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NZ legally obliged to step up and speak out after World Court ruling on Israel

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Why the ICJ did not order a ceasefire
As most international commentary has highlighted, even fixated on, the ICJ did not order a ceasefire as South Africa requested. But the fact that it didn’t is a manifestation of how constrained the court was. Image: South African legal team at The Hague/ APR/X

New Zealand’s commitment to the international rule of law means it must also go beyond the UN court’s genocide case findings on Gaza, writes the University of Auckland’s Treasa Dunworth.

ANALYSIS: By Treasa Dunworth

As Newsroom has reported, 15 aid agencies have joined forces to call on the Aotearoa New Zealand government to do more to encourage an immediate and sustainable ceasefire in Gaza, in the wake of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) decision.

Those 15 agencies are joining an international and increasingly loud chorus of calls for an immediate ceasefire.

I would go further, and remind the government that whatever it thinks of last month’s ICJ ruling, New Zealand has a number of international legal obligations to inform its response to Israel’s military attack on Gaza.

As most international commentary has highlighted, even fixated on, the ICJ did not order a ceasefire as South Africa requested. But the fact that it didn’t is a manifestation of how constrained the court was.

Despite its lofty title, the ICJ (sometimes referred to as the “World Court”) isn’t a “world” court in any meaningful sense of the word. It only has jurisdiction to consider issues in cases where countries have explicitly agreed to the court’s authority over them.

In this current litigation, the court was able to consider the case only on the basis that both South Africa and Israel are States Parties to the Genocide Convention. That meant South Africa had to frame its application through a “genocide lens”, and that the court had no power to go beyond the obligations arising out of that treaty. This jurisdictional conundrum partly explains why the court did not order a ceasefire — it didn’t have the authority to do so.

It also partly explains why the court could not order Hamas to release the remaining Israeli hostages. Hamas was not a party to the proceedings (the court can only hear proceedings on disputes between states), and despite the claim by Israel in its oral pleadings, the hostage taking by Hamas and their subsequent mistreatment and killing didn’t “plausibly”, according to the court, meet the threshold of genocide.

But the court did order Israel to take all measures in its power to prevent genocide, and ordered Israel to enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance to address the adverse conditions faced by Palestinians in Gaza.

Orders fall within ‘genocide jurisdiction’
These orders fall within the “genocide jurisdiction” because the treaty defines genocide as not only direct killing, but also “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”.

An immediate ceasefire would go a long way toward Israel complying with these orders so the calls for a ceasefire are well made, despite the court not having the power to order one.

What is New Zealand’s role in all this? What are the moral and legal responsibilities it has and should fulfil?

In its decision, the court (re)confirmed that all states parties to the Genocide Convention have a “common interest” in ensuring the prevention, suppression, and punishment of genocide. That includes New Zealand, which has a legal obligation to do what it can to ensure that Israel complies with the court’s orders.

This is not a question of New Zealand’s choice of foreign policy, but a legal obligation.

The second relevant international obligation for New Zealand arises from international humanitarian law (IHL) — the body of law which governs the conduct of war, and which includes prohibitions against the direct targeting of civilians, causing superfluous injury and unnecessary suffering, the taking of hostages, the use of “human shields” and engaging in indiscriminate attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure.

These rules don’t just apply to the parties directly involved in any given conflict — in this instance, Israel and Hamas. The relevant treaties stipulate all states have a shared responsibility “to ensure respect” for these rules. That responsibility exists independently of the lack of ICJ jurisdiction to consider these matters.

Must act in good faith
There is a third legal obligation for New Zealand in the wake of these orders.  Although decisions of the court are only binding as between the parties to a case (here South Africa and Israel), as a member of the United Nations, New Zealand has a legal obligation to act in good faith towards the court, being one of the organs of the UN and its principal legal body.

This obligation aligns with New Zealand’s self-professed commitment to the international rule of law.

Thus, regardless of political preferences and whether the current government agrees or disagrees with the court’s findings, the findings have been made and New Zealand ought not undermine the court or the international rule of law.

Governments of all political persuasions repeatedly pronounce that a small nation such as ours depends on the international rule of law and a rules-based international order.

Now is the time for New Zealand to step up and defend that order, even if it feels uncomfortable, even if it annoys some of our “friends” (such as the US). We are legally obliged to step up and speak out.

Dr Treasa Dunworth is an associate professor, Faculty of Law, at the University of Auckland. First published by Newsroom and republished by Asia Pacific Report with the author’s permission.

In waging war on the UN refugee agency, the West is openly siding with Israeli genocide

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Palestinian students rally in front of the Gaza City headquarters
Palestinian students rally in front of the Gaza City headquarters of UNRWA in 2019 against attempts led by Israel to block its funding. Image: Ashraf Amra APA

Israel has long plotted the downfall of UNRWA, aware that it is one of the biggest obstacles to eradicating the Palestinians as a people.

ANALYSIS: By Jonathan Cook

There is an important background to the decision by the United States and other leading Western states, the UK among them, to freeze funding to the United Nations’ Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the main channel by which the UN disseminates food and welfare services to the most desperate and destitute Palestinians.

The funding cut — which has been also adopted by Germany, France, Japan, Switzerland, Canada, Netherlands, Italy, Australia and Finland — was imposed even though the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled on Friday that Israel may be committing genocide in Gaza.

The World Court judges quoted at length UN officials who warned that Israel’s actions had left almost all of the enclave’s 2.3 million inhabitants on the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe, including famine.

The West’s flimsy pretext for what amounts to a war on UNRWA is that Israel claims 12 local UN staff — out of 13,000 — are implicated in Hamas’ break-out from the open-air prison of Gaza on October 7. The sole evidence appears to be coerced confessions, likely extracted through torture, from Palestinian fighters captured by Israel that day.

The UN immediately sacked all the accused staff, seemingly without due process. We can assume that was because the refugee agency was afraid its already threadbare lifeline to the people of Gaza, as well as millions of other Palestinian refugees across the region — in the West Bank, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria — would be further threatened.

It need not have worried. Western donor states cut their funding anyway, plunging Gaza deeper into calamity.

They did so without regard to the fact their decision amounts to collective punishment: some 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza face starvation and the spread of lethal disease, while another 4 million Palestinian refugees across the region are at imminent risk of losing food, health care and schooling.

Direct and active participation in genocide
According to law professor Dr Francis Boyle, who filed a genocide case for Bosnia at the World Court some two decades ago, that shifts most of these Western states from their existing complicity with Israel’s genocide (by selling arms and providing aid and diplomatic cover) into direct and active participation in the genocide, by violating the 1948 Genocide Convention’s prohibition on “deliberately inflicting on the group [in this case, Palestinians] conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”

The World Court is investigating Israel for genocide. But it could easily widen its investigation to include Western states. The threat to UNRWA needs to be seen in that light.

Not only is Israel thumbing its nose at the World Court and international law, but states like the US and UK are doing so too, by cutting their funding to the refugee agency. They are slapping the court in the face, and indicating that they are four-square behind Israel’s crimes, even if they are shown to be genocidal in nature.

The following is the proper context for understanding what is really going on with this latest attack on UNRWA:

1. The agency was created in 1949 — decades before Israel’s current military slaughter in Gaza — to provide for the basic needs of Palestinian refugees, including essential food provision, health care and education. It has an outsize role in Gaza because most of the Palestinians living there lost, or are descended from families that lost, everything in 1948.

