WHERE IS JUSTICE?
Why are there reasons
to be suspicious of the impartiality and institutional commitment of international
judicial bodies in the case of the crimes that the state of Israel committed
and continues to commit against the Palestinian population?
By Sidney Hey
Justice has two ways of
intervening in criminal cases: ex officio or at the request of a party.
Although this would be the general principle in some judicial systems, when it
comes to the application of criminal law at the international level, things get
complicated. When a country has been invaded and the invader removes its
government, any crime perpetuated in the process will go unpunished.
As you can already
guess, this is related to the so-called international law that US officials are
trying to rename “a rules-based order”, which is nothing more than trying to
impose their own rules in this field.
There is no codex of
all international law and it would certainly be a bit difficult to compile,
although if the will were there, nothing is impossible. We have treaties,
protocols and conventions that we see how every day the great powers (which is not
the same as great countries) trample on with impunity.
But there has been
progress before the turn of the century. The Rome Statute of the International
Criminal Court of 1998[1],
on which the international body with its physical headquarters in the Netherlands
was built, deals with nothing less than the most serious crimes committed
against humanity, and seemed to be the beginning of an international justice
system that was impervious to political influences and the pressures of the
powerful states involved in the cases that were brought before it.
The situation of
Palestine and its people is perhaps the one that most awaited such a judicial
instance since, despite the media silence and the customary intoxication of the
Israeli occupation and its consequences for decades, there is still the
possibility of prosecuting not only the bestialities that have been committed
in these three months of intervention in Gaza, but also the countless war
crimes and crimes against humanity that Israel and its officials have had to
their credit for decades.
Following South
Africa's submission to the ICC denouncing crimes that fall within the scope of
the Rome Statute and the 1948 Genocide Convention, there has been an uproar in
Israeli circles and, of course, in Washington. On 11 January, at a hearing
before the Court, South Africa presented the case requesting urgent interim
measures (art. 41) that imply the immediate cessation of military action, based
on the sense of urgency due to the certain risk to the lives of civilians in
the Strip.
The submission also
alludes to the assertion of Principle IV of the Nuremberg Charter, which
basically entitles Israeli troops engaged in operations inside the Gaza Strip
not to be exempted from responsibility for crimes committed against the
civilian population on the grounds that they were carrying out superior orders.
Or more bluntly, that they are not obliged to carry out immoral orders and
leave the battlefield if pressed.
The danger to the
Palestinian population is certain and the evidence for this is overwhelming.
Israel has not only bombed flats and private homes, has demolished hospitals,
schools, mosques, churches, refugee camps where it murdered dozens of UNWRA aid
workers, doctors and some eighty Palestinian and other Arab journalists[2].
Such a monstrosity executed by some other underdeveloped state would have set
in motion all the levers in the UN and the ICC, supported, of course, by the
paid media, making a big melodrama out of it... But if the perpetrators are
Israel and the USA, nothing works?
The state of Israel
with a well documented colonial vocation is trying to make a people disappear
from the face of its territory and this implies the commission of the crime of
genocide that must be prevented in its continuation and therefore the request
for the application of provisional measures.
Despite the fact that
these legal measures are in force, there is no guarantee that Israel will
comply with them, and this leads us to ask ourselves: What kind of justice can
be expected then?
Reactions in Washington
soon followed. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, who staunchly supports Tel
Aviv by exposing - inappropriately his Jewishness-, called the lawsuit “unfounded
and irritating”, showing once again that Washington is not an impartial actor
in all this. How can it be when it provides arms and support on the ground for
these crimes to be committed? Of course, that did not stop the outrage of the
elite in Washington. The same outrage inflamed Israeli officials and their
Zionist supporters around the world.
Tel Aviv's rejection
and the disqualifications that followed were to be expected. As always,
victimhood is a substantial part of its tantrums and in that plan among its
arguments it accused South Africa of cooperating with Hamas making it clear to
all that this is as false as it is dirty since at the time of the 7 October
attack the South African government condemned the actions against Israeli
civilians.
As of today, Israel in
its veiled attempt to push the Palestinians to flee to Sinai and occupy the
Strip has so far killed more than 29,000 civilians (including thousands of
children) and maimed approximately 50,000 more. Certainly, in the absence of
resistance from Palestinian armed groups and the latent second front with
Lebanon, Israel would have swept through the strip without a word from the
United Nations, let alone the European Union.
But what really bothers
Israel is that South Africa could hinder its plans to drive the Palestinians
out of the strip for good and annex it in order to develop real estate (linked
to illegal settlements) and control the gas fields in Gaza's waters.
The judicial
presentation is sufficient in itself with the background and the abundant
documentary evidence that accompanies it, so that there is a solid case against
the state of Israel and its political and military leaders. However, in
reality, we know that this court was created at the behest of the EU and that
means, through a political decision in which pro-Israeli supporters are
intertwined. Added to this, the appointment of some of its members at the
behest of US officials such as Hillary Clinton (although they never say so)
conditions the functioning of a judicial body.
The precedents of
corruption in the ICC were seen with NATO's aggression against Libya and the
assassination of its president (which was managed by then Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton) in 2011 and in which the then Argentine prosecutor Moreno
Ocampo participated in a lamentable role to forget.
To this day, the ICC
authorities do not give much hope that they have overcome these drawbacks, let
alone have the will to prosecute Israeli crimes. Because there is evidence of
their lack of impartiality and even the closeness of ICC president Piotr
Hofmański to Benjamin Netanyahu, the mastermind and planner of the massacres in
Palestine, casts doubt on their impartiality.
[2] ISRAEL BOMBED AN AL JAZEERA
CAMERAMAN — AND BLOCKED EVACUATION EFFORTS AS HE BLED TO DEATH, https://theintercept.com/2024/01/12/al-jazeera-journalist-israel-gaza/
