There have been rumblings over the past few weeks that Nicaragua will join South Africa in the legal battle against Israel and its allies.
As has been widely reported, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) found that there is a plausible case that Israel is guilty of committing genocide, and an order has been issued to cease all killing of Palestinian civilians. If actually enforced —an apparently unlikely scenario— this order would amount to a ceasefire in all but name. If Israel continues to defy this order, as Prime Minister Netanyahu has promised it will, the next mode of resistance carried out in the courts of international humanitarian law will be to challenge those who continue to aid and abet the genocide.
In a conference convened by Iran last December, Nicaragua’s Government of Reconciliation and National Unity expressed its “militant solidarity with the Palestinian people and their just cause” and condemned Israel for “violating the entire system and the International Legal Institutionality.” Now that South Africa has taken the initiative to make a plausible case against Israel at the ICJ, Nicaragua is entering the fray by extending the case to include Israel’s allies for providing weapons and failing in their humanitarian duties by ceasing support for UNRWA.
As reported by Anadolu Agency, Nicaragua has “notified the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, and Canada ‘of its decision to hold them responsible under international law for gross and systematic violations to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, international humanitarian law and customary law, including the law of occupation in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, in particular the Gaza Strip.’”
A ruling against Israel’s allies in the West could prove troubling for Washington, and for the liberal establishment more generally. As Nicaraguans well know from their past successes in winning rulings against the U.S. at The Hague, the U.S. will veto any measure to enforce these rulings at the UN Security Council.
We must ask ourselves, Does the terrain of international humanitarian law belong to us?
Immediately upon Israel’s response to the October 7th Hamas attack, activists rallied for a ceasefire. This ceasefire coalition invoked terms such as war crimes, proportionality, genocide, among others – all of which have legal implications defined largely by international humanitarian law. It is understandable that people would seek an immediate means to intervene to stop the mass slaughter of the Palestinian people.
However, as argued by Eyal Weizman’s 2011 book The Least of All Possible Evils (covered in our January book club), the task of the International Court of Justice is not to end wars, but to ensure that the “necessary” brutality of modern warfare is moderated by choosing the “lesser evil” at every possible opportunity. The purpose of this moderation is to ensure the maximum efficiency of both imperialist violence and the ensuing imperialist rule. The terms invoked by anti-war activists (proportionality, war crimes, etc.) are the very same concepts that imperialist armies use as war doctrine to guide their soldiers and weapons systems.
Humanitarianism was the modus operandi of the siege on Gaza in 2007, when Israel set up the blockade that exists to this day. Israel cut off the Gazan economy from the rest of the world and restricted its population to living under permanent humanitarian governance. The humanitarian economy is based on calculations restricting food and fuel to the absolute minimum possible without causing a “humanitarian crisis.” The Israeli military set up specialized research teams to establish these minimum requirements and monitor their implementation. As a mode of governance, humanitarianism is the means by which Palestinian liberation is politically foreclosed, rendering its people wholly dependent on international humanitarian flows in perpetuity. Even the so-called “two-state solution” wouldn’t fundamentally change this dependent condition.
Today, Israel speaks of dispelling Palestinians from Gaza altogether on the basis of humanitarianism. A January 2024 CNN article quotes Gila Gamliel, Israel’s intelligence minister and a member of the ruling-party Likud, who sought to “promote the voluntary resettlement of Palestinians in Gaza, for humanitarian reasons, outside of the Strip.” That’s ethnic cleansing as humanitarianism, and such a maneuver shouldn’t surprise us. Often, humanitarian law is the very mechanism by which liberal states manage the brutalization, destruction, and exploitation of subordinated nations and peoples.
When Nicaragua condemns Israel and its allies for withdrawing support for humanitarian groups operating in Gaza, they are defending the immediate needs of Gazan civilians, but they are also entering into a process of negotiating over the necro-economy of the humanitarian war—who will be allowed to die, how many, how quickly, and so on. The short-term and immediate relief granted on humanitarian grounds is often a Pyrrhic victory. Liberation will not be achieved on this terrain, where too much is conceded before we’ve even uttered the first word.
Socialist politics require a radical transformation of society —the kind of radical transformation that would be required to build a new democracy in Palestine from the river to the sea.