That was when they were ethnically cleansed by the fledgling Israeli military from most of Palestine, in an event known to Palestinians as the Nakba, or “Catastrophe”. Their lands were turned into what Israel’s leaders described as an exclusively “Jewish state”. The Israeli army set about destroying the Palestinians’ towns and villages inside this new state so that they could never return.

Genocides don’t just emerge out of thin air. They happen after long periods in which the oppressor group dehumanises another group, incites against it and abuses it. Image:UNRWA

Insisted on division
2. UNRWA is separate from the UN’s main refugee agency, the UNHCR, and deals only with Palestinian refugees. Although Israel does not want you to know it, the reason for there being two UN refugee agencies is because Israel and its Western backers insisted on the division back in 1948.

Why? Because Israel was afraid of the Palestinians falling under the responsibility of the UNHCR’s forerunner, the International Refugee Organisation. The IRO was established in the immediate wake of the Second World War in large part to cope with the millions of European Jews fleeing Nazi atrocities.

Israel did not want the two cases treated as comparable, because it was pushing hard for Jewish refugees to be settled on lands from which it had just expelled Palestinians. Part of the IRO’s mission was to seek the repatriation of European Jews. Israel was worried that very principle might be used both to deny it the Jews it wanted to colonise Palestinian land and to force it to allow the Palestinian refugees to return to their former homes.

So in a real sense, UNRWA is Israel’s creature: it was set up to keep the Palestinians a case apart, an anomaly.

3. Nonetheless, things did not go exactly to plan for Israel. Given its refusal to allow the refugees to return, and the reluctance of neighbouring Arab states to be complict in Israel’s original act of ethnic cleansing, the Palestinian population in UNRWA’s refugee camps ballooned. They became an especial problem in Gaza, where about two-thirds of the population are refugees or descended from refugees. The tiny coastal enclave did not have the land or resources to cope with the rapidly expanding numbers there.

The fear in Israel was that, as the plight of the Palestinians of Gaza became more desperate, the international community would pressure Israel into a peace agreement, allowing for the refugees’ return to their former homes.

That had to be stopped at all costs. In the early 1990s, as the supposed Oslo “peace process” was being unveiled, Israel began penning the Palestinians of Gaza inside a steel cage, surrounded by gun towers. Some 17 years ago, Israel added a blockade that prevented the population’s movement in and out of Gaza, including via the strip’s coastal waters and its skies.

Prisoners in giant concentration camp
The Palestinians became prisoners in a giant concentration camp, denied the most basic links to the outside world. Israel alone decided what was allowed in and out. An Israeli court later learnt that from 2008 onwards the Israeli military put Gaza on what amounted to a starvation diet by restricting food supplies.

There was a strategy here that involved making Gaza uninhabitable, something the UN started warning about in 2015. Israel’s game plan appears to have gone something like this:

By making Palestinians in Gaza ever more desperate, it was certain that militant groups like Hamas willing to fight to liberate the enclave would gain in popularity. In turn, that would provide Israel with the excuse both to further tighten restrictions on Gaza to deal with a “terrorism threat”, and to intermittently wreck Gaza in “retaliation” for those attacks — or what Israeli military commanders variously called “mowing the grass” and “returning Gaza to the Stone Age”.

The assumption was that Gaza’s militant groups would exhaust their energies managing the constant “humanitarian crises” Israel had engineered.

At the same time, Israel could promote twin narratives. It could say publicly that it was impossible for it to take responsibility for the people of Gaza, given that they were so clearly invested both in Jew hatred and terrorism. Meanwhile, it would privately tell the international community that, given how uninhabitable Gaza was becoming, they urgently needed to find a solution that did not involve Israel. The hope was that Washington would be able to arm-twist or bribe neighbouring Egypt into taking most of Gaza’s destitute population.

4. On October 7, Hamas and other militant groups achieved what Israel had assumed was impossible. They broke out of their concentration camp. The Israeli leadership’s shock is not just over the bloody nature of the break-out. It is that on that day Hamas smashed Israel’s entire security concept — one designed to keep the Palestinians crushed, and Arab states and the region’s other resistance groups hopeless.

Last week, in a knockout blow, the World Court agreed to put Israel on trial for genocide in Gaza, collapsing the moral case for an exclusive Jewish state built on the ruins of the Palestinians’ homeland.

The judges’ near-unanimous conclusion that South Africa has made a plausible case for Israel committing genocide should force a reassessment of everything that went before.

Genocides don’t just emerge out of thin air. They happen after long periods in which the oppressor group dehumanises another group, incites against it and abuses it. The World Court has implicitly conceded that the Palestinians were right when they insisted that the Nakba — Israel’s mass dispossession and ethnic cleansing operation of 1948 — never ended. It just took on different forms. Israel became better at concealing those crimes, until the mask was ripped off after the October 7 break-out.

UN refugee agency a thorn in Israel’s side
5. Israel’s efforts to get rid of UNRWA are not new. They date back many years. For a number of reasons, the UN refugee agency is a thorn in Israel’s side — and all the more so in Gaza. Not least, it has provided a lifeline to Palestinians there, keeping them fed and cared for, and providing jobs to many thousands of local people in a place where unemployment rates are among the highest in the world.

It has invested in infrastructure like hospitals and schools that make life in Gaza more bearable, when Israel’s goal has long been to make the enclave uninhabitable. UNRWA’s well-run schools, staffed by local Palestinians, teach the children their own history, about where their grandparents once lived, and of Israel’s campaign of dispossession and ethnic cleansing against them.

That runs directly counter to the infamous Zionist slogan about the Palestinians’ identity-less future: “The old will die and the young forget.”

But UNRWA’s role is bigger than that. Uniquely, it is the sole agency unifying Palestinians wherever they live, even when they are separated by national borders and Israel’s fragmentation of the territory it controls. UNRWA brings Palestinians together even when their own political leaders have been manipulated into endless factionalism by Israel’s divide and rule policies: Hamas is nominally in charge in Gaza, while Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah pretends to run the West Bank.

In addition, UNRWA keeps alive the moral case for a Palestinian right of return — a principle recognised in international law but long ago abandoned by Western states.

Even before October 7, UNRWA had become an obstacle that needed removing if Israel was ever to ethnically cleanse Gaza. That is why Israel has repeatedly lobbied to stop the biggest donors, especially the US, funding UNRWA.

Back in 2018, for example, the refugee agency was plunged into an existential crisis when President Donald Trump acquiesced to Israeli pressure and cut all its funding. Even after the decision was reversed, the agency has been limping along financially.

Full attack mode
6. Now Israel is in full attack mode against the World Court, and has even more to gain from destroying UNRWA than it did before. The freeze in funding, and the further weakening of the refugee agency, will undermine the support structures for Palestinians generally.

But in Gaza’s case, the move will specifically accelerate famine and disease, making the enclave uninhabitable faster.

But it will do more. It will also serve as a stick with which to beat the World Court as Israel tries to fight off the genocide investigation. Israel’s barely veiled claim is that 15 of the International Court of Justice’s 17 judges fell for South Africa’s supposedly antisemitic argument that Israel is committing genocide.

