A moral crossroads for the West ( canadiandimension.com )

If Netanyahu is facing his Rubicon, the West has finally arrived at its own moral crossroads. After months of uncritical support for Israel’s assault on Gaza and weeks of equivocation as the magnitude of its inhumanity has become undeniable, there is still time to draw back from the abyss and defend the post-war order whose highest legal authority is the ICJ.

Seven weeks have now passed since the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague ruled that South Africa’s accusation that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza was “plausible.” A final verdict may take years. But on January 26, the ICJ imposed a number of “provisional measures” aimed at “preserving … the right of the Palestinians in Gaza to be protected from acts of genocide” (ICJ report, ¶59).

By a majority of 15 judges to two, the world’s highest court instructed Israel among other things to take “all measures within its power” to prevent:

a killing members of the group
b causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group
c deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part and
d imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group
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