The latest form of Holocaust denial

The ICJ ruling on “genocide” was contemptible. The reaction was worse

International Court of Justice prepares to hear South Africa's case against Israel

The fact that Israel expected worse from the International Court of Justice’s ruling on Friday doesn’t make it anything other than shameful. Worse still, though, was the misrepresentation of the ruling by Israel’s enemies  — and even by some of its defenders — to make it seem more damning than it was.

Although the court didn’t accede to South Africa’s demand that Israel should stop its military operation in Gaza, it ruled that Israel must “take all measures within its power” to prevent a genocide. 

The very suggestion that this might be a possibility is outrageous and not supported by any reliable evidence to the court. Since Israel’s war in Gaza is intended to destroy Hamas and not to destroy uninvolved Palestinians — whose lives Israel has in fact gone out its way to protect — this was a malicious smear against Israel designed to harm it in the eyes of the world and thus weaken its defences against the truly genocidal Hamas. And since the court drew uncritically upon Hamas propaganda produced by the UN to support such a smear, the court was thus implicitly aiding Hamas’s onslaught.

The very same day on which the court issued its ruling, evidence arrived that the UN sources upon which the court had drawn were themselves tainted by Hamas’s genocidal agenda. No fewer than 12 officials of the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) were identified by Israeli intelligence as having been personally involved in the October 7 pogrom. UNRWA has now sacked a number of them. The UK, US and several other western countries promptly suspended their UNWRA funding. In addition, the monitoring group UN Watch has uncovered evidence that more than 3000 UNRWA teachers had celebrated the atrocities on the Telegram channel.

Bringing a claim of genocide against Israel for defending itself against the genocide of the Jews intended by Hamas and its patron, Iran, is obscene. As defined by the Genocide Convention, genocide involves the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such”. 

This does not apply to Israel on a number of counts. Israel has no intention to destroy the Palestinians of Gaza “as such”. It intends to kill the terrorists of Hamas, not uninvolved Palestinians — and not because Hamas are Palestinians, but because Israel is defending itself against their genocidal onslaught. 

Moreover,  the Palestinians are not a discrete “national, ethnical, racial or religious group” but — as many of their own leaders have acknowledged in the past —  they are an indissoluble part of the broader Arab nation. They have no culture, language or religion that makes them distinct from that broader Arab nation; many if not most of their ancestors in the last century immigrated into Palestine from neighbouring states such as Egypt and Syria; their “Palestinian” identity was forged in the 1960s purely as a weapon of war to destroy Israel and to appropriate Jewish history as their own. By this standard, they aren’t covered by the Genocide Convention at all.

On the ICJ, the one judge who dissented from the entire ruling was the Ugandan jurist, Julia Sebutinde, who took the majority decision apart. She got it absolutely right.