By failing to stop the Gaza genocide, the ICJ is working exactly as intended
Israeli soldiers operating in Rafah, southern Gaza, 15 July 2024.
Emilio Dabed writes in +972 on 16 July 2024:
Millions worldwide are appalled by what they see as the total failure of the international legal order to prevent Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Despite major cases before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Court (ICC), there is a growing sense of frustration that the law has not done its job. While understandable, this outrage is based on a fundamental misconception that international law’s objective is to eradicate violence; that may be what the UN Charter promises, but it is not what international law is expected to do nor what it actually does.
The shock and anger at these seemingly futile legal developments, as the philosopher Walter Benjamin would say about our concept of history, is largely the result of an untenable view of the international legal order itself. This order is not failing in Gaza, but is in fact yielding the very fruits it was meant to produce. The genocide of Palestinians has not stopped because all things are working exactly as intended.
Far from ending war, the international legal system has been constructed and functions to administer it. The system does not simply do this in a deterministic or blind way; the concept of administration of violence refers to the dynamics by which imperial and colonial parameters of what is legitimate and illegitimate violence are introduced into the law: what kind of violence can be supported or must be rejected or criminalized, and who can or cannot defend themselves. And at the same time, the law silences the very violence that it inflict