So, the ICJ has ruled:

THE COURT ,
Indicates the following provisional measures:
(1) By fifteen votes to two,
The State of Israel shall, in accordance with its obligations under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, in relation to Palestinians in Gaza, take all measures within its power to prevent the commission of all acts within the scope of Article II of this Convention, in particular:

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(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

The state of Israel shall ensure WITH IMMEDIATE EFFECT that its MILITARY does NOT commit any acts described in point 1.

The court will rule on whether or not a genocide is occurring in a month, at which point a lot more Palestinians will be dead, including from the Israeli engineered famine.

When Russia invaded the Ukraine, the ICJ ordered Russia out one month after the original invasion.

Of course, Russia ignored the ruling, just as Israel will—the genocide will continue, evidence will be destroyed and humanitarian assistance will not be provided.

The ICJ ruling matters because Israel survives due to support from the US and Europe. When that support goes away, so will Israel. Their crimes are not possible without the US shipping them arms 24/7, and their economy needs assistance from the West.

Anything that chips away at the support of various internal political groups in Western countries for the Israeli project thus matters because Israel support is a domestic issue.

Although people don’t like to come out and say it, there are a lot of rich Jews (no, don’t, this is backed up by the statistics) and a lot of them are Zionists, and money is political power. In the US evangelical Christians also support Israel. There is a lot of money and a lot of votes for politicians in letting Israel ethnic cleanse and genocide Palestinians.

(This does not, obviously, mean Jews are bad, or even Evangelical Christians. It means Zionists are bad, and there tend to be more Zionists in those two groups.)

Domestic political support in places like the US, Germany and France for Zionism is what matters. Anything that cuts away at the legitimacy of Zionism is thus dangerous to the ethnic cleansing and genocide program. Europeans, in particular, like to think they support international law and even the US drones on about the “rules based order” constantly.

Elites, at first, were unified in support of Israel’s actions in Gaza. The reason is simple: it’s seen as career and political suicide to oppose Zionism, and this perception is largely correct. Over time, however, Israel’s actions became so grossly disproportionate and their targeting of civilians, schools, hospitals and even children and babies, that more and more members of the elite felt they couldn’t support Israel.

But that doesn’t mean they’ll speak out against genocide, it means, in practice, that they are mostly silent: caught between the fact that opposing Israel is career suicide and that supporting an obvious genocide may also come back to haunt them.

Still, if they have cover, many of them would like to just abandon Israel. They don’t like being put in this position, and Israel has been particularly naked about its crimes: screaming them to heavens for all to see and making plausible deniability all but impossible.

So, the ICJ ruling is still a good thing, not because it can or will be enforced, but because it makes the cost of supporting Israel just a little higher.

And the day the West won’t or can’t support Israel, is the day their little apartheid state is done.

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