day Kazakhstan.

A third is to promote particular genocides as exceptional, such as the Holomodor in Ukraine, while ignoring the simultaneous famine in the Volga, Kazakhstan and other regions of the USSR.

Nor is genocide a local affair: international media has long been complicit.

The NYT crops up throughout the 20^th and 21^st centuries as a handmaiden of U.S. foreign policy as determined or manipulated by the upper floors of the State Department.

In short, the accusation of genocide has always been a political tool to be advanced or denied by vested interests.

Death denial

If you want a modern example, look to Rwanda after the West clearly took sides between Hutu and Tutsi in the mid 1990s and profited from the victory of Tutsi Paul Kagame. He immediately criminalised any reference to genocide on the pretext of stopping hate, keeping peace and avoiding the reignition of violence.

It also conveniently threw a rug over what really happened, as even the BBC was forced to admit.

A BBC documentary on Rwanda does not mention Operation Crimson Mist, but it does suggest that those who provoked the massacres, and benefited from them, was the reverse of the news story told at the time.

War over there

The Western public knows little or nothing of those genocides — of Rwanda, Darfur, Cambodia, the Chinese famine after the Great Leap Forward, or the Cultural Revolution.

This is facilitated by psychopathic lack of empathy of television “experts” who talk coldly and clinically about hostage negotiations, bombing, cutting off water, without an ounce of humanity.

Between 1975 and 1979, under the Khmer Rouge regime, an estimated 1.5 to 2 million people died as a result of starvation, forced disappearances and extrajudicial killings — a quarter of the population of less than eight million. The Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) have classified these acts as crimes against humanity and grave breaches of the 1949 Geneva Conventions.

In 1984, the recently-departed John Pilger exposed how British special forces, the SAS, had trained Pol Pot's killers. It was Pilger (I think) who wrote that Americans may win a war; the problem is they don’t try to win the peace.

Another veteran journalist Chris Hedges has written that all settler colonial projects, including Israel, reach a point when they embrace wholesale slaughter and genocide to eradicate a native population that refuses to capitulate.

What is the essence of genocide, a word we hear so often and yet so rarely stop to understand?

Sirvard Kurdian was aged three when she was forced to walk in 1915 from Erzerum to Mosul. In 2018, on her 102nd birthday in Toronto, Kurdian received a visit from her local parish priest. He asked what she’d wish for if she were to live life again. She replied: “I would like to have a childhood. I never had one.”

More than a century after Sirvard’s experience, Azerbaijan, with the complicity of Turkey, the U.S. and armed by Israel, in Sep 2023 ethnically-cleansed Ngorno Karabakh, known to Armenians as Artsakh.

Consolee Nishimwe, of New York, survived the 1994 genocide in Rwanda as a teenager. “I also remember hearing the people who took my father talking about how happy they were to have killed him. It was one of the worst times in my life. I wished they had killed me too... Yet, the voice of God kept telling me never to give up.”

PART TWO

Court portrait

A guide to the International Court of Justice based on a meeting with vice-president Kirill Gevorgian, for an article on the centenary of the opening of the Peace Palace in the Hague (written 2013, updated 2024).

One of the six main organs of the United Nations, the ICJ or World Court owes its origins to the initiative of the last Russian Tsar.

The Tsar and the jurist and diplomat Fyodor Martens were worried about the growing arms race between the colonial powers. They wanted to hold an international peace conference in a small, neutral country. The Netherlands was neutral, home to several of his relatives, and had already played host to several international meetings.

Tsar Nicholas II convened the first international peace conference of 1899, which proposed a Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA). It would seek “the most objective means of ensuring to all peoples the benefits of a real and lasting peace.” The two Hague peace conferences and the Geneva Conventions were some of the earliest legalized rules of war and laws against war crimes.

Martens suggested the court should have a special building, a peace temple, as he called it, and set about trying to raise funds to build it. Eventually the U.S.-Scottish philanthropist Andrew Carnegie agreed to finance a library of international law along with the palace, at a cost of $1.5 million.

An architect from Lille, Louis Cordonnier, produced the winning design from 200 architects. Construction began in 1907 and on 28th August 1913, the Peace Palace was inaugurated. The opening coincided with the centenary of Dutch independence from French rule.

Monarchs and heads of state lavished the Peace Palace with gifts. Tsar Nicholas sent a vase of jasper, with two-headed eagles in gilded bronze. It weighs about 3,000 kilograms and required the floors to be strengthened. It stands under the palace tower. In the next room is one of the last portraits ever painted of Nicholas II.

Although the Second Hague Conference failed to stop the build up of arms and tensions that led to the First World War, it developed the idea of international arbitration to settle disputes between countries.

In 1922, the Permanent Court of International Justice (PCIJ) was established, under the Covenant of the League of Nations. Between the two world wars it heard 29 contentious cases between states, and delivered 27 advisory opinions. When Germany invaded The Netherlands, German troops withdrew from the Peace Palace, which was the only territory of The Netherlands that they did not occupy.

After the League of Nations failed to stop the Second World War, the United Nations was established to replace it. In turn, the UN charter created the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on the shoulders of the PCIJ in 1945.

One of the first tasks of the ICJ was to legitimize the UN itself. The UN sought an advisory opinion on whether the UN had “the capacity to bring an international claim against a government regarding injuries that the organization alleged had been caused by that state”. The ICJ concluded that while the UN is not a state, it is an international person, and has the capacity to maintain its rights by bringing international claims.

Today the Hague is the home of several judicial institutions, including the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the several ad hoc UN tribunals investigating war crimes like the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).

