What can I do? Many of us have repeatedly asked this question in the past months. We predicted the revolution would not be televised; we did not anticipate the genocide would.
Scholars of anti-colonialism were well versed in Europe’s history of horrors. We knew of the German annihilation of the Herero and the Nama; we wrote about the Indigenous peoples the French filled with gunpowder and blew up and of the ones the British tossed into the ocean—while alive—to lighten the cargo (and thereafter submitted an insurance claim for the loss of ‘chattel’). We taught the Nuremberg trials as an example of international law’s selective accountability, activated when Europeans brutalised other Europeans. We even watched videos of Israeli soldiers boasting of raping children during the Nakba, the pride and glee still palpable decades later.
Yet, despite our knowledge of history, we were ill-prepared for the reality of rows of lifeless infants, smashed like porcelain dolls. We could not fathom hundreds of children undergoing amputations without anaesthesia—I still can’t knowing I would succumb to the pain or be psychologically mutilated going forward. Most of all, we could only gawk as Biden and Trudeau, Sunak and Macron, Borrell and van der Leyen, and the near totality of the Euroamerican journalistic class marshalled pretences to excuse the barbarism ‘the most moral army in the world’® was committing with their help. Their statements echoed grimly with the rationalisations uttered by their ancestors, verifying that today’s politicos are much like yesterday’s, regretting nothing about the racialised violence they visit upon others.
Continue reading at https://opiniojuris.org/2024/01/09/at-worlds-end-palestine-the-icj-and-a-new-dawn-in-international-law/