The court quoted extensively from UN officials, including the head of UNRWA, that Israel was actively engineering an unprecedented humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Now, as former UK ambassador Craig Murray notes, the coerced confessions against 12 UNRWA staff serve to “provide a propaganda counter-narrative to the ICJ judgment, and to reduce the credibility of UNRWA’s evidence before the court”.

Extraordinarily, the Western media have done Israel’s PR work for it, happily focusing more attention on Israel’s claims about a handful of UNRWA staff than it has on the World Court’s decision to put Israel on trial for genocide.

Equally a boon to Israel is the fact that leading Western states have so quickly pinned their colours to the mast. The funding freeze cements their fates to Israel’s. It sends a message that they will stand with Israel against the World Court, whatever it decides.

Their war on UNRWA is intended as an act of collective intimidation directed towards the court. It is a sign that the West refuses to accept that international law applies to it, or its client state. It is a reminder that Western states refuse any restraint on their freedom of action — and that it is Israel and its sponsors who are the true rogue states.

Jonathan Cook is a writer, journalist and self-appointed media critic. Winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism.

Caitlin Johnstone: Everything Israel wants to destroy is Hamas

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The United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA)
The United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) . . . "Cutting off aid to the most aid-dependent population on earth would be a psychopathically monstrous act all by itself . . . " Image: Caitlin Johnstone

COMMENTARY: By Caitlin Johnstone

UNRWA is Hamas. The hospitals are Hamas. The ambulances are Hamas. The journalists are Hamas. The schools are Hamas. South Africa is Hamas. People tweeting unfavorable things about Israel are Hamas. Basically everyone Israel and its supporters want killed is Hamas.

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Defunding UNRWA over a handful of alleged Hamas members who don’t even work there anymore makes no sense from a humanitarian perspective or a military perspective, but it makes a ton of sense from a genocidal perspective.

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Cutting off aid to the most aid-dependent population on earth would be a psychopathically monstrous act all by itself, even without having caused their extreme needfulness in the first place by backing a genocidal bombing campaign on a giant concentration camp full of children.

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The Pentagon has admitted that it has no evidence that Iran was behind the attack on a US base on the Jordan-Syria border which killed three American troops. The one and only reason the US government and its stenographers in the western press mentioned the word “Iran” a zillion times after that attack was to administer propaganda to manufacture public hostility toward a government long targeted for regime change by the US empire.

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Don’t talk to me about October 7. Don’t talk to me about hostages. I don’t care. I haven’t cared for months. Many, many times more Gazans are dying and suffering than the number of Israelis who died and are suffering. That means the death and suffering of Palestinians is much more urgent and matters much more than the death and suffering of Israelis. The only way to disagree with this is to believe Israeli lives are worth much, much more than Palestinian lives.

The longer the mass atrocity in Gaza goes on for the less tragic and worthy of sympathy October 7 becomes. It’s already been diminished to a fraction of the significance it once had, and it’s getting smaller and smaller as this nightmare stretches on. This is not the fault of people like me, it is the fault of the people conducting this genocide. You don’t get to murder tens of thousands of people and then demand everyone weep over you losing a thousand. That’s not a thing.

It’s so obnoxious how Israel supporters keep acting like actions a tiny fraction as impactful as what’s been happening in Gaza are where all our sympathy and attention should still be going, nearly four months after the fact. Idiotic bullshit.

All of Israel’s actions since October 7 have revealed why Hamas did what it did on October 7. This is the kind of murderousness and depravity Palestinians have been living under from the Nakba on. Israel is so murderous and depraved that one of the most common talking points of its apologists when responding to opposition to the atrocities in Gaza has been “Yeah, what did Hamas expect would happen?” That’s not a sane or acceptable way for human beings to talk about acts of genocide and the butchery of thousands of children, but Israel apologists think it’s normal. Because that’s what Israel is.

In the eyes of the world, Israel has retroactively legitimized the acts of violence the Palestinian resistance has been inflicting upon it. It has legitimised those acts by showing the world its true face.

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You should never feel any sympathy for Israel, because Israel uses sympathy as a weapon. It uses weaponised sympathy to justify mass atrocities and endless abuses. When somebody’s using a weapon to hurt people, you take their weapon away. Stop giving Israel weapons. ANY weapons.

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Biden supporters literally believe the January 6 riot was worse than what their guy is doing in Gaza. They actually, truly, sincerely believe that. That’s how stupid and crazy party politics makes you.

Biden is doing all the very worst things Democrats claimed Trump would do if re-elected. If it had come out in 2020 that Trump was plotting a genocide and ethnic cleansing campaign in which his victims would be cut off from humanitarian aid, the shrieking from Democrats would have broken glass.

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It’s good to block virulent Israel supporters on social media, not so much because they’re bad people (though they are) but because they’re literally trolling for engagement with an acute awareness that time you spend arguing with them is time you’re not spending harming Israel’s image.

Like the astroturf NAFO op, Israel apologists are not merely reacting to posts they disagree with, they’re engaging in a conscious effort to protect the information interests of their prefered power structure and have a fleshed-out system and a working theory for doing so. They know that draining your time by dragging you into pointless debates and draining your emotional energy by saying things that upset you keeps you from spending your time and energy harming the information interests of their favorite ethnostate.

Caitlin Johnstone is an independent Australian journalist and poet. Her articles include The UN Torture Report On Assange Is An Indictment Of Our Entire Society. She publishes a website and Caitlin’s Newsletter. This article is republished from Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix with permission.

It may be genocide against Gaza, but it won’t be stopped

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South African International Relations Minister Dr Naledi Pandor
South African International Relations Minister Dr Naledi Pandor . . . “How do you provide aid and water without a ceasefire?” Image: AJ screenshot APR

ANALYSIS: By Chris Hedges

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) refused to implement the most crucial demand made by South African jurists: “The State of Israel shall immediately suspend its military operations in and against Gaza.”

But at the same time, it delivered a devastating blow to the foundational myth of Israel. Israel, which paints itself as eternally persecuted, has been credibly accused of committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.

Palestinians are the victims, not the perpetrators, of the “crime of crimes”.

A people, once in need of protection from genocide, are now potentially committing it. The court’s ruling questions the very raison d’être of the “Jewish State” and challenges the impunity Israel has enjoyed since its founding 75 years ago.

The ICJ ordered Israel to take six provisional measures to prevent acts of genocide, measures that will be very difficult if not impossible to fulfill if Israel continues its saturation bombing of Gaza and wholesale targeting of vital infrastructure.

The court called on Israel “to prevent and punish the direct and public incitement to commit genocide.” It demanded Israel “take immediate and effective measures to enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance”.

It ordered Israel to protect Palestinian civilians. It called on Israel to protect the some 50,000 women giving birth in Gaza. It ordered Israel to take “effective measures to prevent the destruction and ensure the preservation of evidence related to allegations of acts within the scope of Article II and Article III of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide against members of the Palestinian group in the Gaza Strip”.

Prevent crimes
The court ordered Israel to “take all measures within its power” to prevent the crimes which amount to genocide such as “killing, causing serious bodily and mental harm, inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part, and imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.”

Israel was ordered to report back in one month to explain what it had done to implement the provisional measures.

Gaza was pounded with bombs, missiles and artillery shells as the ruling was read in The Hague — at least 183 Palestinians have been killed in the last 24 hours. Since October 7, more than 26,000 Palestinians have been killed. Almost 65,000 have been wounded, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health. Thousands more are missing.

