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The International Court of Justice Is Waging Lawfare on Israel

(Washington Post) Ruth Marcus - The International Court of Justice is neither behaving like a court nor dispensing justice. Rather, the ICJ is allowing itself to be used as a geopolitical weapon in the Israel-Gaza war. In January, the court found that South Africa had made a "plausible" claim that Israel was committing genocide in waging the war against Hamas in Gaza. The perversity of deploying this accusation against Israel is hard to grasp. Israel's legitimate intent, under international law, is to defend itself and destroy Hamas. A country with genocidal intent does not warn the civilian population it is supposedly seeking to destroy to leave an area it plans to bomb. It does not deliver incubators and baby formula to their hospitals. What's going on here isn't law; it's lawfare, an effort to hijack the mechanisms of international justice to political ends. Years from now, when the genocide claim is ultimately resolved, it's not likely Israel will be found to have committed this most terrible of crimes. But that's not the goal. The goal is to turn current public opinion even further against the Jewish state. Somehow Israel seems always to be held to a different, higher standard than other countries. The ICJ's ruling is the latest manifestation of this familiar double standard.
2024-04-04 00:00:00
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