ISRAEL PLEADS GUILTY

Ladies and Gentlemen of the Court,

A relationship of reciprocity exists between a democratic state and its citizens, surpassing the theories that legal scholars have put forth to justify the existence of any state. Elected leaders make decisions that bind those who have mandated them, encompassing all citizens, whether they exercise their right to vote or not.

This establishes a shared responsibility, for better or worse, extending beyond what you are expected to rule on. Modern Law, derived from ancient rights and cleansed of collective responsibility, has evolved around individual accountability. The notion of collective responsibility defined by a passport would be considered scandalously alien to it.

The horizon of a shared responsibility lies beyond whatever verdict you may establish. However, it remains present in the minds of our accusers and those who defend against them. You may have noticed that the ongoing procedure is unprecedented in the History of your institution regarding the allegations at hand. Equally unprecedented is the proportion of condemnations voiced by the United Nations in its various bodies aimed at the sole state on earth representing the Jewish people.

Let's not obscure the truth: this accusation, if we may say so, targets the entire Jewish community, as the State of Israel is considered, in the eyes of its detractors, the Jewish embodiment among nations.

The International Court of Justice, presided over by your esteemed leadership, was established in June 1945 through the United Nations Charter. Among its primary missions is the resolution, under International Law, of legal disputes brought before it by states, whether their governance is genuinely democratic or not.

I won't presume to list the UN member states, characterize their modes of operation, or, most importantly, compile the lengthy and distressing catalog of humanitarian law and laws of war violations committed by many of these states. Regrettably, in the absence of sufficient political interests, numerous transgressions have gone unnoticed by your tribunal without any proceedings brought to its attention.

On December 29, 2023, South Africa submitted an application against the State of Israel concerning alleged breaches by the latter of its obligations under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide concerning the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

The application also included a request for provisional measures, filed by Article 41 of the Court's Statute and Articles 73, 74, and 75 of its Rules of Procedure. In this request, South Africa urged the Court to indicate provisional measures as a "protection against further serious and irreparable harm to the rights that the Palestinian people derive from the Genocide Convention" and to "ensure that Israel complies with its obligations under the convention not to commit genocide and to prevent and punish genocide."

"By paragraph 2 of Article 60 of the Court's Rules of Procedure, and for the reasons presented during the hearing on January 12, 2024, as well as any other reasons the Court may deem appropriate, the State of Israel has asked the Court: 1) to reject the request for provisional measures submitted by South Africa, and 2) to remove the case from its docket."

This is the sequence of events, presented in its most neutrally legal aspect, as of the moment I write to you. As an Israeli citizen, I have participated in the democratic process in my country. Therefore, as I have attempted to demonstrate, I find myself under accusation by South Africa.

In my name alone, I speak here, but I ask you, Ladies and Gentlemen of the Court, to perceive it as the voice of many of my sisters and brothers, co-accused. I humbly request you to recognize it as a voice, or rather a polyphony, echoing long before your tribunal came into existence, emerging in the aftermath of the Second World War.

These voices belong to our mothers and fathers, uncles and aunts, and grandparents. Ultimately, it is the Jew that our enemies, on both the military and legal fronts, identify as such. They make no secret of it; no one is deceived. Thus, as a member of this people with a profound history, I will allow myself to present not a line of defense, but one of self-accusation. With caution, I use the plural form of the first person.

We plead guilty.

Rather than invoking illusory mitigating circumstances, we present to you, O judges, the admission of our complete and unequivocal guilt. This guilt is so undeniable for those willing to take the time to analyze the charges in the context of the long term that it seems legitimate to begin a digression now to trace, in our long History, the roots of the evil that you are tasked with eradicating. Indeed, we are guilty not only of the specific crimes we are charged with before you but of many others as well. It is essential to mention these to fully grasp the extent of our guilt.

Let us openly declare to the representatives of the United Nations that we are guilty of believing in humanity, guilty of believing in Justice, and guilty of having offered you the most fundamental mechanisms of it.

Yes, esteemed magistrates, we are guilty of these wrongs since Abraham, facing the world, proclaimed the primacy of Law over war, the freedom of Man in a world dictated by stars and idols, and the possibility for the Just to save the city. Guilty of taking so idealistic a vision of Justice, no potentate, be it king or emperor, could evade it.

Guilty still of crafting a legal system that applied not only to our civilization but also to others. Guilty of a moralized vision of relations between individuals and peoples, inviting them to respect the Noahide laws, among which stands the obligation to establish courts of Justice.

Before you, we cannot escape our overwhelming responsibility. Thus, we stand guilty of believing in humanity without imposing our religion upon it, of contemplating the universality of Law without applying restrictive frameworks of universalism to others.

Since time immemorial, we have been guilty of proclaiming that the Law would pierce through the mountain. Guilty still of subscribing to the idea of moral progress, combined with the concept of values common to all humanity and the very notion of humanity as a co-responsible entity. Upon closer inspection, these form the foundation upon which the Court, summoned to judge us through your sharp minds, stands. Indeed, guilty as we are for not perishing in the greatest genocide, an actual genocide with a plan, we are undeniably guilty through the action of some members of our people to have provided the conceptual tools for you to introduce into jurisprudence the notion of genocide and, sadly, its corollary, the crime against humanity.