The carnage continues. This is the cold reality.

Translated into the vernacular, the court is saying Israel must feed and provide medical care for the victims, cease public statements advocating genocide, preserve evidence of genocide and stop killing Palestinian civilians. Come back and report in a month.

It is hard to see how these provisional measures can be achieved if the carnage in Gaza continues.

“Without a ceasefire, the order doesn’t actually work,” Dr Naledi Pandor, South Africa’s Minister of International Relations, stated bluntly after the ruling.

Thousands will die
Time is not on the side of the Palestinians. Thousands of Palestinians will die within a month. Palestinians in Gaza make up 80 percent of all the people facing famine or catastrophic hunger worldwide, according to the United Nations.

The entire population of Gaza by early February is projected to lack sufficient food, with half a million people suffering from starvation, according to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, drawing on data from UN agencies and NGOs. The famine is engineered by Israel.

At best, the court — while it will not rule for a few years on whether Israel is committing genocide — has given legal licence to use the word “genocide” to describe what Israel is doing in Gaza. This is very significant, but it is not enough, given the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza.

Israel has dropped almost 30,000 bombs and shells on Gaza — eight times more bombs than the US dropped on Iraq during six years of war. It has used hundreds of 900kg bombs to obliterate densely populated areas, including refugee camps.

These “bunker buster” bombs have a kill radius of 300m. The Israeli aerial assault is unlike anything seen since Vietnam. Gaza, only 33km long and 8km wide, is rapidly becoming, by design, uninhabitable.

Israel will no doubt continue its assault arguing that it is not in violation of the court’s directives. In addition, the Biden administration will undoubtedly veto the resolution at the Security Council demanding Israel implement the provisional measures. The General Assembly, if the Security Council does not endorse the measures, can vote again calling for a ceasefire, but has no power to enforce it.

Defence for Children International — Palestine v Biden was filed in November by the Center for Constitutional Rights against President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin. The case challenges the US government’s failure to prevent complicity in Israel’s unfolding genocide of the Palestinian people. It asks the court to order the Biden administration to cease diplomatic and military support and comply with its legal obligations under international and federal law.

Only active resistance
The only active resistance to halt the Gaza genocide is provided by Yemen’s Red Sea blockade. Yemen, which was under siege for eight years by Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, France, Britain and the US, experienced more than 400,000 deaths from starvation, lack of health care, infectious diseases and the deliberate bombing of schools, hospitals, infrastructure, residential areas, markets, funerals and weddings.

Yemenis know too well — since at least 2017 multiple UN agencies have described Yemen as experiencing “the largest humanitarian crisis in the world” — what the Palestinians are enduring.

Yemen’s resistance — when the history of this genocide is written — will set it apart from nearly every other nation. The rest of the world, including the Arab world, retreats into toothless rhetorical condemnations or actively supports Israel’s obliteration of Gaza and its 2.3 million inhabitants.

The Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth reported that the US has sent 230 cargo planes and 20 ships filled with artillery shells, armoured vehicles and combat equipment to Israel since the attacks of October 7, in which some 1139 Israelis were killed. US weapons and military equipment are being shipped to Israel — which is running out of munitions — from the British base RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus, according to the UK investigative website Declassified UK.

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that more than 40 US and 20 British transport aircraft, along with seven heavy-lift helicopters, have flown into RAF Akrotiri, a 40-minute flight from Tel Aviv. Germany reportedly plans to provide 10,000 rounds of 120mm precision ammunition to Israel.

If the court rules against Israel, these countries will be recognised by the world’s most important international court as accomplices to genocide.

The ruling was dismissed by Israeli leaders.

‘Outrageous’ says Netanyahu
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, seeking to paint the decision not to demand a ceasefire as a victory for Israel, said: “Like every country, Israel has an inherent right to defend itself. The vile attempt to deny Israel this fundamental right is blatant discrimination against the Jewish state, and it was justly rejected. The charge of genocide leveled against Israel is not only false, it’s outrageous, and decent people everywhere should reject it.”

National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir said: “The decision of the antisemitic court in The Hague proves what was already known: This court does not seek justice, but rather the persecution of Jewish people. They were silent during the Holocaust and today they continue the hypocrisy and take it another step further.”

The ICJ was founded in 1945 following the Nazi Holocaust. The first case it heard was submitted to the court in 1947.

“Decisions that endanger the continued existence of the State of Israel must not be listened to,” Ben-Gvir added. “We must continue defeating the enemy until complete victory.”

The court, which rejected Israel’s arguments to dismiss the case, acknowledged “that the military operation being conducted by Israel following the attack of 7 October 2023 has resulted, inter alia, in tens of thousands of deaths and injuries and the destruction of homes, schools, medical facilities and other vital infrastructure, as well as displacement on a massive scale.”

The ruling included a statement made by the UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, Martin Griffiths, who on January 5, called Gaza “a place of death and despair.” The court document went on:

. . . Families are sleeping in the open as temperatures plummet. Areas where civilians were told to relocate for their safety have come under bombardment. Medical facilities are under relentless attack. The few hospitals that are partially functional are overwhelmed with trauma cases, critically short of all supplies, and inundated by desperate people seeking safety.

A public health disaster is unfolding. Infectious diseases are spreading in overcrowded shelters as sewers spill over. Some 180 Palestinian women are giving birth daily amidst this chaos. People are facing the highest levels of food insecurity ever recorded. Famine is around the corner.

For children in particular, the past 12 weeks have been traumatic: No food. No water. No school. Nothing but the terrifying sounds of war, day in and day out.

Gaza has simply become uninhabitable. Its people are witnessing daily threats to their very existence — while the world watches on.

The court acknowledged that “an unprecedented 93 percent of the population in Gaza is facing crisis levels of hunger, with insufficient food and high levels of malnutrition. At least 1 in 4 households are facing ‘catastrophic conditions’: experiencing an extreme lack of food and starvation and having resorted to selling off their possessions and other extreme measures to afford a simple meal. Starvation, destitution and death are evident.”

The ruling, quoting Philippe Lazzarini, the Commissioner-General of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), continued:

Overcrowded and unsanitary UNRWA shelters have now become ‘home’ to more than 1.4 million people,” the ruling read. “They lack everything, from food to hygiene to privacy. People live in inhumane conditions, where diseases are spreading, including among children. They live through the unlivable, with the clock ticking fast towards famine.

The plight of children in Gaza is especially heartbreaking. An entire generation of children is traumatized and will take years to heal. Thousands have been killed, maimed, and orphaned. Hundreds of thousands are deprived of education. Their future is in jeopardy, with far-reaching and long-lasting consequences.

The court also referred pointedly to comments made by multiple senior Israeli government officials advocating genocide, including the president and minister of defence. Statements made by government and other officials form a crucial element of the “intent” component when seeking to establish the crime of genocide.

It quoted Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant who declared — two days after the Hamas-led attack of October 7 — that he ordered a “complete siege” of Gaza City with “no electricity, no food, no fuel” being permitted.

“I have released all restraints . . . You saw what we are fighting against. We are fighting human animals. This is the ISIS of Gaza,” Gallant told Israeli troops massing around Gaza the following day.

“This is what we are fighting against . . . Gaza won’t return to what it was before. There will be no Hamas. We will eliminate everything. If it doesn’t take one day, it will take a week, it will take weeks or even months, we will reach all places.”

