Image is of legal adviser to Israel's foreign ministry Tal Becker and British jurist Malcolm Shaw at the ICJ hearing.
The ICJ case against Israel might not achieve much for the Palestinian cause directly, given that Israeli politicians have explicitly stated that the Hague will not stop them - and I believe them. The Resistance will be what stops them, and they are doing quite well for themselves. Hezbollah has hit highly sensitive and important Israeli military sites over the last couple weeks, and in general persist in several border attacks every day. The battles in Iraq and Syria also continue. Hamas remains largely intact, and is successfully forcing Israeli forces in the northern Gaza Strip to retreat, and other parts of the Gazan Resistance are continuing to battle down in Khan Yunis. And, last but not least, Yemen is firmly dedicated to the blockade, warding off another ship literally minutes before I started writing this paragraph.
What the ICJ is battling over isn't Palestine and Israel - not really - but the legitimacy of international law itself, and to what degree victimized countries can rely on it to solve problems, versus needing to take more militant routes for justice. In a weird sense, it might be an L for Israel either way. If international law sides with Palestine, then when Israel refuses to stop, it will invalidate international law. If international law sides with Israel, then it will invalidate international law. There is no conceivable way for the West to come out of this looking good.
The South African portion detailing Israeli atrocities against Gaza was largely ignored by the western media. They have instead, obviously, decided to focus on the Israeli portion. Their defense appears to amount to "We didn't do it, Hamas did it. And if we did do it, it doesn't matter, because that's just urban warfare for you. Please get this whole thing thrown out on a very dubious technicality so we don't have to advance to the next stage."
From Craig Murray, who has been physically going to the Hague:
It is important to realise this. Israel is hoping to win on their procedural points about existence of dispute, unilateral assurances and jurisdiction. The obvious nonsense they spoke about the damage to homes and infrastructure being caused by Hamas, trucks entering Gaza and casualty figures, was not serious. They did not expect the judges to believe any of this. The procedural points were for the court. The rest was mass propaganda for the media.
...I am sure the judges want to get out of this and they may go for the procedural points. But there is a real problem with Israel’s “no dispute” argument. If accepted, it would mean that a country committing genocide can simply not reply to a challenge, and then legal action will not be possible because no reply means “no dispute”. I hope that absurdity is obvious to the judges. But they may of course wish not to notice it…
What do I think will happen? Some sort of “compromise”. The judges will issue provisional measures different to South Africa’s request, asking Israel to continue to take measures to protect the civilian population, or some such guff. Doubtless the State Department have drafted something like this for President of the court Donoghoe already.
I hope I am wrong. I would hate to give up on international law. One thing I do know for certain. These two days in the Hague were absolutely crucial for deciding if there is any meaning left in notions of international law and human rights. I still believe action by the court could cause the US and UK to back off and provide some measure of relief. For now, let us all pray or wish, each in our way, for the children of Gaza.
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The Country of the Week is South Africa! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
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Israel-Palestine Conflict
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA daily-ish reports on Israel's destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news (and has automated posting when the person running it goes to sleep).
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.
English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.
Various sources that are covering the Ukraine conflict are also covering the one in Palestine, like Rybar.
Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Sources:
Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don't want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it's just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists' side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR's former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR's forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster's telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a 'propaganda tax', if you don't believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine Telegram Channels:
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
Yes the west is calling in favors but it has nothing to do with ICJ case, which doesn't really matter and the west/israel will ignore anyway. They're calling in favors for material war reasons, not court cases that don't impact them
Sure, ultimately they'd ignore it. Just the timing though. An order for a cease fire would have huge material, and geopolitical consequences
What consequences btw? The court orders Israel to enact a ceasefire and US/Israel ignore them. The normal countries condemn the blatant breach or international law. A UNSC emergency meeting and resolution is enacted to force compliance, US vetoes it.
Then what? Literally nothing changes, just like when Nicaragua won the ICJ case against the US and never saw a penny of the judgment
“This will show the world the international rules based order is based on a lie” yeah no shit we have thousands of examples already, how does 1,001 change anything?
Israel must be strategically defeated in the field. There’s no other solution. Nobody will join in to help Palestine except the Axis of Resistance. This court case won’t change the battle lines.
Thank you Mr. Proclaimer, you say these things assuming these views are my own. I dont understand the anger. I was just trying to spark conversation. I tend to agree with you. I'm not some lib all hung up over the ICJ if that's what you're thinking. However, I wouldn't say it is without consequences even militarily. It could potentially have some western nations suspend relations and aid and would also most importantly see the resistance step up attacks. It would also discourage western aligned states in the region from cooperation
The timing is due to their being an escalating regional war. ICJ is a minor sideshow.
