RSS
Israel faces charges of genocide at the International Court of Justice. Here’s why, and how Israel will respond.

WASHINGTON (JTA) — Perhaps the most famous court case in Israel history was the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the architects of the Holocaust. Next week, more than 60 years later, lawyers for the Israeli government will again grapple with an allegation of genocide — but this time as defendants and not as prosecutors.
That grim history helps explain why Israel has chosen to engage with the International Court of Justice, which will weigh a claim by South Africa that Israel is committing genocide in its war against Hamas in Gaza. Israel is furious at the accusation, which it called a perversion of the genocide charge.
The ICJ will base its judgment on the 1948 U.N. Genocide Convention, which Israel joined almost as soon as the state was established because the convention was written in the wake of the Holocaust, in hopes of preventing another genocide.
“Israel decided to send a legal team because this is an outrageous application by South Africa and we will defend ourselves against those lies,” Lior Hayat, the spokesman for Israel’s Foreign Ministry, said in an interview.
Here’s what’s behind the accusation, how Israel is defending it and what to anticipate.
Who is adjudicating the accusation, and when?
The International Court of Justice, based in The Hague in the Netherlands, adjudicates claims against states. In the past it has considered disputes on everything from maritime border disputes to the United States’ funding of the Contras rebel groups in Nicaragua in the 1980s. The court, first convened in 1946, is the culmination of a series of international conferences that aimed to adjudicate disputes between nations as a means of preventing war.
The court has previously considered cases involving Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, the moving of the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and an incident in 1955 in which an El Al flight was shot down over Bulgarian airspace.
The International Criminal Court in the same city adjudicates criminal allegations against individuals, such as generals or notorious despots including Libya’s Muammar Ghaddafi and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The case was initiated late last month by South Africa, and the first hearings are next week, Jan. 11 and 12.
Why is Israel participating?
Israel has a tradition of not engaging with war crimes accusations against its officials, in part because it is not party to the 2002 compact that created the International Criminal Court. In light of the United Nations’ repeated votes and other measures placing blame on Israel, Israel sees the U.N. system as irredeemably biased, and feels that the charges are likely to be loaded.
But Israeli officials say the charge of genocide is too much for a state born in the ashes of the Holocaust to ignore.
“The State of Israel will appear before the International Court of Justice at The Hague to dispel South Africa’s absurd blood libel,” Eylon Levy, a government spokesman, said on Jan. 2.
Rumors have circulated that Alan Dershowitz, the emeritus Harvard Law professor and Israel advocate, will be part of Israel’s legal team, though he has not confirmed his participation. Dershowitz has been on the legal teams of other famous defendants, including O.J. Simpson and, more recently, President Donald Trump during his first impeachment trial. He did not reply to a request for comment.
Beyond seeking to stake a moral defense against a crime it has prosecuted against Nazi war criminals, there are practical reasons for Israel to participate. The ICJ’s process may take years, but if after next week’s hearing it finds enough evidence to go forward, it may call on the parties in the Gaza war to cease hostilities.
Such a court order would establish a legal basis for countries to boycott and isolate Israel and to restrict the movement of its officials if Israel does not comply.
Two years ago, Ukraine sought and received a similar order from the court in its efforts to repel Russia’s invasion. But while both cases involve genocide, the Russia and Israel trials differ: Ukraine is not accusing Russia of genocide. Rather, it went to the ICJ to contest Russia’s accusation that Ukraine is committing genocide — which Putin has cited as a pretext for the war.
Russia, which is massive and has built an insular economy, ignored the order. But Israel, a small country allied with the West, can’t afford to make the same choice, said Orde Kittrie, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, an influential Washington think tank with close ties to Israel’s government.
“If Israel is ordered to do what Russia [was] ordered to do, which would be to immediately suspend its military operations, it would certainly be bad for Israel from a PR perspective,” said Kittrie, who is a law professor at Arizona State University. “You don’t want to be violating international law. You don’t want to be fighting when you’ve been told to stop.”
The Biden administration has indicated that it will not honor any injunctions targeting Israel as a result of the genocide charges. “We find this submission meritless, counterproductive, and completely without any basis in fact whatsoever,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said on Wednesday.
Pro-Palestinian protestors supporting the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign against Israel in Cape Town, South Africa, Sept. 21, 2015. Michelly Rall/Getty Images)
Why is South Africa making the charge?
South Africa’s government sees itself as a bulwark against what it casts as western imperialism. It also wants to push back against perceptions in the West that, since the end of apartheid in the early 1990s, it has devolved into corruption, authoritarianism and alliances with repressive regimes.
