On Jan. 26, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague handed down a binding order finding that South Africa had presented a “plausible case” of genocide by Israel, and further ordered that Israel immediately cease any such actions in Gaza while a full investigation is conducted. The ICJ also demanded that Israel file a report with the Court on progress made within 30 days.
The response of the British and American controllers of Israel’s Netanyahu government has been to double down on the crime of genocide of which they are accused—almost as if to finish off the job of wiping out 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza before the month is up.
First: On the very same day of the ICJ ruling, Jan. 26, the Israeli government dramatically unveiled a secret dossier supposedly containing “evidence” that a dozen or so workers of UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East) had participated in the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel. Although no evidence has been made public to back up the charges, Secretary of State Blinken did everything he could to quickly puff up the accusations by assuring that the evidence provided by Israel is “highly credible,” and a total of 15 countries—led by the U.S., the U.K., and Germany—promptly suspended all funding of UNRWA. That UN agency is the principal source of humanitarian relief for Palestinians; without it, the threat of famine in Gaza will become actual famine.
As Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) put it simply: “Cutting off support to @UNRWA—the primary source of humanitarian aid to 2 million+ Gazans—is unacceptable. Among an organization of 13,000 UN aid workers, risking the starvation of millions over grave allegations of 12 is indefensible.”
Second: Scarcely four days later, on Jan. 30, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) publicly announced that the Israeli military is flooding Hamas tunnels in Gaza with seawater. This is designed to not only kill everyone in the tunnels, Hamas and hostages alike; it will also make the entire region uninhabitable for man, beast, or plant life for decades to come. On Dec. 23, 2023, the British daily Guardian reported the comments of an expert hydrologist who worked in Palestine for the UN, Mark Zeitoun, director of the Geneva Water Hub and professor at the Geneva Graduate Institute. Pumping seawater into the porous, sandy soil of Gaza would inevitably seep into the aquifer that its 2.3 million residents rely on for about 85% of their water, Zeitoun argued. “Flooding the freshwater aquifer with seawater would go against every norm humanity has ever developed, including the environment aspects of international humanitarian law/rules of war and the recent principles on the protection of environment in relation to armed conflict and all the progress made towards criminalizing harm to the natural environment: ecocide.”
“It would ruin the conditions of life of everyone in Gaza,” Zeitoun said. “I say the conditions of life because I think that’s one of the elements of genocide within the UN convention, the partial or complete physical destruction of the conditions necessary for life of any people.”
The Netanyahu government—which could not do what it is now doing without the backing of Washington and London—was actively engaging in these crimes of genocide even as the United Nations Security Council met on Jan. 31 to discuss how to ensure the “binding effect” of the ICJ decision on Israel to stop the carnage. Every day that passes without that enforcement, means another day of genocide which Mankind will carry on its conscience. We therefore urge you to participate in the International Peace Coalition’s weekly meeting every Friday morning to join with others around the world who are also moved to act.
There are broader, strategic consequences as well. The world is moving to the breaking point on several fronts, Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche warned today, which cannot hold. These include Gaza and the spreading war across Southwest Asia; the growing protest movement of farmers and broader layers of the population across Europe; the dangerously explosive environment being whipped up around the border crisis in the U.S., in the middle of the Presidential election campaign; and, of course, the underlying breakdown collapse of the entire Western financial system, which is the ultimate cause of all the other crises.
What Israel is now doing with U.S., U.K., and German backing will not be forgotten by the nations of the Global South, Zepp-LaRouche elaborated, and could lead to a devastating break between North and South. What Mankind needs is not such a rift, but for the nations of the North and the South to cooperate around policies of joint high-technology physical-economic development, as Lyndon LaRouche promoted for half a century—and the speculative debt bubble of Wall Street and the City of London be damned. The meetings of the BRICS-Plus nations will have that issue on their action agenda over the course of 2024, and they are the natural allies of the growing anti-war movement and other demonstrators in the nations of the North.