The main difference is that the ICC can issue arrest warrants, try individuals and cross examine witnesses. The ICJ is a court of arbitration. It can make a finding — such as an order for a country to desist or make restitution — and pass that advice to the UN General Assembly and the Security Council.

Although it is one of the six main organs of the UN, the ICJ is relatively small, with an annual budget of about $23 million and fewer than 200 staff. In comparison, the ICC has more than 800 staff.

The court hears legal disputes between states, which can only be initiated by a state. Companies or international organisations must use the PCA. Nor does the court hear political issues, which are thrashed out in the UN Security Council. The court also gives advisory opinion on legal issues to the main organs of the UN and specific UN agencies.

All 193 states can be party to a case, though they must give their consent. More than 300 conventions and treaties have a clause that refers disputes or interpretation to the ICJ, which means that states have effectively already given their consent to arbitration.

However, they might still object on the grounds that a case is political. Since 1946, the ICJ has heard more than 150 cases and given 113 judgments on contentious cases. Sometimes states settle cases between themselves. The president of the court, a former U.S. State Department official Joan E. Donoghue, holds a casting vote.

The panel

The court has 15 judges who, according to its charter, must represent the main forms of civilisation and the leading political systems.

Current members of the court include three African, two Latin American, three Asian, one West Asian (Lebanon) and two eastern Europeans. There are also four judges from western Europe and other countries (including the U.S., and Australia). Once elected, judges do not represent their countries but are independent. With the status of diplomats, they usually live in The Hague so that they are available to hear disputes at short notice.

One of the most common types of dispute before the court relates to frontiers. Borders are often the flashpoint between countries, where their interests touch, physically. Half of all cases before the ICJ concern borders, from crop spraying to mining rights.

Other cases include diplomatic protection, human rights, genocide (excluding individual war crimes), the environment and the use of force. Examples include the long-running pulp mill dispute, in which Argentina alleges that a pulp mill on the Uruguay River causes pollution and damages tourism. The ICJ called expert witnesses and has already made one ruling on the dispute.

In the case of Romania versus Ukraine, the ICJ drew the limits of the continental shelf around Snake Island on the Black Sea in 2009, settling the areas in which the two countries could exploit natural resources. Belgium versus Senegal led to a ruling that Senegal must begin proceedings to try Chad’s former leader Hissene Habre “without delay”. Guinea versus Congo involved the compensation of a Guinean citizen after the government of the Congo seized his assets.

Even where states have not followed the ICJ’s rulings, the court has influenced events. When the ICJ ruled that South Africa should withdraw its forces from Namibia it paved the way for the independence in 1990 of that country.

Nicaragua complained the U.S. was arming paramilitaries against the Sandinista government. The ICJ ruled against the U.S. in 1986, and although the U.S. rejected the decision, the case was finally resolved in 1991.

The ICJ broadcasts its hearings live on the Internet, except for deliberations which are conducted in private. The Peace Palace also hosts an Academy of International Law, which attracts 700 students and academics each summer.

When when a case is settled, both states win. Simply by using the court, states show they are willing to use measures other than force to settle their disputes.

PART THREE

Capture by oligarchs

Tsar Nicholas II had convened an international peace conference in 1899, concerned by the arms race. Industrial mass production had made possible war more bloody, by orders of magnitude, than ever before. Railways could deliver bombs directly from the factory gates to the front lines in a round-the-clock manufactury of death.

The impending switch to fiat currency, and the Federal Reserve system by which private central bankers would create money out of thin air, meant governments would finance wars almost without limit.

With his cousin, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, he saw that the great powers were being maneouvered into a world war and made efforts to halt the drift. During that First Hague Peace Conference, 26 countries came together to speak about disarmament and about the possibility of international jurisdiction, which led to the establishment of the Permanent Court of Arbitration in the Hague. That body is now known, colloquially, as the World Court and is a sub-unit of the United Nations.

The Peace Palace has since 1913 been managed by the Carnegie Foundation — the same foundation whose trustees, in 1908 debated: “Is there any means known more effective than war, assuming you wish to alter the life of an entire people?”

“And they conclude[d] that, no more effective means to that end is known to humanity, than war.” Those minutes were revealed by Norman Dodd, chief knvestigator to the Reece Committee in 1954.

“So then, in 1909, they raise the second question, and discuss it, namely, how do we involve the United States in a war?”

It would seem that an attempt to prevent WW1 was hijacked by weapons manufacturers, through the U.S. private foundations that act as tax-evading fronts for corporation; and banking interests and monarchs who were integrated with supra-national finance capital such as the British and Dutch royal families who were, and are, key players in the oil industry through their stake in Royal Dutch Shell. Together they would go on to found the Bilderberg Group.

“The Carnegie Foundation is working towards a better world,” it declares on the Peace Palace website.

Nicholas used to speak with Wilhelm in English. Surviving telegrams show how desperately they foresaw the danger of WW1 — a total reversal of history as written by the victors. Their exchange after the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo is telling. [3]

The two monarchs were removed from office by abdication and one of them was liquidated by the Bolsheviks along with his family. His country was annexed for the modern era’s first great experiment in social engineering, something that has been seemingly revived as a global project that haunts us all.

One common thread that you may notice is that the globalists are not imaginative. They repeat the same playbook. They hijack and redirect the efforts of others, repurpose projects, change names, appropriate the language and invert meaning.

The plan for a world tribunal lives on, however, close to its architect’s original intentions, perhaps less sullied than other units of the United Nations.

[1] WSJ, Dec 8, 2023 - Is It Time to Retire the Term ‘Genocide’?

[2] Times of Israel, Dec 29, 2023 - ‘Blood libel’: Israel slams South Africa for requesting ICJ genocide investigation

[3] Facing History Org - Last-Ditch Effort to Prevent a War