The World Court Case Against Israel is Political Warfare

The development of “international law” since the Nuremberg trials is seen broadly in the West as a mark of human progress—to the extent that many subordinate their own moral judgments to the findings of the United Nations and the various international institutions. This is disastrous.

It is quite right to locate the foundations of “international law” at Nuremberg, but the myth of Nuremberg as the gold standard of dispassionate justice distorts the understanding of everything that has flowed from it. There was no justice at Nuremberg: that tribunal was a political enterprise to finish the Second World War, which involved the Allies collaborating in the fictions that the Soviet Union had not collaborated with the Nazis to start the war and had not behaved at least as atrociously in terms of aggression and crimes against humanity. Meanwhile, the process was manipulated from start to finish by the Soviet secret police as a form of political warfare to further the Communist cause.

The political nature of what happened at Nuremberg is not an anomaly: the story is not of a messy birth for “international law”, followed by a maturation over the decades into an ever-more pristine mechanism for dispensing international justice. “International law” as we have it now is a faithful heir of Nuremberg, as we can see with the current case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) accusing Israel of “genocide”.

HAMAS, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), and other terrorists controlled by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) carried out a horrific massacre of 1,200 Israelis and abducted another 240 as hostages on 7 October 2023. Israel has since begun a defensive operation to destroy the IRGC infrastructure in the Gaza Strip and ensure the enclave can never again be used to launch such an operation.

The IRGC/HAMAS strategy to counter this and ensure its survival relies on its tunnel network. The tunnels, built using the aid money the “international community” gave the U.N. for the benefit the Palestinian population, are embedded in civilian areas throughout the entire Strip and have their entrances in “protected” sites, particularly hospitals, as well as schools and mosques. HAMAS is under no illusion it can militarily defeat Israel. Instead, HAMAS intends to cause the deaths of as many Palestinians civilians as it takes to generate international political pressure on Israel to halt its campaign.

To reach the threshold of international outrage necessary to enforce a “ceasefire” that saves HAMAS, the group has pursued several lines of active measures. Probably the most notorious is spreading distorted casualty numbers through its “health ministry” and betting that they will be credulously repeated by the international media—a good bet so far. HAMAS has courted the sympathy of the international press specifically with its dubious claims of a concerted Israeli campaign against journalists in Gaza. And then there is the “lawfare”.

South Africa’s government, run by the African National Congress (ANC), brought a case before the ICJ, the U.N.’s “World Court”, a month ago that claims Israel is guilty of “genocide” in Gaza. Yesterday, the ICJ ruled against Israel’s request to dismiss the case, saying it had jurisdiction to hear the case because “at least some of the acts and omissions alleged by South Africa to have been committed by Israel in Gaza appear to be capable of falling within the provisions of the [Genocide] Convention”.

The ICJ ruling will not have any practical impact on the ground, and did not even try to order a cessation of Israel’s military operations, as many supporters of the case hoped it would, but it did tack on some “provisional measures” against Israel, namely demands that Israel avoid genocidal actions in Gaza—which, of course, Israel is doing anyway—and allow more “humanitarian” aid into the Strip, a slippery demand given how the IRGC uses aid to further its war aims, as we have seen in Yemen, Syria, and elsewhere.

The layers of absurdity here are so numerous it is difficult to unpick them all, but let us focus on a few of the most salient.

Leave to one side that the 1948 Genocide Convention is another product of Soviet manipulation, written so it could not be applied to the Soviet terror-famine in Ukraine. Just take the Convention and related “international laws” as they are actually written, and it is self-evident Israel is not committing genocide in Gaza. Even on the worst assumptions about how indiscriminately Israel is carrying out its military campaign, this is not genocide, which has a highly specific meaning.

There has been a tortured “legal” argument about whether non-State actors are bound by “international law”. As HAMAS is a de facto extension of a recognised government, namely the Islamic Republic in Iran, it is questionable whether this “debate” applies to it. What is not in doubt is that HAMAS is bound by customary “international humanitarian law” (IHL) and, through one of those incongruities in which “international law” specialises, the non-existent “State of Palestine” has been a signatory to the Geneva Conventions since 2015. HAMAS is a governing entity in this “State”.

The ICJ did find space in yesterday’s ruling for a single paragraph calling for an “immediate and unconditional release” the Israeli hostages. HAMAS, it might be noted, had publicly claimed it would abide by the ICJ ruling. HAMAS responded within half-an-hour of the ICJ ruling by rhetorically welcoming it—and firing another barrage of missiles at Israel’s civilians. Neither the ICJ nor the ANC have found time to condemn this behaviour.