Our guilt, you will agree, when examined through the lens of our regrettable History, leaves no room for doubt. Our Prophets, too, were guilty of calling for Justice, and we perpetuate their crime by not losing hope that the world can be repaired.

The religions that have claimed allegiance to our texts, abruptly turning against us by rendering them obsolete and attempting, in the process, to eliminate us physically, can be seen as pieces of evidence. We are convinced that following their example, you will turn Love and Strict Justice, Compassion and Submission to the Law against us.

Rather than dwelling on the past, let us, in the spirit of full confession, list the contemporary evidence of our guilt. We continue to place the question of law at the center of our experience and tirelessly dissect it to better understand its contours. Formally, let us not forget that it is the Zionist project that is to be condemned, as it was championed by the Jewish people, redefining their inevitably guilty relationship with themselves and the nations.

You judge states and their leaders, as we have understood, just as we have understood that certain groups escape your scrutinizing gaze, given that the war led by Iran is played out in the arena of asymmetric conflict. You only judge constituted states, as our South African accusers so magnificently reminded us when confronted with the actions of Hamas (which we would not dare call crimes, for fear of diminishing our own). Therefore, we will not have the audacity to remind your honors of what could constitute explicit calls for genocide in this case, be it in the Charter of Hamas, the motto of the Houthis, or the calls for the murder of the leaders of Hizbullah. We will not mention the Iranian leaders, as such a maneuver, you would have well understood, would be, at best, dilatory.

No, we cannot evade the statement of our guilty actions, nor the inevitable collective punishment they would call for in a less perfect system than yours, one where, for example, upon reading your verdict, crowds could express their hatred for the Jew, forgetting that we are only discussing the responsibilities of a state and its leaders. Any confusion between the Jews as a people and the state they have established would be a result of bad faith, ours, obviously.

We are indeed guilty since our guilty return to the land of our guilty ancestors for not having measured up to our enemies. Sufficient blame cannot be placed upon us for daring to evoke, in our Declaration of Independence, the ideals that we believed were yours before the nations diluted the meaning of the word 'genocide.' Guiltily, we wanted this state 'based on the principles of justice, freedom, and peace, as taught by the Hebrew prophets.' Wickedly, we wished for it to 'maintain the full political and social equality of all its citizens without distinction of race, religion, or sex; guarantee the full freedom of conscience, worship, education, and culture; ensure the inviolability and sanctity of churches and holy places of all religions,' and, to top it off with disgrace, that it 'dedicates its efforts to the realization of the principles of the United Nations Charter.' Our guilt is evident. The only merit you may consider is our candor. Unless, of course, that condemns us further: is there a worse criminal than one who claims responsibility for his misdeed?

The stain that disfigures us is evident to those who can read: "We extend our hand in peace and friendship to all neighboring states and their peoples and invite them to cooperate with the independent Jewish nation for the common good." Who, in 1948, coming out of the genocide (which we will not discuss here, aware that we are the only community that cannot invoke its memory), could reach out to their belligerent neighbors? Only an ontologically guilty people, guilty also of allowing the development of an Arab minority within, of not practicing ethnic cleansing, as was prevalent in Europe, north of the Indian Peninsula, and throughout the Arab world that forcibly rid itself of its guilty Jews. How could we escape the verdict of the Nations, guilty as we are of not doing what the Turks did in Armenia, the European nations in Africa (yes, in Africa, that colonized continent enslaved by those who will never be guilty in the eyes of those who, after decolonization, made guilt the foundation of their conscience before finding in us more perfect culprits)? Let us cast off our responsibility for not conforming to nations' standards. If, in the face of the murder of our children, we had behaved like any other group throughout History, including the most contemporary, you know that you would not be searching for vague intentions in this or that statement. Instead, our enemies would have been obliterated from the face of the earth. Yet, it must be admitted: in this regard, too, we have shown ourselves outrageously guilty.

Therefore, we have truly earned our place as culprits before you. So that you do not grant us the benefit of the doubt, we assert that our minds are still filled with projects that are elsewhere unspeakable: to transform humanity, to make it good. Please consider, noble magistrates, that we are not only guilty but, especially in light of our numerous relapses, terribly dangerous. It is evident that we will continue our path in what is reprehensible.

Throughout our long and culpable History, in which we have outlined a few condemnable chapters with broad strokes, we have developed, concealed within the culpable Jewish humor and its atrocious self-deprecation, the most shameful of traits: irony.

Therefore, we humbly withdraw from your judgment, from that of your peers, to stand dignified before the Man of tomorrow: the one who will have understood that words have meaning, that Justice is a project, and that History has a direction. And, facing him, facing you and all our accusers, we will strive, today as yesterday, to live up to our name. Israel!

Joel Hanhart, Jerusalem, January 14, 2024