The ICJ quoted Israel’s President Isaac Herzog as saying: “It is not true this rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved. It is absolutely not true. They could have risen up. They could have fought against that evil regime which took over Gaza in a coup d’état. But we are at war. We are at war. We are defending our homes.”

Herzog continued: “We are protecting our homes. That’s the truth. And when a nation protects its home, it fights. And we will fight until we’ll break their backbone.”

The decision was read out by the ICJ’s current president, Judge Joan Donoghue, an American lawyer who used to work at the US State Department and the Department of the Treasury before she joined the World Court in 2010.

South African genocide claims ‘plausible’
“In the Court’s view, the facts and circumstances mentioned above are sufficient to conclude that at least some of the rights claimed by South Africa and for which it is seeking protection are plausible,” it read.

“This is the case with respect to the right of the Palestinians in Gaza to be protected from acts of genocide and related prohibited acts identified in Article III, and the right of South Africa to seek Israel’s compliance with the latter’s obligations under the Convention.”

It is clear from the ruling that the court is fully aware of the magnitude of Israel’s crimes. This makes the decision not to call for the immediate suspension of Israeli military activity in and against Gaza all the more distressing.

But the court did deliver a devastating blow to the mystique Israel has used since its founding to carry out its settler colonial project against the indigenous inhabitants of historic Palestine. It made the word genocide, when applied to Israel, credible.

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning author and journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times. This article was first published on his Substack page.

Defunding UNRWA will cause Gazans ‘more misery and suffering’, warns former PM Clark

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Cafe Pacific Publisher
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UNRWA under attack
UNRWA under attack . . . Palestinian relief workers on the job in Gaza. Image: AJ screenshot APR

Asia Pacific Report

Former New Zealand prime minister Helen Clark, who led the UN Development Programme which oversees UNRWA, told RNZ Morning Report today it was the biggest platform for getting humanitarian aid into Gaza for a population that is 85 percent displaced.

People are on the verge on starvation and going without medical supplies, she says.

“If you’re going to defund and destroy this platform, then the misery and suffering of the people under bombardment can only increase and you can only have more deaths.”

Former NZ prime minister Helen Clark
Former NZ prime minister Helen Clark tells Morning Report why humanitarian funding should continue. Image: RNZ screenshot

Clark said it was “most regrettable that countries have acted in this precipitous way to defund the organisation on the basis of allegations”.

Al Jazeera reports that top Palestinian officials and Hamas have criticised the decision by nearly a dozen Western countries led by the US to suspend funding (totalling more than US$667 million) for UNRWA — the UN relief agency for Palestinians — and called for an immediate reversal of the move, which entails “great” risk.

Ireland, Norway, Spain, the European Union and others (with funding totalling more than $497 million) have confirmed continued support for UNRWA, saying the agency does crucial work to help Palestinians displaced and in desperate need of assistance in Gaza.

The Norwegian aid agency said the people of Gaza would “starve in the streets” without UNRWA humanitarian assistance.

Hamas’ media office said in a post on Telegram: “We ask the UN and the international organisations to not cave into the threats and blackmail” from Israel.

Defunding ‘not right decision’
Former PM Clark did not deny the allegations made were serious, but said defunding the agency without knowing the outcome of the investigation was not the right decision, RNZ reports.

“I led an organisation that had tens of thousands of people on contracts at any one time. Could I say, hand on heart, people never did anything wrong? No I couldn’t. But what I could say was that any allegations would be fully investigated and results made publicly known,” she said.


UNRWA funding cuts — why Israel is trying to destroy the UN Palestinian aid agency.  Video: Al Jazeera

“That’s exactly what the head of UNRWA has said, it’s what the Secretary-General’s saying, that process is underway, but this is not a time to be just cutting off the funding because a small minority of UNRWA staff face allegations.”

Luxon suggested Clark’s plea would not affect New Zealand’s response.

“I appreciate that, but we’re the government, and they’re serious allegations, they need to be understood and investigated and when the foreign minister [Winston Peters] says that he’s done that and he’s happy for us to contribute and continue to contribute, we’ll do that.”

He compared the funding of about $1 million each year (in June) with the $10 million in humanitarian assistance provided by the government for the relief effort — “and we’ve split that money between the International Red Cross and also the World Food Programme”.

Clark said people could starve to death or die because they did not receive the medication they needed in the meantime.


If major donor countries like the United States and Germany continued to withhold funding, UNRWA would go down and there was no alternative, she said.

Clark did not believe there was any coincidence in the allegations being made known at the same time as the International Court of Justice’s ruling on the situation in Gaza.

According to the BBC, the court ordered Israel to do everything in its power to refrain from killing and injuring Palestinians and do more to “prevent and punish” public incitement to genocide. Tel Aviv must report back to the court on its actions within a month.

Clark said the timing of the UNRWA allegations was an attempt to deflect the significant rulings made of the court and dismiss them.

“I think it’s fairly obvious what was happening.”

Israel had provided the agency with information alleging a dozen staff were involved in the October 7 attack by Hamas fighters in southern Israel, which left about 1139 dead and about 250 taken as hostages.

More than 26,000 people — mostly women and children — have been killed in Gaza since Israel launched a major military operation in response, according to the enclave’s Health Ministry.

Israel military have killed 152 UNRWA aid workers since the onslaught on Gaza began.

UNRWA was founded in the wake of the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 to provide hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees who were forcibly displaced with education, healthcare, social services and jobs. It started operations in 1950.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

The major donors that have paused funding for UNRWA
The major donors that have paused funding for the UNRWA after unproven Israeli allegations. Graphic: Al Jazeera/CC

‘Ceasefire now’ protesters march on NZ naval base, demand Luxon upholds Israel genocide court order

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David Robie
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New Zealand protesters supporting Palestine today marched on Auckland's Devonport Naval Base
New Zealand protesters supporting Palestine today marched on Auckland's Devonport Naval Base to deliver a "ceasefire now" and "hands off Yemen" message to the coalition government. Image: David Robie/Asia Pacific Report

By David Robie, editor of Asia Pacific Report

About 200 protesters marched through the heart of Auckland’s tourist suburb of Devonport today to the Royal New Zealand Navy base, accusing the government of backing genocide in the Middle East.

Demanding a “ceasefire now” in Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza that has killed almost 27,000 Palestinians — mostly women and children — so far, the peaceful protesters called on the New Zealand government to scrap its support for the US-led Red Sea maritime security operation against Yemen’s Houthis.

Speakers contrasted New Zealand’s “proud independent foreign policy” and nuclear-free years under former Labour prime ministers Norman Kirk and David Lange with the “gutless” approach of current Prime Minister Christopher Luxon.

Among many placards condemning the New Zealand government’s stance, one read: “We need a leader not a follower — grow some balls Luxon”. Others declared “It is shameful for NZ troops to aid genocide”, “Hands off Yemen” and “Blood on your hands”.

Led by the foreign affairs activist group Te Kūaka, Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) and Palestinian Youth Aotearoa (PYA), the march was organised in reaction to Luxon’s announcement last week that New Zealand would deploy six NZ Defence Force officers to the Middle East in support of the US-led attacks on Yemen.

“We are appalled our government is dragging New Zealand into a new war in the Middle East instead of supporting diplomatic efforts to achieve a ceasefire in Gaza,” Te Kūaka spokesperson Dr Arama Rata said.