If the ICJ was concerned with war crimes and crimes against humanity in former Mandate Palestine, it would surely have started with HAMAS. Given the sheer scale of HAMAS’ criminal activities—from the use of human shields, missile attacks on civilian populations, the deliberate use of rape as a weapon of war, mutilation of corpses, taking hostages, using booby-traps, and on and on—it is doubtful the ICJ would have time to attend to much other business.

Moreover, under the precedents in the international system, there is a very good case that the 7 October pogrom against Israel does qualify as genocide. If the ICJ wanted to investigate a State for complicity in genocide in former Mandate Palestine, its focus would be better directed at Iran. As a signatory to the Genocide Convention, Israel is mandated to “prevent and to punish” the perpetrators of genocide—as is South Africa.

HAMAS’ genocidal intentions are not disguised. The 1988 HAMAS Covenant invokes the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the warrant for the Nazi genocide against the Jews, as justification for its mission to destroy Israel and its inhabitants, Islamizing this product of Christian antisemitism to foretell an apocalyptic struggle that will end with the stones and trees helping Muslims murder the last Jews. The 7 October pogrom was undertaken within this framework, and HAMAS’ desire to repeat the massacre has been made clear by its officials over the last three months.

Despite some demented commentary about the ANC now being “the leader of the free world”, and much confected outrage when Israel’s Foreign Ministry said the ANC was “functioning as the legal arm of HAMAS”, that is clearly the role the ANC conceives of itself playing. The ANC has had close political relations with HAMAS for some time.

The ANC signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with HAMAS in October 2015, vowing to support HAMAS’ war against Israel. During the trip by HAMAS officials to sign the MOU in South Africa, the ANC provided HAMAS’ then-leader Khaled Meshal with an official party podium to call for further stabbings and other terrorist attacks against Israelis.

In early December 2023, after the pogrom and HAMAS’ declarations that it would repeat the atrocity as soon as it was able to, the ANC welcomed another HAMAS delegation to South Africa, including HAMAS’ “official” representative in Iran, Khaled Qaddoumi. The HAMAS terrorists were taken to a ceremony for the anniversary of Nelson Mandela’s death, by his grandson Mandla Mandela, who declared the struggle to establish a Palestinian State—heavily implied to be in place of Israel, rather than alongside it—to be “the great moral issue of our time”.

It is not only with respect to HAMAS that the ANC has shown its view that “international law” is a weapon to be used against its enemies and an irrelevance with respect to its friends.

In July 2023, the ANC publicly stated it would not abide by the International Criminal Court (ICC) warrant issued for the arrest of Russian ruler Vladimir Putin relating to Putin’s role in the abduction of Ukrainian children and the attempt to have them raised as Russians. The ICC indicted Putin for a crime against humanity (forcible transfer), but it is arguably a breach of the Genocide Convention, which specifies that “forcibly transferring children of the group to another group” as part of an attempt “to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such”, is an act of genocide. The ideological purpose of the Russian war is to destroy Ukrainians as such, and the conduct of the Russian Army in Ukraine has reflected this.

The prima facie evidence of genocide by Russia does not interest the ANC. Indeed, where genocide can genuinely be argued to be in progress, the ANC generally looks favourably on the perpetrators. For example, the ANC has consistently supported Bashar al-Asad as he committed crimes against humanity on an industrial scale to put down the Syrian rebellion that broke out in 2011. Asad was supported by Russia and Iran, and the Russian veto on the U.N. Security Council protected Asad from any ICC meddling, not that the ANC would have changed its policy if the ICC had concerned itself with Syria.

In Sudan, the ICC did involve itself, indicting the ruler, Umar al-Bashir, for genocide in 2009. The ANC government joined the African Union in pledging not to enforce the ICC arrest warrant, and in 2015 made good on this promise by welcoming Al-Bashir onto South African territory. The only ANC reaction to the displacement of seven million people in Sudan in recent months, as the genocidaires from last time rampage across the country again, has been for President Cyril Ramaphosa to host the leader of the death squads in Pretoria.

The ANC also has no respect for the ICJ itself. The ICJ ruled in March 2022 that Russia must halt its attack on Ukraine. The ANC has made no effort to enforce this ruling. To the contrary, the ANC refuses even to rhetorically oppose the Russian occupation of large areas of Ukraine and has overtly tightened its relationship with Russia over the last few years, including by supplying weapons to the Russian war effort to eliminate Ukraine and holding joint naval exercises, which also included China, on the second anniversary of the invasion of Ukraine.

