The UN’s top court orders Israel to ‘immediately’ halt its military assault on the southern Gaza city of Rafa.
Nawaf Salam, the head of the International Court of Justice: “Israel must immediately hold its military offensive of any other action in the Rafah governorate which may inflict on the Palestinian group in Gaza, conditions of life that could bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”
Without these orders being backed by some form of material threat, they're the equivalent of finger wagging. It's good for documentation and building a paper trail for the inevitable trials that will result, but you just wish there was a way for these orders to have some weight behind them.
The main use for these decisions right now is to hold libs' feet to the fire. Oh, you're Mr. Rules Based International Order? You think we're the good guys? You think this is a complicated, messy situation but whaddayagonna do? Here's an objective, prestigious international observer saying it's genocide.
Short of anything really cool happening, this is going to end the way apartheid South Africa ended: gradual economic and political isolation plus on-the-ground resistance resulting in some version of the Israeli government deciding the current course is untenable.
Will the US let the Isntreali government decide that though? The whitehouse seems to be extremely vociferous in its backing of israel, way more than apartheid South Africa.
In the early Obama era, the lib argument for how this is "supposed" to work is that the UN would identify nation-state level crimes about to happen (or in-progress), and then send a coalition national militaries over there to solve the problem. They based this on such positive examples as UN and NATO interventions in Yugoslavia and Afghanistan.
The UN will want another International Tribunal for this but the mechanism to call one is performed via a security council vote. What they have to do first is make it so politically costly that the US won't veto it.
An International Tribunal called by the security council has binding powers above that of the Security Council itself. Effectively once called an international tribunal can ultimately bind the security council to act on its decisions.
I honestly don't know enough about the level of standard of the ICJ's other findings. Do we really want them to have a global cop force to back up their threats?
I mean fuck it, why not. Any court on the level of a constitutional court or the ICJ with no standing army is always going to be finger wagging
There's a debate to be had about the existence of these types of courts in the first place but if you actually believed in them you'd be pro them having a standing army
In a now deleted tweet the "Jüdische Rundschau", which prides itself as being the only independent jewish newspaper in germany, accused the ICJ of being a soros founded plot against israel, citing an author from the Kopp Verlag, a right wing conspiracy publisher
The mission statement of the paper is "to counter an often distorted and incomplete media picture of Israel"
It's also not the only jewish newspaper in germany, because there's the Jüdische Allgemeine, which is published by The Central Committe of Jews in Germany and is more liberal lol
It's wild to me that people seem to believe that any UN body is more likely to materially intervene against the empire rather than the UN just dissolving like the league of nations to be replaced with a more explicitly org representing the Rules Based International Order.
Three fifths of the permanent UN security council members are committed to destroying and (re)colonizing the other two fifths, and have no reservations about doing a nuclear first strike to make that happen.