Police guard at the entrance to Auckland's Devonport Naval Base
Police guard the entrance to Auckland’s Devonport Naval Base today. Image: David Robie/APR

‘Unpopular, dangerous move’
“This is an unpopular, undemocratic, and dangerous move, taken without a parliamentary mandate, or authorisation from the United Nations Security Council, which could further inflame regional tensions.”

PSNA secretary Neil Scott branded the New Zealand stance as preferring “trade over humanity!”

A child carrying a placard protesting
A child carrying a “blood on your hands” placard today protesting over the childrens’ deaths in the Gaza Strip. Image: David Robie/APR

He said that in South Africa’s case before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) the ruling indicated “plausible genocide” by Israel in its war on Gaza and that state was now on trial with an order to comply with six emergency measures and report back to The Hague within one month.

“This is something that has been obvious to all of us for months based on Israel’s actions on the ground in Gaza and Israeli politicians’ stated intent,” Scott said.

“Yet [our] government refuses to call for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire. It refuses to take any action to oppose that genocide.”

Referring to the Houthis (as Ansarallah are known in the West) and their blockade of the Red Sea, Scott said: “Ships and containers heading to Israel — no other ships to be impacted.

“They [Houthis] state that they are carrying out an obligation to oppose genocide under Article 1 of the Genocide Convention. They will end their blockade when Israel ends the genocide.

The lines are drawn at Devonport
The lines are drawn . . . the “ceasefire now” and “hands off Yemen” protest at Devonport Naval Base today. Image: David Robie/APR

‘Oppose Israeli genocide’
“This is something every country in the world is meant to do. Oppose Israeli genocide — that includes Aotearoa.

“So what does Prime Minister Luxon, Minister of Foreign Affairs [Winston] Peters and Minister of Defence [Judith] Collins do? They decide to send our sailors to the Red Sea to defend ships — getting our Navy to be complicit in defending Israeli genocide.”

His comments were greeted with loud cries of “Shame”.

Scott declared that the protesters were calling on the government to “acknowledge New Zealand’s obligations” under Article 1 of the Genocide Convention; expel the Israeli ambassador until the genocide ends, and to “immediately rescind the order to send our sailors” to join the US forces “defending Israeli genocide”.

The protesters also called on New Zealand’s Defence Force chief Air Marshal Kevin Short and Navy chief Rear Admiral David Proctor to stand by the legal obligations of the Genocide Convention to oppose Israeli genocide.

Pointing to the HMNZS Philomel base as Navy officers and a police guard looked on, Green Party MP Steve Abel referenced New Zealand’s “proud episode 50 years ago” when the late Prime Minister Norman Kirk dispatched the frigate HMNZS Otago (and later the Canterbury) to Moruroa atoll in 1973 to protest against French nuclear tests.

He also highlighted Prime Minister David Lange’s championing of nuclear-free New Zealand and the nuclear-free Pacific Rarotonga Treaty “a decade later” in the 1980s.

Abel called for a return to the “courageous” independent foreign policies that New Zealanders had fought for in the past.

Today’s Devonport naval base protest followed a series of demonstrations and a social gathering in Cornwall Park over the holiday weekend in the wake of the “first step” success against impunity by South Africa’s legal team at The Hague last Friday. Other solidarity protests have taken place at some 17 locations across New Zealand.

Rallying cries near the entrance to the Devonport naval Base
Rallying cries near the entrance to the Devonport Naval Base today. Image: David Robie/APR
"Grow some balls Luxon" placard in
“Grow some balls Luxon” placard in the protest today at the Devonport Naval Base. Image: David Robie/APR
Green Party MP Steve Abel
Green Party MP Steve Abel . . . contrasted the Luxon government’s weak stance over the Middle East with the “proud” days of the Royal NZ Navy in protesting against French nuclear testing. Image: David Robie/APR

Caitlin Johnstone: Commemorating a past Holocaust while cheerleading the current one

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Cafe Pacific Publisher
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It’s been so surreal watching empire managers
It’s been so surreal watching empire managers issue solemn words in honor of Holocaust Memorial Day while enthusiastically facilitating a modern-day genocide in Gaza. Image: Caitlin Johnstone: Notes

COMMENTARY: By Caitlin Johnstone

The United States and eight of its allies have suspended funding to UNRWA, the primary humanitarian agency in Gaza, following Israeli allegations that a dozen employees of the 30,000-staff organisation were involved in the October 7 attack by Hamas.

The allegations conveniently sprang up at the same time as the International Court of Justice rulings against Israel in the genocide case brought against it by South Africa, quickly supplanting the ICJ ruling in Western mass media headlines.

The US has continued to dismiss the South African case as unfounded.

A senior Israeli official told Axios that Israeli intelligence agencies came upon the information about the UNRWA staffers largely through “interrogations of militants who were arrested during the October 7 attack.

Israel has an extensive history of using torture in its interrogations, and there’s no reason to believe it hasn’t been used on captured Hamas fighters in recent months.

So to recap:

Accusations of genocide deemed credible by the International Court of Justice: Preposterous lies. Not worth opposing a single massacre over.

Unsubstantiated claims about UNRWA staff extracted via torture: Gospel truth. Worthy of ending humanitarian support to Gazans for.

❖

How does ANY unproven claim by the Israeli government get treated seriously by ANYONE anymore? There ought to be a limit on how many lies you can get caught circulating before the entire political/media class just starts laughing at you whenever you make any claim about anything.

❖

It’s been so surreal watching empire managers issue solemn words in honor of Holocaust Memorial Day while enthusiastically facilitating a modern-day genocide in Gaza.

Commemorating the Holocaust while cheerleading for the current holocaust is next-level dystopia.

❖

The IDF shot and killed a Palestinian man who had a white flag in a designated “safe zone” right in front of an ITV News crew, drawing headlines around the world.

It’s been undeniable that the IDF routinely kills Palestinians who are waving white flags ever since last month when they killed three escaped Israeli hostages who were waving a white flag mistaking them for Palestinians. This was just the first time the Western press filmed it.

❖

A re-election campaign year for a Democrat president coinciding with an active genocide backed by that same president is exposing the true face of the Democratic Party clearer than anything I can remember.

Biden is preparing to send Israel 50 child murder jets and 12 child murder helicopters, but oh no no we mustn’t focus on this too much because it’s an election year and Trump is a very bad person.

❖

I understand the logic of lesser-evil voting. I just don’t understand the logic of designating a president who backs a literal genocide and engages in nuclear brinkmanship a “lesser evil”.

❖

A political establishment which tells you you have to choose between two presidential candidates who both want to help Israel murder children by the thousands is a political establishment which must not be permitted to exist.

❖

Israel has been caught in lie after lie after lie after lie since October 7, yet we’re meant to believe it’s crazy anti-semitic holocaust denialism to think it may have lied about some of the stuff that happened on October 7 as well.

❖

Young people spent 2020 protesting against racism and injustice and spent 2022 being told that it’s bad for an occupying force to drop bombs on people, but when Israel started a racist and unjust bombing campaign in 2023 older generations were still somehow surprised to see young people stand against it.

❖

To defend Israel is to defend the US empire, because the military might of the US empire is what makes Israel’s existence possible. You can’t separate the two.

