We look to solidarity with the movement in Israel, not the ICJ

International pressure on Israel continues to mount, but with little visible impact on its military action. On 11-12 January South Africa brought a legal case to the International Court of Justice (ICJ), accusing Israel of perpetrating a genocide in Gaza.

However it rules on the “genocide” question, the ICJ is likely to issue a ruling condemning Israel’s war and ordering it to cease. A comprehensive judgement could take years, but an interim ruling could come within weeks. A cease-and-desist order will be good, but the ICJ has no binding power. A 2022 cease-and-desist order on Russia’s war in Ukraine was wholly ignored.

If an ICJ ruling has the effect of imposing some restraint on Israel, and thus saving Palestinian lives, that will be welcome.

Socialist-internationalists who wish to oppose Israel’s actions on the basis of a consistently democratic and egalitarian politics should also be as precise as possible in the language and terms we deploy, and clear-eyed about the ideological roots of some of the arguments made on the left about Israel.

Omer Bartov, a prominent genocide scholar who denounces the Israeli onslaught, argued in November that there was “no proof a genocide is occuring”. He said that “war crimes and crimes against humanity” were likely occuring, with a strong risk of the war developing in an even worse direction, but as yet he sticks to his opinion. The presence in the Israeli government of figures who advocate exterminationist policies shows the risks. A strong claim can certainly be made that the mass displacements and destruction of civilian life already inflicted on Gaza represent a form of ethnic cleansing.

There are good reasons to be wary about insisting Israel’s war represents “a genocide”. Some of the definitions being relied upon, about any action that destroys “in part or in whole” a national, cultural, or ethnic group, would also mean the British firebombings of Dresden (at least 25,000 dead) and Hamburg (nearly 40,000), or the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (over 100,000, maybe over 200,000), or many other war atrocities, were genocides. It is not necessary to call those acts “genocide” in order to condemn them. Would it add anything to our political understanding of the Second World War retrospectively to add the word?

Some Israeli politicians have used genocidal rhetoric about the Palestinians, since 7 October and before, but it does not necessarily follow that those who oppose them have already been defeated.

On Gaza demonstrations, accusations that Israel has been essentially about a “slow genocide” of the Palestinians ever since its foundation have been common, in different tones and variants. The reflexive insistence that whatever Israel does must be the worst thing imaginable, that it represents a kind of unique and essential evil, fuels and is fuelled by a nexus of ideological claims that Workers’ Liberty and others have described as left antisemitism. Comparisons of Israel with the Nazis, and claims that its policies towards the Palestinians are consciously informed by the Holocaust, or represent a “new” (sometimes, implicitly worse) Holocaust, also belong to this nexus.

It remains the case that the social forces with the best immediate chance of imposing restraint on Israel come from within its own society. If the anti-war left is able to intervene in the broader anti-Netanyahu, hostage-return protests and persuade significant numbers that, as Standing Together’s slogan puts it, “only peace will bring security”, this could help build a movement with real leverage. Especially in the context of ongoing state clampdowns — against the anti-war left, against the Palestinian minority — dissident voices inside Israel need our solidarity more than ever.

A meaningful peace settlement must be based on the establishment of a genuinely independent Palestinian state alongside, and with the same rights as, Israel. A framework guaranteeing an equal right to self-determination to both peoples is the only possible basis for future confederation and unity. That horizon is surely remote, but so too for now are all others beyond the perpetuation of a brutal war. It will only become less remote if it is consciously advocated and fought for by socialists and internationalists, around the world but especially on the ground, as part of our immediate agitation and organising against the war.