David Renton hails today’s ruling from the International Court of Justice

“The court concludes that the conditions are met.”

The decision of the ICJ to impose provisional measures is a vindication for everyone who spoke out against the war – for the Palestinians of course and above all – but also everyone who marched, and for the hundreds of people in Britain, and the tens of thousands of people worldwide who’ve faced the loss of their jobs, threats of jail or deportation for doing so. It creates the possibility of change for the better. We’re living in a world which is teetering on the brink of fascism, not of one war against Gaza, but of dozens of wars as nationalist leaders radicalise to the right. In every continent. Today’s decision is an attempt, on the part of a small group of strategically placed people to pull the handbrake.

From that perspective, here are my three reasons for delight, but also one note of caution.

FOR PALESTINE

Nothing that happened today can bring back the 26,000 people who have already died, or the 10,000 of them children. But it creates the possibility for a ceasefire. And, more important still, it creates the possibility that the people like in Gaza – all of who, without exception – are starving, are short of food and water, might survive the winter. For that to happen, Israel would have to open the border crossings, which remain closed. Which in turn would have to mean that Britain and the US and Israel’s other allies, who have refused to put any pressure on Netanyahu at all, would have to change course.

But, be clear, if that doesn’t happen – the death toll by the summer will many times higher than 30,000 people. The WHO reports that 93% of the population is starving. According to the UN, 4/5 of the hungriest people in the world are in Gaza. People are going to die by the tens of thousands unless pressure is put on Israel – and on Israel’s allies – to permit food to enter. Listening to the judges, this is what they wanted (it was actually a much larger part of their decision than it was of the oral advocacy before them): they want the armies withdrawn, the Palestinians fed. That process is made immensely easier by today’s decision.

FOR SOUTH AFRICA

There is a reason why the South African delegation of lawyers seemed to represent the people of the world: black Africans to the fore, Muslim women, an Irish woman, whereas the Israeli delegation of lawyers was white, was a middle aged white English barrister stumbling over his papers.

It is because South Africa is a country formed by struggle – perhaps the only state in the world which is in any significant sense the product of a revolution. Yes, a passive, incomplete, revolution. Yes, a revolution which handed over politics to two generations of kleptocrats, ones who would raid the state, and another who would hand it over to private business. But, despite all of that, many South African institutions remain shaped by the liberation struggle. It’s not exactly dual power, but it is something real, and in a world where the right are winning – it’s something to celebrate.

WE HAVE TO DEFEAT THE LIBERAL DAYDREAM ABOUT RULES-AND-EMPIRE

At every moment in recent times, when global politics has shifted to the right – the liberal parties had their hands on the machinery of power. In 2008, during the global banking crisis, which has set the tone for so much that has gone wrong since, the response to the crisis was forged by an alliance of Democrats in the US and the Labour Party in Britain.

You can see exactly the same combination at work today: it is Biden who is arming Israel, who is funding the bombs, who is ignoring Congress to do so. And it is Starmer, as our Prime Minister in waiting, who has been insisting here too that Britain will back Israel – no matter how many children die, in fact the more who die the better. That, at the end of the general election, there will be no change in foreign policy.

The liberals can see the growing power of the global far right, and in relation to it they demand that we vote for them, because only the liberal stands up for a rules-based international order which might restrain the kleptocracy of a super-rich who tell themselves don’t even need workers in their factories – they can just invest in finance, they can survive behind the walls of their gated communities, even if that means the whole world burns.

But liberalism does not create a system of rules which would restrain the freedom of capital to do whatever it likes. Rather, for several years, liberalism has been complicit in the destruction of those rules. Faced with the survival of the injunction against genocide – the US and the British ruling class have said, they prefer empire. But you can’t have both.

You can’t pretend that Israel is a part of the liberal order, when it is led by Netanyahu, where it is using all its diplomatic power to boost the far right in the US, and in Eastern Europe.

Somehow, we have to break this fixation that rules-and-empire is a single, joint, strategy to save the world, when rather it is the integration of the rules and imperial power which is the reason why we’re all in the mess.

CAUTION: DON’T SLEEPWALK AWAY FROM TODAY’S DECISION

What I expect to see next is a significant small block of people break away, and try to re-establish new strategies of justifying not at end to the war but its continuation. The Jonathan Freedlands of the world, the people who dominate on the board of the BBC, the people who take a lead from them – they’ll say that everything in Israel is very complex. That the ICJ has done Israel a huge favour. They’ll lie and pretend that a government – which is nothing other than Trumpism in the Middle East, and with even more guns – is still part of an answer. They’ll point to the lawyers stationed in the Israeli army, and they’ll say that after 26 January everything has changed.

To which the answers, I’d say, are simple: either the Palestinians are still being bombed, or the bombing has stopped. Either the Israeli army has withdrawn, or the war continues. Either food is arriving in Gaza at an unprecedented rate – or what is taking place in front of us will still be a genocide. And will still be the first of many yet to come.

David Renton is a barrister and the author of Against the Law: Why Justice Requires Fewer Laws and a Smaller State, which was published by Repeater in 2022 and of Horatio Bottomley and the Far Right Before Fascism, which was published by Routledge in November 2022. This article was taken from his blog Lives; Running and was originally published here.

Image: International Court of Justice. Source: Netherlands-4540 – International Court of Justice. Author: Dennis Jarvis, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.