By CARLOS SAPIR

On Jan. 26, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) delivered its preliminary ruling on the case brought by South Africa concerning Israel’s invasion of Gaza. The court ordered Israel to “take all measures within its power to prevent the commission of all acts within the scope” of genocide, to investigate and punish individuals committing such acts, and to submit a report demonstrating compliance to the UN in a month’s time.

Stopping short of actually ordering an end to the Israeli invasion or the dismantling of its apartheid regime throughout its territory, the ruling is perfectly calculated to protect the legitimacy of the UN and its courts while doing virtually nothing to actually protect Palestinians facing Israeli occupation. Consequently, it has received muted praise by the U.S. and its European allies.

Reactions to the ruling by Palestinian organizations have been varied. It was welcomed by Hamas and various Palestine solidarity groups as a step forward that affirms the validity of accusing Israel of genocide. Palestinian Islamic Jihad denounced the ruling, while the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine offered mixed praise and criticism.

There is an extreme absurdity in politely ordering a government to “take all measures within its power” to prevent the deaths of Palestinians, when it is actively and willfully the leading cause of Palestinian deaths. The ruling implicitly endorses the through-line of Israeli propaganda: the idea that the Israeli military is an organization that generally respects international law.

By giving Israel time to demonstrate its compliance in the form of a written report, the preliminary ruling suggests that all of the deaths up until now were excusable. This is hardly subtext; it is the substance of the Biden administration’s position at this juncture, which has simultaneously welcomed the ruling while insisting that no genocide is taking place and that Israel generally has the right to unleash punitive violence against Palestinians. The ruling further hides, at least for another month, the fact that the ICJ and UN more broadly are actually powerless to intervene unless they have the backing of the U.S. and other UN Security Council members.

As we wrote at the beginning of the year: “With the USA behind it, Israel is well aware that it can ignore any resolution from the United Nations … the situation of Palestine, both in 1948 and 2024, reveals the lie that there is an ‘international community’ of nations dedicated to peace and human prosperity. The reality is that, instead, the UN represents a club of capitalist governments dominated by a small clique of imperialist great powers—the USA, China, Great Britain, France, and Russia. The veto of any one of these permanent Security Council members is enough to shut down any initiative. This guarantees that the world’s great imperialist states have a free hand to carry out any kind of grotesque violence they want without interference from the United Nations. Since Israel is a client of Yankee imperialism in the eastern Mediterranean, it has a green light to carry out genocide as long as it has Washington’s support.

“This is why a final end to the long war on Palestine will not come from the UN chambers in New York. The only force that has both the power and the desire to end the genocide of Palestinians is the Palestinian working class, backed up by the working masses of the Middle East.”

Despite all of this, the Israeli government has still reacted to the preliminary ruling with outrage. This likely has less to do with the long-term prospects of Israeli military operations than it has to do with the short-term prospects of Benjamin Netanyahu’s political career. Although it fails to rule out the day-to-day violence of Israel’s military operations and apartheid laws, the ICJ decision does threaten to complicate the bloodthirsty rhetoric of revenge that has been the main domestic appeal of Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition in Israel for the last few months. In a sense, the ICJ’s ruling can be seen as an insistence that Israel return to the rhetoric of liberal Zionism, to shed crocodile tears for the dead and speak solemnly about peace while coldly prosecuting their occupation with the same iron fist.

Still, the ruling has been celebrated by some Palestine solidarity groups (although Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank are considerably less enthusiastic) for providing any amount of confirmation that the violence unleashed by Israel is unacceptable. But while this reflex is understandable, the wish that the “international community of states” will step in to rescue the Palestinians is a political dead end that will never be realized. The South African government and other cosigners of the request for action by the ICJ, meanwhile, have achieved their diplomatic goals and are quite content to sit and wait while the court spends years deliberating (even as they enthusiastically welcome the similarly criminal Sudanese military leader Hemedti on a diplomatic junket).

It is important to remember that the framework of “international law” is what gave the green light to Israeli colonization in the first place, in the form of the 1947 UN Resolution 181, with which the victors of World War II voted to partition Palestine against the wishes of the entire Arab population. This framework also continues to demand a two-state solution, ignoring both how this falls far short of redressing the crimes committed against Palestinians and how Israel itself has undermined any possibility of even making good on this fundamentally inadequate concession.

Far from defending Palestinians, the ICJ preliminary decision is an invitation for Israel to put on a song and dance for The Hague to mull over for a decade, all while the bodies of Palestinians pile ever higher. Any hope that this ruling will help “unmask” the position of the Israeli regime will need to confront the certainty that Israel and the U.S. will work at every turn to frustrate, delay, and generally prevent any international process from finding Israel meaningfully culpable of the crimes it commits. Instead of stating the facts of the day, that Israel has repeatedly acted with clear intent to destroy Palestinians in every sense of the word, the ICJ hides behind procedure and formalities as the bombing continues, with 174 Palestinians killed on the same day that the ruling was pronounced.

It is only the power of millions of people in the streets around the world that even brings the ICJ to consider this case in the first place. And likewise, it is only the persistence of these mobilizations, together with the heroic armed and unarmed resistance by Palestinians living under Israeli occupation, that will secure a free, democratic Palestine from the river to the sea.

Photo: Family in Gaza flees Israeli bombing. (Abdelkarim Hana / Al Jazeera)