Just a pet peeve of mine when people say something major is happening to "distract the narrative" from something way less important. Cranks and conspiracy theorists do this a lot because they are obsessed with "the truth" and "media narratives" and often completely miss the forest for the trees, drawing up elaborate plots instead of just admitting a major event is happening.
kinda like when the US brought up aliens and the reaction from some people was "oh, they're only doing this to distract from events in Ukraine/somewhere else" my sibling in christ, Americans stopped caring about the war after a month, let alone like a year
to go off on a bit of a tangent, at the end of the day, I do wonder sometimes how much propaganda actually shifts things. like, I'm not talking about, say, engineering a global situation where citizens of most countries want to study in the West and especially America in order to bring back liberal capitalist ideas and practices to their home countries - that's clearly at least quite impactful (though I think "if you DON'T do capitalism, then we'll sanction the fuck out of you" is the greater motivator). I mean in terms of the government saying shit like "this is a war for freedom and democracy" etc etc to their populations as the justification for events, or "we need to tighten our belts because the budget is low" when that's obviously bullshit (in the US most especially). as in, if a population in general needs conditions to reach X Level Of Badness for a revolutionary situation to become possible and perhaps even probable, how much does all the propaganda actually shift X? By 5%? By 50%?
because I can't personally name any situation where I can say "Oh, this situation would have been revolutionary, the material conditions were all there and the people were all ready, except the propaganda was just that good, that it prevented it from happening." Or, alternatively, "Oh, this situation might not have been revolutionary, but man, that country was just so bad at propaganda that the conditions didn't even need to get that bad for the revolution to start." often times when it appears that propaganda is making a large difference, it's just an artefact of a worldview not focussed enough on material conditions, or with its own mythology as to why a revolution did or did not happen that is disconnected from a more "objective" analysis, or just not being educated in how bad things got, or even being so bad at analysis that you believe that Very Special Good/Evil Guy magically persuaded the population to do Good/Bad thing
my inkling is that the propaganda feels quite overwhelming and very impactful when you're living under the government creating it, but once you're outside of the system or it's collapsed, you sorta realize "oh. I was complaining all the time that the people around me are brainwashed propagandized liberal subjects who love foreign wars just because the government said so, and that they were buying state propaganda hook line and sinker, and that's the reason why socialism isn't working, but in reality it was a combination of a very strong police+surveillance state making collective action very difficult; the built environment discouraging collective action; the public services being unable to easily facilitate mass action and instead encouraging a lot of car usage; and the incredibly financialized economy and much of the means of production being shifted abroad making it much harder to create leverage over the bourgeoisie compared to workers in the early 20th century who could physically seize factories making steel and guns and use them against the police - you can't do that with like, a funko pop factory and a bitcoin mining facility. those are the factors we had to overcome, and the fact that most of suburbia was comprised of crazed racists whose only goal in life was to become a landlord was just a symptom of the disease, and we needed to treat the disease and not the symptoms, so it was useless to yell at crazed suburban racists and attempt to teach them how to become human beings with empathy again and stop posting their idiotic opinions on reddit and twitter"
I know Roderic Day's redsails essay goes into this a lot, and about how people generally won't buy propaganda (without extreme coercion) if they don't have some level of implicit support for it, but my currently tired brain can't remember if he ever explicitly says what he thinks propaganda is like, really doing, if it isn't turning Good People into Bad People (to vastly oversimplify).
Are said crazed suburban racists doomed to forever be crazed and racist? While they're indeed only a symptom of a problem with a greater scope, they're still an immediate threat.
I think there's a difference between propaganda and ideological reproduction, which propaganda is but one form. The easiest example I could think of is American civic religion. American civic religion isn't really propagated through propaganda, but the civic religion is cultivated through educational and government institutions. The pledge of allegiance shouldn't be understood as a form of propaganda but a form of civic religious ritual that nurtures the American civic religion brainworms.
Israel apparently spent the week leading up to the hearing calling up as many countries as they could and begging (and/or threatening?) them to denounce it. I don't think it means nothing to them, even if it isn't all that critical to them. In the end it hurts their propaganda game, which obviously Israel (and the U.S.) does have some stake in.
I agree that the attacks on Yemen and possible covert actions in neighboring regions would probably be happening without the ICJ case. I do think they probably modified them and/or adjusted the time table due to the ICJ case, though. That the first bombing in Yemen coincided with one of the two days of the hearing is very unlikely to be just coincidence.