Loops magazine said that Israel is suffering today, after about 8 months of war on Gaza, from humiliating decisions by international justice, because the right to self-defense does not allow anyone to be freed from international humanitarian law.
Pierre Haseke asked – in his column in the magazine – “Do the Israelis realize the extent of the disaster that befell them?” Pointing out that they lost the battle to win global public opinion, after the world had expressed to them its shock at the “scale and brutality” of the attack they were subjected to on October 7, 2023.
After nearly 8 months, Israel is receiving blows. Through humiliating decisions by international justice institutions, hostile clamor from student movements in the United States and Europe, and calls for a boycott that have remained marginal until now.
The first reaction – as the writer says – was to blame a world that is inherently hostile and to which anti-Semitism is returning again, which is what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu defiantly summed up on Holocaust Remembrance Day by saying, “We will fight alone if necessary.”
Collective punishment
The writer pointed out that this Israeli position is accompanied by a refusal to see the apparent reason for this growing hostility, which is the disgust aroused by the images coming from Gaza, the testimonies of the few humanitarian workers who went there, and the scale of the humanitarian catastrophe that befell the people of the Gaza Strip.
The writer explained that the strategy followed by the Israeli government and army since October 7 could only lead to a bad end. How could it not when it is based on excessive use of force and collective punishment of more than two million civilians under the pretext that fighters of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) are hiding? Among them, any post-war political solution is excluded, not to mention the presence of extremists seeking to reoccupy Gaza, or loudly dreaming of ethnic cleansing.
Perhaps this description of 8 months of war is unacceptable to Israelis who do not see the same images that we see abroad, as their main media ignores these images and avoids everything that would arouse sympathy with the “enemy.” The shock will be more severe when the press is allowed The international community entered Gaza and recounted the tragedy that occurred there.
In this context, the decisions of international justice seem incomprehensible to the Israelis, and the accusation of their prime minister, whom most of them hate, of committing genocide and crimes against humanity is incomprehensible to those who are still living the shock of October 7, and waiting for the return of the detainees.
However, what the judges of the United Nations International Court of Justice and the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court wanted to clarify is that the right to self-defense does not entitle anyone to be free from international humanitarian law.
Pierre Hase concluded by saying that rejecting these Sharia courts or wanting to impose sanctions on them, as the Americans announced, will only lead to widening the worrying gap between the West and the “Global South” that Moscow and Beijing are courting, so that the tragedy of war is coupled with a political disaster.