Why is Israel the only state that is ever charged with the crime of hunger? ━ the European conservative

Last week in the Hague, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) began to hear a case against Israel of South Africa, which accused Israel of the genocide and tried to force Israel to renew the collaboration with agencies of the United Nations and to restart the help in Gaza. In addition, two Israeli leaders, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, are currently examined by the International Criminal Court (ICC) because of the crime of hunger in Gaza. Netanyahu and Gallant are the first people who have ever been accused by the International Criminal Court because of the crime of war crime, although this case was postponed due to the question of jurisdiction.

Why is Israel the only state ever charged with hunger? This seems to be strange, since suffering and hunger are initially inevitable consequences of war – often due to conscious politics – and secondly a place in the world where there is no hunger is Gaza.

Nevertheless, human rights lawyers make a special case of Israel to prove that hunger as a war crime can be prosecuted. As Boyd van Dijk, author of Preparation for the war: the creation of the Geneva Convention, Say: “Public explanations of Israeli political leadership have transformed the hunger of a war crime that has never been persecuted in what some scientists of international law” described low fruits “.

Over the centuries of warfare, blockade and siege in enemy cities and states was a central part of the wars. Until the end of the Second World War, the tactics of blocking food to a country with which they are war would have been regarded as controversial on no side. As Boyd van Dijk says in Israel, Gaza and the hunger weapon

From 1914, the United Kingdom imposed all the central powers of a navy blockade, which ultimately led hundreds of thousands of deaths. In fact, the tactic, which is known in German, was so terribly effective HungerThat both the winner and the war prize, which had caused Germany and Austria-Hungary in 1918, defeated it.

During the Second World War, hunger campaigns, if at all, became even more important, and both the Allies and the Axis powers expressly gave that their goal was to kill enemy civilians. As part of its all-out war against Japan, the United States, for example, have the operation hunger, a submarine and air blockade that cut off food and raw materials.

In the 1960s, the US strategy in Vietnam included burning rice fields to cause difficulties and hunger to cause the Vietnamese who supported the insurgent Viet -Cong fighters. Even today, the western sanctions against Russia to Ukraine aim to disrupt trade and cripple the Russian economy (ie GDP). This will have a impoverished influence on the Russian people.

Starting with the Geneva Convention of 1949 and 1977, the description of hunger was defined and expanded by new protocols, but nobody had been charged with this crime until 2024.

There is widespread hunger and hunger in the world. In the Sudan and other parts of the world torn from war, many millions of people are faced with hunger due to the wars caused by war. Oxfam estimates that almost a billion people go to bed hungry worldwide.

In fact, a place where there is no hunger is in Gaza. As part of his campaign against Hamas, Israel has indeed blocked food and other help in Gaza and freed the hostages held by Hamas since October 7, 2023. And since the last ceasefire in March, Israel has blocked all help in Gaza. Israel's case is that the UN help is exploited by Hamas and supports the terrorist campaign against Israel.

But even this blockade did not lead too hungry in Gaza. This has not stopped Hamas that what Israel is doing is a hunger war or the global media prevented from reporting the claim of genocidal Islamists as a fact.

During the war, the Gazans undoubtedly suffered poorly, as the population always does. Despite the periodic claims of relief agencies that hunger is imminent, Israel has raised its blockade to enable enough food and medicine to prevent gaza strips to prevent hunger from taking place. Israel is currently negotiating with aid organizations to extend the auxiliary flow into Gaza Strip, but under Israeli control, Hamas cannot take control of control and benefit from its distribution.

So if there is no hunger in Gaza, how can there be a case against Israel and its leaders? And why is Israel classified as “low -hanging fruits” by human rights lawyers and others who are looking for opportunities to pursue hunger against Israel on the ICC and ICJ?

One reason for this is that some Israeli guides, including Gallant after the massacre of October 7, 2023, have publicly declared that the Gazaners should suffer. Two days after October 7, Gallant said: “I ordered a complete siege on the Gaza strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly.”

Unusual words of a man whose country had just suffered a terrible orgy of rape and murder and took a hundred or more hostages. This declaration is regarded by ICC prosecutors as an explanation of the genocidal intent. The intention is the key word in the indictment, since even the lawyers of the ICC have to accept that hunger is a by -product of all wars. For successful law enforcement, there must be the intention of killing the population and committing genocide. Unfortunately, Gallant's statement, born out of anger, did not translate into a deliberate policy of hunger.

The second reason why Israel is seen as “low -hanging fruits” is that it was sentenced to Hamas before the court of the Western opinion and elsewhere as a culprit party. The case against Israel and its leaders only makes sense in the further context of a widespread hostility to Israel in the United Nations and throughout the International Community. Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East and the only Jewish state on earth, the country that has entered and slaughtered and raped its citizens has little international sympathy. Israel is the lowest common denominator for international outrage. This is the greater picture that encouraged the ICC to pursue his case against Israel.

The crisis of international institutions

There is a third reason in the case of the ICC against Israel. The time of relative peace in the west since the Second World War enabled the growth of an international lobby of progressive lawyers, non -governmental organizations and other activist forces that concentrated around the United Nations that were pushed to a universalist approach to the war rules and opposed the sovereignty of the states. In recent years, the global consensus has fragmentated after the war that promoted the ICJ and later the ICC. So much that the United States, under whose global dominance the United Nations was founded, started sanctions against the ICC itself because it has biased against the USA and Israel.

The globalistic attack on sovereignty is deeply undemocratic, as Melanie Phillips argued

At a lower level, the idea that developed according to the Holocaust that international laws and institutions would provide justice was basically incorrect. The law results in its authority of parliaments that represent the will of the people. International laws and tribunals, which have no such inherent jurisdiction, lack this legitimacy and are therefore more in instruments of politics than in law.

The ICC and the institutions like it are on the back foot. Even when it was founded, countries that represent more than half of the world's population refused to ratify membership in the ICC, including the USA, China, India and Russia. Hungary has just welcomed and announced a visit from Netanyahu to leave the ICC. In our world of fragmentation of alliances, it is unlikely that post -war institutions can continue to have a lot of influence.

In this context, the persecution of Israel has become a test case for the credibility of the ICC/ICJ. This was made clear in the ICJ hearing against Israel in Haag last week than the Guardian Reports, blinne ní ghrálaigh, the lawyer of the Palestinian state, described Israel's actions as

“Antithic to a peace -loving state”. She said the restrictions on “the fundamental rights of the Palestinian people, [Israel’s] Attacks on the United Nations and on UN civil servants, property and premises, the intentional disability of the work of the organization and their attempt to destroy an entire UN, “were” unprecedented in the history of the organization “. That the international order crumbled and expressed that “the persistent desperate hope that the international law was finally established by the Moral Act”. Israel to allow help to enter Gaza and by restoring the cooperation with Unkarfung.

The writing of ICC and ICJ never went far, and successful law enforcement was only a few and far apart. Let's hope that it will continue to shrink so that it cannot credibly condemn the sovereign state of Israel to defend itself.