Israel is Guilty of Genocide but the Law Won’t Save Us

South Africa’s presentation of a case for genocide against the state of Israel before the International Court of Justice in the Netherlands last week shed a crucial spotlight on the horrific conditions Palestinians continue to endure. Since Israel began its war against Gaza in October, more than 23,000 Palestinians have been killed, more than 50,000 injured, and 1.8 million people have been displaced from their homes. More than 9,000 Palestinian children have been killed. Gaza is on the brink of famine. Disease in Gaza runs rampant.

These details were all part of the South African legal case claiming that Israel is in violation of international law.  Israel is party to the 1948 international genocide convention, which classifies the intentional killing “in whole or in part,” of a specific group of people. The genocide convention was part of the United Nation’s 1948 Declaration of Universal Human Rights intended, in theory, to discourage a second Holocaust like the one perpetrated by Germany against 6 million Jewish people.

The establishment of the United Nations in 1945 was presented to the world as an attempt to create international standards of law or what is known as a “rules-based international order.” The International Court of Justice where South Africa is presenting its case for genocide is in effect the United Nations courtroom.

But Marxists argue that what is known as the “law” is itself a tool created by capitalist states to create, maintain and preserve the power of the wealthy. As one legal scholar puts it, the law “is the arm of the state apparatus which provides on a daily basis the standard institutional mechanism for the repression of the subordinate classes.” For example, most laws protect wealth and private property. While capitalist owners “legally” steal the value of your labor to enrich themselves, the quickest way for workers and poor people to go to jail is to “steal” anything from capitalists owners.

When it comes to international law, those too were created by wealthy capitalist states meant to protect and preserve their own wealth and power. For example, even though the United Nations created a genocide convention, it did nothing to challenge or dismantle the system of colonialism that existed when the U.N. came into being. It was perfectly happy to create laws pretending to create “universal” human rights when many people in the world still had almost no rights at all.

Israel provides an excellent example of this double standard. Since it was created in 1948, the United Nations has passed numerous resolutions condemning its supposed violations of international law against the Palestinians. Yet on more than 40 different occasions, the United States has vetoed these resolutions, rendering them useless. It has done so to protect its economic interests—like Middle Eastern Oil—through which Israeli force helps it gain access.

This is in keeping with the Marxist analysis of law, which identifies how bourgeois legality “disguises the presence of class domination behind the mask of formal equality of access to power.”

In fact, the hearings before the International Court of Justice are full of legal hypocrisy rooted in capitalist interests. The hearings are taking place in The Netherlands, one of the countries that participated in the bombing of Yemen—the same day as the hearings themselves. Those bombings were to protect Israel from the Houthis, who have attacked Red Sea shipping lines to protest Israel’s bombing of Gaza. In other words, the bombings were to protect private property. Meanwhile, the government of South Africa, which is bringing the charge of genocide against Israel, has itself participated in the brutal repression and killing of its own people and not been held accountable. In 2012, for instance, police shot down and murdered 34 striking miners by order of the government during the Markana Massacre.

So, while it is good that Israel’s crimes of genocide and US complicity are being publicized for the world to see, we as revolutionaries should understand that capitalist states, bourgeois courts, and international law will not and can not stop US imperialism, Zionist state and settler violence, or bring forth our liberation in any way. We have to organize to do this ourselves.