Israel apologists pretend they’re defending a plucky little underdog country in the Middle East and a persecuted religious minority, when really they’re defending the most powerful empire that has ever existed and the most murderous and tyrannical power structure of the 21st century.

Caitlin Johnstone is an independent Australian journalist and poet. Her articles include The UN Torture Report On Assange Is An Indictment Of Our Entire Society. She publishes a website and Caitlin’s Newsletter. This article is republished from Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix with permission.

ICJ’s stunning blow over Gaza war genocide charge ups pressure on Israel

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Cafe Pacific Publisher
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South Africa President Cyril Ramaphosa
South Africa President Cyril Ramaphosa (back to camera) . . . embraced by keffiyeh-wearing government and party officials celebrating the favourable interim ICJ ruling on its genocide case against Israel. Image: Asia Pacific Report screenshot

ANALYSIS: By Trita Parsi

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) has ruled against Israel and determined that South Africa successfully argued that Israel’s conduct plausibly could constitute genocide. The court has imposed several injunctions against Israel and reminds Israel that its rulings are binding, according to international law.

In its order, the court fell short of South Africa’s request for a ceasefire, but this ruling, however, is overwhelmingly in favour of South Africa’s case and will likely increase international pressure for a ceasefire as a result.

On the question of whether Israel’s war in Gaza is genocide, that will still take more time, but today’s news will have significant political repercussions. Here are a few thoughts.

This is a devastating blow to Israel’s global standing. To put it in context, Israel has worked ferociously for the last two decades to defeat the BDS movement — Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions — not because it will have a significant economic impact on Israel, but because of how it could delegitimiSe Israel internationally.

However, the ruling of the ICJ that Israel is plausibly engaged in genocide is far more devastating to Israel’s legitimacy than anything BDS could have achieved.

Just as much as Israel’s political system has been increasingly — and publicly — associated with apartheid in the past few years, Israel will now be similarly associated with the charge of genocide.

As a result, those countries that have supported Israel and its military campaign in Gaza, such as the US under President Biden, will be associated with that charge, too.

Significant implications for US
The implications for the United States are significant. First because the court does not have the ability to implement its ruling.

Instead, the matter will go to the UN Security Council, where the Biden administration will once again face the choice of protecting Israel politically by casting a veto, and by that, further isolate the United States, or allowing the Security Council to act and pay a domestic political cost for “not standing by Israel.”

So far, the Biden administration has refused to say if it will respect ICJ’s decision. Of course, in previous cases in front of the ICJ, such as Myanmar, Ukraine and Syria, the US and Western states stressed that ICJ provisional measures are binding and must be fully implemented.

The double standards of US foreign policy will hit a new low if, in this case, Biden not only argues against the ICJ, but actively acts to prevent and block the implementation of its ruling.

It is perhaps not surprising that senior Biden administration officials have largely ceased using the term “rules-based order” since October 7.

It also raises questions about how Biden’s policy of bear-hugging Israel may have contributed to Israel’s conduct.

Biden could have offered more measured support and pushed back hard against Israeli excesses — and by that, prevented Israel from engaging in actions that could potentially fall under the category of genocide. But he didn’t.

Unconditional support, zero criticism
Instead, Biden offered unconditional support combined with zero public criticism of Israel’s conduct and only limited push-back behind the scenes. A different American approach could have shaped Israel’s war efforts in a manner that arguably would not have been preliminarily ruled by the ICJ as plausibly meeting the standards of genocide.

This shows that America undermines its own interest as well as that of its partners when it offers them blank checks and complete and unquestionable protection. The absence of checks and balances that such protection offers fuels reckless behavior all around.

As such, Biden’s unconditional support may have undermined Israel, in the final analysis.

This ruling may also boost those arguing that all states that are party to the Genocide Convention have a positive obligation to prevent genocide. The Houthis, for instance, have justified their attacks against ships heading to Israeli ports in the Red Sea, citing this positive obligation.

What legal implications will the court’s ruling have as a result on the US and UK’s military action against the Houthis?

The implications for Europe will also be considerable. The US is rather accustomed to and comfortable with setting aside international law and ignoring international institutions. Europe is not.

International law and institutions play a much more central role in European security thinking. The decision will continue to split Europe. But the fact that some key EU states will reject the ICJ’s ruling will profoundly contradict and undermine Europe’s broader security paradigm.

Moderated war conduct
One final point: The mere existence of South Africa’s application to the ICJ appears to have moderated Israel’s war conduct.

Any plans to ethnically cleanse Gaza and send its residents to third countries appear to have been somewhat paused, presumably because of how such actions would boost South Africa’s application.

If so, it shows that the court, in an era where the force of international law is increasingly questioned, has had a greater impact in terms of deterring unlawful Israeli actions than anything the Biden administration has done.

Trita Parsi is the co-founder and executive vice-president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. First published at Responsible Statecraft.

World Court or­ders Is­rael to take steps to pre­vent acts of geno­cide in Gaza

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Cafe Pacific Publisher
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Asia Pacific Report

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) has ordered Israel to take steps to prevent acts of genocide in South Africa’s case over the war on the Gaza Strip.

But it stopped short of ordering a ceasefire in what is being seen as a historical ruling on emergency measures requested by the South African government which analysts say will put pressure on Tel Aviv and its Western backers.

The ICJ, also known as the World Court, ordered Israel to take measures to prevent and punish direct incitement of genocide, and also to take immediate, effective measures to enable provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance in the besieged enclave.

Hailing the emergency measures as a victory for international law, South African Minister of International Relations Dr Naledi Pandor said outside the court in The Hague that Israel would have to halt fighting in Gaza if it wanted to adhere to the orders of the United Nations’ top court.

“How else is it going to comply with the ruling?” she asked, adding that it was up to the global community to ensure the measures were applied to “stop the suffering of the Palestinian people”.

“How do you provide aid and water without a ceasefire?” Dr Pandor said.

“If you read the order, by implication a ceasefire must happen.”

In South Africa, government officials welcomed the ruling.

“It’s a watershed judgment for all those who want to see peace in Palestine,” Fikile Mbalula, secretary-general of the ruling African National Congress party, told reporters.

Years to decide
The ICJ judges have not yet ruled on the merits of the genocide allegations, which may take years to decide. However, a big majority of the judges ruled that South Africa had presented a “plausible case” with its genocide allegations that led to the emergency measures.

Since October 7 when Hamas launched a deadly raid on Israel, Tel Aviv’s military campaign has killed at least 26,083 people and wounded 64,487 others, according to officials in Gaza. Thousands more are missing under the rubble, most of them presumed dead.

Al Jazeera’s senior analyst Marwan Bishara told the network that “Israel is on trial for genocide”, saying that the provisional ruling would cause a seismic split between the Global North and South depending on which side people aligned, even if the ICJ had not called for an immediate ceasefire.

He said Israel’s major backer, the United States, which had vetoed three UN Security Council resolutions seeking a ceasefire in recent months, now needed to “look in the mirror”.


ICJ ruling is a ‘major legal and moral blow’ to Israel, says analyst Marwan Bishara.   Video: Al Jazeera

“The UK, Germany and other countries who supported Israel in the past three months unconditionally also need to look in the mirror and reconsider their decision because the World Court has taken up the case of genocide against Israel for its actions in the past three months,” Bishara said.

The principle outcome was that the ICJ would take on the case and had put Israel “on notice” and demand that the state carry out a number of steps.

