At the International Court of Justice, a case is underway against Israel for obstructing humanitarian aid into Gaza. “Israel is now seeking to destroy Palestinians as a group,” the court heard, “including by inflicting on them conditions of life calculated to bring about their destruction.” What’s more, “Israel appears set on destroying the very international framework created to ensure compliance with international law and accountability for its breach, with profound consequences that reverberate far beyond Palestine and Palestinians.”
CPT set up a program in Palestine in the aftermath of the 1994 Ibrahimi Mosque massacre in Al Khalil (Hebron), when Baruch Goldstein, born in Brooklyn, murdered 29 Palestinian worshippers. Itamar Ben-Gvir, now Israel’s National Security Minister, called Goldstein “a righteous man,” “a hero.” CPT Palestine reported this week on continued restrictions at the Ibrahimi Mosque and the violent expulsion of Palestinians from Masafer Yatta by settlers, in collusion with Israeli forces.
As the ICJ heard, this reverberates beyond Palestine. Last week, Ben-Gvir toured the US, meeting with senior Republican lawmakers at Mar-A-Lago who reportedly expressed support for his plans to bomb food and aid depots in Gaza. His visit was met with persistent protest. At a private lunch in a Manhattan steakhouse, a man hid in the bathroom for two hours before confronting him, telling him he would be “remembered as a Nazi.” Demonstrations dogged him, from Yale to Brooklyn to the Capitol.
In Brooklyn, a woman mistaken for a protester was surrounded by a mob of Ben-Gvir’s supporters chanting “Death to Arabs.” They kicked and spat on her, laughing, pelting her with objects. A sole cop looked panicked as he hurried her away.
It takes an active hand to build a culture of impunity. In December, lawyers submitted a dossier to the ICC arguing that Ben-Gvir should be prosecuted for incitement to genocide. Yet in the US, he enjoys free rein. Meanwhile, half the lawyers in the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division have resigned en masse over the prerogatives of its new Trump-appointed director, who declared the department would no longer “persecute police departments.” Staff were told instead to target “woke ideology” and “anti-Semitism”.
The shamelessness lays the machinery bare. The more our buried contradictions are dug up for all to see, the more ferocious the backlash. In 1970—“an age in which silence is not only criminal but suicidal”—James Baldwin wrote to a recently imprisoned Angela Davis. Struck by a picture of her in chains on the cover ofNewsweek, he asked why, when “one might have hoped that, by this hour, the very sight of chains on Black flesh” would be “intolerable,” people appeared more than ever “to glory in their chains.” The answer, he found, was that Davis represented a generational “revolution in Black consciousness”—one that had exploded the diktat that Black Americans “should consider themselves no better than animals.” And that had “frightened the nation to death.”
But “the secret is out: we are men!”
