An “Expert Comment,” posted on the front page of the Chatham House site, on the eve of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) Jan. 26 decision on South Africa’s case for provisional measures against Israel, asks: “Will the War in Gaza Become a Breaking Point for the Rules-Based International Order?” Chatham House, also known as the Royal Institute for International Affairs, is the British Monarchy’s leading foreign policy think tank. The reverberations of the ICJ case and the youth-led international mobilization against the genocide in Gaza have some in London worried.
The author, Dr. Renad Mansour, Senior Research Fellow in Chatham House’s Middle East and North Africa Programme and Project Director of its Iraq Initiative, opens bluntly:
“As the International Court of Justice (ICJ) recognizes its prima facie jurisdiction to investigate Israel for carrying out genocide in Gaza, also on trial is the so-called ‘rules-based international order…. The scale of death and destruction in Gaza is increasingly viewed as an indictment of a system facing perhaps its most daunting and most stubborn challenge—global perceptions of hypocrisy.”
