Just a week ago, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu could smile in private. His army paraded the national flag on the Gazan side of the Rafah crossing without a diplomatic crisis with Egypt. Hundreds of thousands of Gazans followed the army’s orders and made their umpteenth forced displacement towards an “expanded humanitarian zone” that the UN does not see as such. And, after paralyzing a shipment of weapons to Israel, the United States promoted another package worth 920 million euros and clarified that the current operation in Rafah is not the large-scale offensive that it rejects.
It is difficult for the Israeli prime minister to smile at the end of this week. A concatenation, by chance, of important political and judicial decisions has meant the biggest diplomatic setback for Israel since it invaded Gaza last October. The solidarity received after the Hamas attack, with 1,200 people murdered and the pain of the hostages’ relatives, has been buried by 233 days of death (almost 36,000 people, mostly women and children, according to Gaza authorities), devastation and statements by ministers that range from “we don’t care what the world says” to incitement to genocide.
As happens with leaks in pipes, the United States’ plug in defense of its great ally (blocking up to three permanent ceasefire resolutions) has not prevented the water from coming out the other way. The most recent, the UN International Court of Justice (ICJ), based in The Hague. South Africa, a country in the Global South with the symbolism of having left behind the regime of apartheid, took Israel there for alleged genocide in Gaza. After two hearings that ended in warnings, the court ordered him this Friday to immediately stop the offensive in Rafah. “For historians looking back at the Gaza war, May 24, 2024 [día de la resolución del TIJ] “It will be the second most important date since October 7, 2023,” Yonatan Touval, senior policy analyst at Mitvim, wrote on the social network X. think tank based in Tel Aviv that analyzes Israeli foreign policy.
To that order and to international pressure to stop the war, Netanyahu has responded by maintaining defiant rhetoric and with new bombings on Gaza, including in Rafah, the southern area of the enclave from which the majority of displaced people have fled in fear and it is estimated that There are still hundreds of thousands more left. The offensive continues with the same intensity. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has insisted on the need for more aid to Gaza. The court demands that Israel reopen the Rafah crossing with Egypt for humanitarian aid, but it remains closed.
Experts are divided on the true scope for the offensive of the decision, since it speaks of actions that “may inflict on Gazans living conditions that may lead to their total or partial destruction”, that is, constituting genocide. And its compliance depends in practice on what the countries decide now, especially in the UN National Security Council. But it shows, in any case, how the international community is closing more and more doors to Netanyahu in his flight towards a total victory that – he insists – involves, yes or yes, invading Rafah and in which 48% of Israelis no longer believe. , according to a survey broadcast this Thursday on public television.
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The Hague has been the key setting of your week horribilis. Karim Khan, the chief prosecutor of the other major court based in the city – the International Criminal Court, which tries people and not States – asked the judges on Monday to issue an unprecedented arrest warrant against him and his Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant.
The suit is triple. Khan was able to make the request because the Palestinian leadership opted in 2009 to gain a foothold in international organizations. In Israel they came to call it “judicial terrorism.” The International Criminal Court (ICC) rejected the Palestinian candidacy because it was not yet considered a State. It obtained status in 2012 (as a non-member) and joined in 2015, despite warnings from the United States and Israel (which reacted by withholding taxes that it had to transfer to the Palestinian Authority). Just three years ago, the ICC confirmed its jurisdiction over crimes committed in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, or by Palestinians elsewhere. That is to say, since Israel does not recognize the court, none of the five arrest requests this Monday (neither those of the Israeli leaders, nor those of the Hamas leaders) would have been possible today, if it had not been for that path that Netanyahu tried. to prevent.
Furthermore, although the prosecutor did not attribute the same crimes or equate the two leaders of Israel with the three Hamas leaders whose arrest he also requests, he symbolically put them on the same level by announcing the arrest requests at the same time: Netanyahu, the maximum leader of the country that boasts of having “the most moral army in the world” and Hamas, which the US and the EU have on their list of terrorist organizations.
If the judges end up calling for the arrests, Netanyahu would share a car with African satraps with a lot of blood on their hands or the Russian president, Vladimir Putin. And, while it would hardly change the lives of the Hamas leaders, it would be an earthquake for Israel if its prime minister could not set foot in 124 states, including its main allies (except the United States) in the Western mirror in which it likes to see itself reflected. As Micah Goodman, a researcher at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, pointed out this Friday in the newspaper Yediot Aharonot: “We need the West to see us as a moral country that follows the rules and for the Middle East to see us as a determined, aggressive and unpredictable country that is also sometimes ruthless. We want both things: love and fear. May the West love us and may the Middle East fear us.”
Recognition of the Palestinian State
Between both judicial decisions, came a weighty policy. Spain, Ireland and Norway announced that they will recognize the Palestinian State this Tuesday, an idea that had been sleeping for a decade. Between 2014 and the war in Gaza, only three countries did so; two of them, Caribbean microstates. The invasion of Gaza has resurrected it as a message of defense of the two-state solution, in the face of Israel’s refusal to negotiate it, and of support for moderate forces against those, like Hamas, who resort to violence and do not recognize the right to exist of Israel.
The Israeli Government reacted defensively. The arrest requests? A “political murder” by a court like those of Nazi Germany, according to Netanyahu. Recognition of the Palestinian State? “A gold medal to the murderers and rapists of Hamas”, for Foreign Affairs, which called its ambassadors for consultations and summoned those of the three countries to a reprimand in which it showed them the unpleasant video of the kidnapping of several military women. The Hague decision? Israel is already avoiding harm to civilians and is working to get humanitarian aid into Gaza.
It is not, however, the only thing that has happened this week. Germany (Israel’s main European ally, which helps it defend itself against the charge of genocide and provides it with weapons) has made it clear that it would not disobey its legal obligation to arrest Netanyahu or Gallant, if necessary.
Italy has announced that it is resuming funding to the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA), which it suspended following accusations by Israel that its workers were involved in the Hamas attack. It is part of a trickle of similar announcements since, last month, an independent report by former French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna found no evidence and defended the mechanisms of UNRWA, destroying Israel’s campaign against the agency.
And the waves have caused the detachment of part of the floating dock built by the United States in the maritime waters of Gaza and presented as a great solution, now that the troops prevent the entry of aid through Rafah. It ended up about 40 kilometers further north, on the coast of the Israeli city of Ashdod, according to Israeli television channel 12.
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