“I think that legally and morally sends a strong message to Israel and its backers that they need to cease and desist — even if the court did not spell it out.”

Plausible case of genocide
Thomas Macmanus, director of international state crime initiative at Queen Mary University of London, stressed that the court had said there “is a plausible case of genocide in Gaza”.

“So, we now have a serious risk of genocide,” he said, noting that the law stipulated that once there is “a serious risk”, then states needed to do “everything they can to stop enabling that genocide and to start taking all action in their capacity to prevent it”.

Riyadh al-Maliki, Palestinian Minister of Foreign Affairs, issued a statement welcoming the ICJ’s provisional measures “in light of the incontrovertible evidence presented to the court about the unfolding genocide”.

“The ICJ ruling is an important reminder that no state is above the law or beyond the reach of justice. It breaks Israel’s entrenched culture of criminality and impunity, which has characterised its decades-long occupation, dispossession, persecution, and apartheid in Palestine.”

Far-right Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir mocked the ICJ after the court ended its reading.

“Hague shmague,” the minister wrote on X, formerly Twitter, in the first comments by an Israeli official.

Waitangi 2024: how NZ’s Tiriti strengthens democracy and checks unbridled power

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Cafe Pacific Publisher
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Liberal democracy was not the form of government Britain established in Aotearoa
Liberal democracy was not the form of government Britain established in Aotearoa New Zealand in 1840. Māori political authority is found in tino rangatiratanga and through shared decision making on matters of common interest. Image: 1News screenshot APR

ANALYSIS: By Dominic O’Sullivan

The ACT Party’s election promise of a referendum for Aotearoa New Zealand to redefine and enshrine the “principles” of the Te Tiriti o Waitangi (Treaty of Waitangi) is likely to dominate debate at this year’s Rātana and Waitangi Day events.

ACT’s coalition agreement with the National Party commits the government to supporting a Treaty Principles Bill for select committee consideration. The bill may not make it into law, but the idea is raising considerable alarm.

Leaked draft advice to Cabinet from the Ministry of Justice says the principles should be defined in legislation because “their importance requires there be certainty and clarity about their meaning”. The advice also says ACT’s proposal will:

change the nature of the principles from reflecting a relationship akin to a partnership between the Crown and Māori to reflecting the relationship the Crown has with all citizens of New Zealand. This is not supported by either the spirit of the Treaty or the text of the Treaty.

Setting aside arguments that the notion of “partnership” diminishes self-determination, the 10,000 people attending a hui at Tūrangawaewae marae near Hamilton last weekend called by King Tūheitia were motivated by the prospect of the Treaty being diminished.

Do we need Treaty principles?
The Treaty principles were developed and elaborated by parliaments, courts and the Waitangi Tribunal over more than 50 years to guide policy implementation and mediate tensions between the Māori and English texts of the document.

The Māori text, which more than 500 rangatira (chiefs) signed, conferred the right to establish government on the British Crown. The English text conferred absolute sovereignty; 39 rangatira signed this text after having it explained in Māori, a language that has no concept of sovereignty as a political and legal authority to be given away.

Because the English text wasn’t widely signed, there is a view that it holds no influential standing, and that perhaps there isn’t a tension to mediate. Former chief justice Sian Elias has said: “It can’t be disputed that the Treaty is actually the Māori text”.

On Saturday, Tūheitia said: “There’s no principles, the Treaty is written, that’s it.”

This view is supported by arguments that the principles are reductionist and take attention away from the substance of Te Tiriti’s articles: the Crown may establish government; Māori may retain authority over their own affairs and enjoy citizenship of the state in ways that reflect equal tikanga (cultural values).

Democratic or undemocratic?
The ACT Party says this is undemocratic because it gives Māori a privileged voice in public decision making. Of the previous government, ACT has said:

Labour is trying to make New Zealand an unequal society on purpose. It believes there are two types of New Zealanders. Tangata Whenua, who are here by right, and Tangata Tiriti who are lucky to be here.

Liberal democracy was not the form of government Britain established in 1840. There’s even an argument that state government doesn’t concern Māori. The Crown exercises government only over “its people” – settlers and their descendants. Māori political authority is found in tino rangatiratanga and through shared decision making on matters of common interest.

Tino rangatiratanga has been defined as “the exercise of ultimate and paramount power and authority”. In practice, like all power, this is relative and relational to the power of others, and constrained by circumstances beyond human control.

But the power of others has to be fair and reasonable, and rangatiratanga requires freedom from arbitrary interference by the state. That way, authority and responsibility may be exercised, and independence upheld, in relation to Māori people’s own affairs and resources.

Assertions of rangatiratanga
Social integration — especially through intermarriage, economic interdependence and economies of scale — makes a rigid “them and us” binary an unlikely path to a better life for anybody.

However, rangatiratanga might be found in Tūheitia’s advice about the best form of protest against rewriting the Treaty principles to diminish the Treaty itself:

Be who we are, live our values, speak our reo (language), care for our mokopuna (children), our awa (rivers), our maunga (mountains), just be Māori. Māori all day, every day.

As the government introduces measures to reduce the use of te reo Māori in public life, repeal child care and protection legislation that promotes Māori leadership and responsibility, and repeal water management legislation that ensures Māori participation, Tūheitia’s words are all assertions of rangatiratanga.

Those government policies sit alongside the proposed Treaty Principles Bill to diminish Māori opportunities to be Māori in public life. For the ACT Party, this is necessary to protect democratic equality.

In effect, the proposed bill says that to be equal, Māori people can’t contribute to public decisions with reference to their own culture. As anthropologist Dr Anne Salmond has written, this means the state cannot admit there are “reasonable people who reason differently”.

Liberal democracy and freedom
Equality through sameness is a false equality that liberal democracy is well-equipped to contest. Liberal democracy did not emerge to suppress difference.

It is concerned with much more than counting votes to see who wins on election day.

Liberal democracy is a political system intended to manage fair and reasonable differences in an orderly way. This means it doesn’t concentrate power in one place. It’s not a select few exercising sovereignty as the absolute and indivisible power to tell everybody else what to do.

This is because one of its ultimate purposes is to protect people’s freedom — the freedom to be Māori as much as the freedom to be Pakeha. If we want it to, democracy may help all and not just some of us to protect our freedom through our different ways of reasoning.

Freedom is protected by checks and balances on power. Parliament checks the powers of government. Citizens, including Māori citizens with equality of tikanga, check the powers of Parliament.

One of the ways this happens is through the distribution of power from the centre — to local governments, school boards and non-governmental providers of public services. This includes Māori health providers whose work was intended to be supported by the Māori Health Authority, which the government also intends to disestablish.

The rights of hapū (kinship groups), as the political communities whose representatives signed Te Tiriti, mean that rangatiratanga, too, checks and balances the concentration of power in the hands of a few.

Checking and balancing the powers of government requires the contribution of all and not just some citizens. When they do so in their own ways, and according to their own modes of reasoning, citizens contribute to democratic contest — not as a divisive activity, but to protect the common good from the accumulation of power for some people’s use in the domination of others.

Te Tiriti supports this democratic process.The Conversation

Dr Dominic O’Sullivan is adjunct professor, Faculty of Health and Environmental Sciences, Auckland University of Technology, and professor of political science, Charles Sturt University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

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