Some have found the ANC’s support for Putin’s Russia “puzzling”, and proposed various material explanations. This is creating a mystery where none exists. The ANC was an integral part of the Soviets’ global terrorist apparatus, which significantly relied on Palestinians, and the ANC has never departed from those ideological roots. Certain policy specifics of Communism might have been abandoned, but the central pillars of Soviet theology remain: the anti-Western orientation and the obsessive hostility to Jews. It must be amusing, if not infuriating, for the ANC gangsters to see themselves declared leaders of a Free World they have spent their lives warring against.

As a side-note, accepting the reality of what the ANC is—and a cursory look at the historical record—would put an end to the habit of writing about the ANC’s “issues” as a confusing detour after Nelson Mandela. In his last months as president, Mandela went to Moscow to praise the Soviet Union as an “inspiration” for all those wanting a “humane future”, and more truthfully to thank the Soviets for training the ANC’s terrorists, providing “a home away from home for many of us”, and being “the vanguard” of the ANC’s “struggle”. Mandela spoke about the Iranian regime and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini personally in similar terms. Mandela’s identification with the blood-soaked leader of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), Yasser Arafat, was total and unwavering right down to the end. Colonel Muammar al-Qaddafi—a collaborator with Khomeini and Arafat in the Iranian Revolution, and a close Soviet ally—was embraced by Mandela long after it could be rationalised as a tactical alliance, and the same was true of Mandela’s devotion to Fidel Castro, Robert Mugabe, and so many other anti-Western tyrants and movements.

The KGB ran more active measures against “Zionism” than any other enemy of the Revolution, with the sole exception of the Main Adversary (America). The antisemitism that took over the Centre was so extreme that even Leonid Brezhnev, well into his mental decline, lamented: “Zionism is making us stupid”. The centrepiece of the KGB’s “anti-Zionist” campaign was to portray Israel as a colonialist, racist, and apartheid State, and to make unfavourable comparisons between the Jewish State and the Nazis. This should sound familiar. Many Soviet disinformation campaigns have proven durable, such as the idea that the U.S. government created HIV/AIDS to exterminate black Americans, but perhaps none maintain so much purchase on world opinion at the present time as the “anti-Zionist” active measures.

Naturally, the Soviets were able to get assistance from the United Nations in embedding their lies about Israel in the global consciousness. Active measures cannot create political trends, only exploit those that already exist. It is not an accident, as the comrades used to say, that UNRWA, the U.N. agency dealing with the Palestinians, was involved in the 7 October massacre. The U.N.’s bitter hatred of Israel was perhaps most neatly encapsulated in the Security Council condemning Israel after it apprehended Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the Holocaust, in Argentina in 1960.

The peak of the Soviets’ success was getting the U.N. General Assembly to pass the “Zionism is racism” resolution in November 1975. Not coincidentally, this was during the tenure of U.N. Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim, a Nazi war criminal whose then-secret past was known to the Soviets and had been used to blackmail him into acting as their agent since at least the late 1960s. It remained the official institutional position of the U.N. for more than fifteen years that the Jewish national liberation movement was a form of racism. The resolution was only repealed in December 1991, two weeks before the Soviet Union collapsed. But the formal repeal of the resolution and the demise of the Soviet Empire did not undo the damage, as we can see.

The critics of the ANC and the ICJ, therefore, err when they detect hypocrisy in representatives of actors with true genocidal intent bringing charges of genocide against Israel, while Putin, Asad, and all these other actual war criminals remain untroubled by the institutions of “international law”: the targeting of Jews and the protection of anti-Western murderers is the central feature of the U.N. system. There is no “reform” or “solution” for this. All that can be done is to recognise it, and respond accordingly. As the U.S. and other allies of Israel look for ways to respond to the ICJ in the next few days, they should look back to the speech made by the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., Daniel Patrick Moynihan, after the “Zionism is racism” resolution passed. Moynihan told the General Assembly, “The United States of America … does not acknowledge, it will not abide by, [and] it will never acquiesce in this infamous act.”

The ANC case against Israel at the ICJ is a continuation of the political warfare the Soviets waged against Israel, hence the other old Soviet assets like Jeremy Corbyn attaching themselves to this sinister enterprise, which fuses the traditions of the Moscow Show Trials and the Dreyfus frame-up. The rapidity of the ICJ’s interim ruling, the choice to release it the day before International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and the way the “substantial part” requirement for a genocide finding has been reinterpreted, among other things, leave little doubt what the ICJ’s final ruling will be.

In times past, Jews were put through “trials” where the outcome was predetermined to answer fantastical charges of poisoning wells and hunting down Christian children to use their blood in Passover matzos. Now, in these much more progressive times, Jews who have suffered through an act of genocide have to stand in the dock and answer charges of genocide made by the killers’ allies.

Post has been updated