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Lydia Polgreen

By Lydia Polgreen

Opinion Columnist

Over the past month, we’ve watched an astonishing, high-stakes global drama play out in The Hague. A group of countries from the poorer, less powerful bloc some call the Global South, led by South Africa, dragged the government of Israel and by extension its rich, powerful allies into the top court of that order, and accused Israel of prosecuting a brutal war in Gaza that is “genocidal in character.”

The responses to this presentation from the leading nations of the Western rules-based order were quick and blunt.

“Completely unjustified and wrong,” said a statement from Rishi Sunak, Britain’s prime minister.

“Meritless, counterproductive, and completely without any basis in fact whatsoever,” said John Kirby, spokesman for the United States National Security Council.

“The accusation has no basis in fact,” a German government spokesman said, adding that Germany opposed the “political instrumentalization” of the genocide statute.

But on Friday, that court had its say, issuing a sober and careful provisional ruling that doubled as a rebuke to those dismissals. In granting provisional measures, the court affirmed that some of South Africa’s allegations were plausible, and called on Israel to take immediate steps to protect civilians, increase the amount of humanitarian aid and punish officials who engaged in violent and incendiary speech. The court stopped short of calling for a cease-fire, but it granted South Africa’s request for provisional measures to prevent further civilian death. For the most part, the court ruled in favor of the Global South.

Accusing the state created in the aftermath of the slaughter that required the coinage of the term genocide is a serious step. Scholars of genocide have raised alarms about statements from Israeli leaders and its conduct in the war while stopping short of calling the killing genocide. Some have welcomed South Africa’s application as a necessary step to preventing genocide.

The court was not asked to rule on whether Israel had in fact committed genocide, a matter that is likely to take years to adjudicate. Whatever the eventual outcome of the case, it sets up an epic battle over the meaning and values of the so-called rules-based order. If these rules don’t apply when powerful countries don’t want them to, are they rules at all?

“As long as those who make rules enforce them against others while believing that they and their allies are above those rules, the international governance system is in trouble,” Thuli Madonsela, one of South Africa’s leading legal minds and an architect of its post-apartheid constitution, told me. “We say these rules are the rules when Russia invades Ukraine, or when the Rohingya are being massacred by Myanmar, but if it’s now Israel butchering Palestinians, depriving them of food, displacing them en masse, then the rules don’t apply and who ever tries to apply the rules is antisemitic? It is really putting those rules in jeopardy.”

Reading the document South Africa prepared, I wondered if the leaders of the Western world who dismissed the allegations out of hand had read the same evidence that I had. It is a harrowing chronicle of a charnel house of horrors that shows in detail how Palestinians in........

© The New York Times