The International Court of Justice, the Israelis and genocide

Genocide/ The Israelis are identified with the victims and therefore cannot be the perpetrators… The comment

There Courtwhich is based in The Hague, is the supreme justice body of the UN. The State of Israel has decided to appear to respond to the accusation brought against him by South Africa because it signed the International Convention against Genocide and recognizes the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice in this matter, and only in this matter. It would not be possible to bring him to trial, for example, regarding his matters violations of the laws of war and humanitarian law.

In the past it was State of Israel he ignored the Court's calls: for example regarding the erection of the famous wall and problems associated with his occupation of the West Bank territory. Likewise, the Israelis have consistently ignored United Nations Security Council resolutions, such as those ordering a halt to the colonial occupation of Palestinian territories in the West Bank.

The Israelis must have thought that the accusation of genocide is of an unprecedented gravity from which it is important to defend oneself. What does the crime of genocide consist of? It may be remembered that he was not invoked at Nuremberg. The Nazis were accused of extermination. But some Jewish jurists who survived the Nazi exterminations pointed out the difference between any extermination and an extermination that has the aim of eradicating an ethnic group: the Nazis had wanted to eradicate the Jewish people.

This was a new and more serious crime. Not only against the victims, but against humanity. It is clearly disgraceful to be accused of this crime, of which European Jews were victims. Israelis have deeply internalized their role as a race that has suffered this atrocious threat. This seems to have acted on them in a double direction: in feeling like victims, and in being determined never to become one again. On the other hand, a state of Jews (not of all Jews) could have guaranteed a peaceful refuge if it had settled peacefully and established friendly relations with its neighbors.

But things didn't go that way at all, and very soon the State of Israel has become a besieged fortressin which it was exhilarating to be guests until the enemies who showed up from time to time were defeated. But Israel is now more than ever in need of political, diplomatic, financial and above all military support from the United States. Identification with the victims of the Nazis means that Israelis have developed a strong sense of self-legitimacy that extends to a guilt-free conscience. They believe, more or less consciously, that they have inherited the moral credit of their grandparents and parents towards the rest of the world. This is explicitly confirmed by leading German politicians and intellectuals.

And it is clearly illustrated in a response from Daniel Taub, jurist and former ambassador of the State of Israel to the United Kingdom interviewed in yesterday's Press: “We are witnessing quite shockingly a attempt to redefine, beyond credibility, the concept of the crime of genocide. First let's remember that Israel is a party to the 1948 Genocide Convention, it was one of the first countries to sign it. The concept of genocide is deeply felt in Israel, as a Jewish state. And let's remember that October 7th [la data dell’irruzione di Hamas] there were holocaust survivors who were killed or kidnapped and taken away. And I believe this is what gives particular emotional strength to Israel's participation.” That the Israeli government has committed or is about to commit genocide by compromising the existence of the Gazans, a substantial part of the Palestinians, is here rejected as not a logical, but a genetic contradiction: it would be part of the concept of genocide that the Israeli Jews are identified with with the victims and therefore [un non-sequitur!] they cannot be the perpetrators.

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