Brooke Goldstein and Gerard Filitti
Jerusalem Post, Jan. 12, 2024
“… appeasing Israel’s critics (let alone its enemies) has never worked, and appointing a judicial activist who seems to believe in expanding, rather than limiting, a court’s powers (he killed the Israeli Supreme Court’s standing test and increased the range of matters deemed justiciable) is imprudent, given Israel’s interest in limiting its exposure to the ICJ.”
Wars are not won by defending an attack on terms dictated by one’s enemy. Israel is at war, not just with terrorist organizations that seek the genocide of the Jewish people, but with terrorist supporters who abuse the international legal system to wage lawfare against it.
South Africa – a country in which Jew-hatred is rampant – filed a petition with the International Court of Justice (ICJ) spuriously alleging, of all things, that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. The same Gaza whose Arab population has grown by the hundreds of thousands since Israel forcibly evicted every last Jewish person in 2005. This petition, which seeks to restrain Israel’s right to defend its civilian population from genocidal attacks like those of Oct. 7, is the very essence of lawfare, the abuse of the law as a weapon of war.
Responding to this lawfare “symmetrically” – by defending against these claims before the ICJ – is not in Israel’s interests. Simply put, even if Israel “wins,” it will be forced to play again, over and over again, until it loses. And if (when) Israel loses, a further precedent will be set: the rights of all democratic countries to defend their people will be severely undermined.
Israel shouldn’t respond to the ICJ
Clearly, a different response is needed. The only way to win a war in which the terms of engagement are stacked against you is asymmetrically. Or, to put it differently, the only way to win a rigged game is to not play at all.
… [To read the full article, click here]