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There's nothing in David Swanson's lopsided screed today's Opednews about the ICJ's ruling about Hamas and its actions aside from this weak promise, more like a suggestion:
"Hamas said that it would cease fire if Israel does, and release all prisoners if Israel does."
As usual, Hamas and its supporters get a pass from the U.N. and in this case, its court.
The ruling is not as terrible as it could have been since it did not call for unilateral end to Israel's self-defense. But the conditions imposed on Israel in an urban warfare setting are so unrealistic that it might just as well have done so.
To be clear, and according to the U.N. itself: in urban warfare, the ratio of civilians to combatants killed is typically 9:1. In Gaza, thanks entirely to Israel's preventative actions, the ratio is 1.5:1, probably a record low for this kind of intense urban warfare in modern times. It's clear that many Hamas members are slipping away with civilians or using them as human shields, whenever Israel tries to prevent civilian deaths, postponing or making it ultimately impossible for Israel to rid Gaza of Hamas and its threat to the very existence of Israel - which, of course, is exactly what Hamas is committed to doing, in its charter, words, and deeds. The only genocide practiced is from Hamas, notably but far from exclusively, when Hamas attacked Israel on October 7th. It continues to attack Israel, firing 1,000s of rockets - some of which malfunction and land in Gaza, causing death and destruction that is then blamed on Israel too, by Hamas and its too credulous media supporters.
Those who claim to want to protect human life from loss or maiming are hypocrites if they do not in at least equally loud and consistent voices, call for Hamas to surrender and release all hostages who, unlike legitimate prisoners in Israel, have committed no crimes and were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Some of them employed and tried to help Palestinians who crossed the Gaza border daily to have better lives; i.e. they were from Israel's rapidly disappearing pro-peace "Left." That has all stopped now, and will probably never resume, as Israel does all that is necessary to preserve its existence. It should be remembered, but seldom is, that the region's lands of Arabs are Islamic states to a greater or lesser degree, and they occupy geographically an area 800 times as large as Israel. If they wanted to make a land for Palestinians, they could have easily done so and barely noticed the effort, geographically, economically, and culturally. They - including Jordan which is now majority Palestinian, and Egypt, which rigidly closes its border with Gaza while Israel has opened two border crossings that the U.N. and others have failed to supply sufficient aid and food through - have chosen not to, for decades. It's not hard to understand why, since everywhere Palestinians have gone, they have tried to revolt or even overthrow their host governments. But it's more than that: Islamic countries in that region are among the most repressive regimes on Earth, and the Palestinians serve as useful pawns to distract their own populace from rebelling against the dire conditions in those countries. It's a virtually direct relationship between tyranny (what is now called "authoritarianism" in the too apologetic West) and Islamic rule. The more there is of the latter, the more there is of the former. So-called progressives are clueless, and they incredibly fail to recognize that the freedoms they enjoy would be most likely to be preserved in Israel and most likely to be lost in any of the Islamic countries they side with, and their lives would most likely be lost altogether in regions like Gaza. Today's progressives, while failing to identify what river or sea is meant in the oft-repeated mantra "From the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free!" are siding with the least progressive and most racist regimes on Earth. The history of Arab on African/Black people's is one of the most brutal in history, yet African Americans somehow think the ordinary Arab struggle to escape the yoke of oppression is theirs too. It defies both logic and history. So does this ruling from the ICJ.
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