In 2017, it ignored an ICC warrant for the arrest of then-Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir on genocide charges, allowing him to enter the country.
In addition to the genocide accusation, it has embraced charges that Israel is guilty of apartheid, the crime of institutionalized racial discrimination that was South Africa’s hallmark under white minority rule for decades. Its leaders have never forgiven Israel for cozying up to the apartheid regime. Its parliament in November, in a non-binding vote, said the government should expel Israeli diplomats.
“South Africa has been engaged on the Palestinian issue since really the end of apartheid and the founding of the state,” Michael Walsh, a visiting scholar at the University of California Berkeley, told Vox. “It’s been a prominent issue in South African politics and among South African leaders.”
What is the basis for the genocide accusation?
Pro-Palestinian activists and anti-Zionist figures have been accusing Israel of genocide since the earliest days of the war — an allegation Israeli and other scholars across the political spectrum have strenuously denied both in this conflict and previous rounds of fighting. (A recent letter by a group of Israeli public figures — unconnected with the ICJ case — did accuse some Israeli officials of incitement to genocide, though not of the crime of genocide itself.)
South Africa’s charging document in the ICJ case, which outlines what it calls acts of genocide and also intent, relies on many of the same arguments pro-Palestinian activists have made in recent months.
The acts are drawn from news accounts of the carnage, which according to the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry has topped 22,000 Palestinian casualties, including thousands of children. That number doesn’t differentiate between civilians and combatants.
Also included are warnings by international bodies that the population of the enclave is on the verge of mass starvation and disease. “The acts in which Israel has engaged … are genocidal in character, having regard to their nature, scope and context,” the charging document says.
In seeking to establish intent, South Africa quotes statements by Israeli leaders, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, that South Africa claims are genocidal in scope.
That is an “extraordinarily challenging” standard to meet, according to an analysis by Alaa Hachem and Oona Hathaway at Just Security, an online security think tank run out of the New York University School of Law. “It requires proof of a specific intent to destroy a group in whole or in part.”
The South African charging document quotes a speech Netanyahu delivered to the Knesset, describing the war as “a struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness, between humanity and the law of the jungle,” which South Africa called a “a dehumanizing theme to which he returned on various occasions.”
That quote and some of the others in the document, the FDD’s Kittrie noted, refer not to the Palestinians as a whole but to Hamas. Kittrie said that Israeli leaders on other occasions have made clear that their war is with the terrorist group that launched the conflict with massacres that took the lives of some 1,200 people, most of them civilians, on Oct. 7.
“Our war against Hamas, the Hamas terrorist organization, is a war — it’s not a war against the people of Gaza,” Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said last month at a press conference with Lloyd Austin, the U.S. defense secretary.
Smoke is seen over Beit Hanoun in the Gaza Strip from the Israeli side of the border, Oct. 27, 2023. (Amir Levy/Getty Images)
Other more damning quotes cited in the document come from figures on the far right. It quotes for instance Amichai Eliahu, the minister of heritage who is a member of the Otzma Yehudit, or Jewish Power, party, who has said, “There is no such thing as uninvolved civilians in Gaza” and has called to nuke the territory.
Those figures are not making decisions in the war, Kittrie said. “The South Africans point to a few statements by members of the Knesset,” he said. “They take some statements out of context.”
That may be the case, said Yaniv Roznai, a law professor at Reichman University in Israel, but it is incumbent on Netanyahu and others to get their allies to avoid indulging fantasies of ethnic cleansing at an extraordinarily risky time.
“Instead of understanding that words have meanings, and that we are in wartime and to watch their mouths and not say really stupid things,” Netanyahu and others are “trying to explain them,” Roznai said in a podcast for UnXeptable, a group that opposes the massive judicial reforms Netanyahu sought before the war.
What will Israel’s case be?
Kittrie said Israel will be able to show it has instituted mitigation measures in its military campaign.
“Israel’s extensive advance warning and other measures to mitigate harm to Gaza civilians make clear that Israel’s goal is not to commit genocide but, far from it, to instead minimize Palestinian civilian casualties while lawfully exercising Israel’s rights to rescue its hostages, apprehend the Oct. 7 perpetrators, and ensure that Israel’s population is secure from further attacks,” he said.
Israeli spokespeople have also suggested that Israel will seek to turn the tables, and level charges of genocide against Hamas.
“The Hamas terrorist organization — which is committing war crimes, crimes against humanity and sought to commit genocide on 7 October — is responsible for the suffering of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip by using them as human shields and stealing humanitarian aid from them,” the Foreign Ministry’s Hayat said in a statement.
—
The post Israel faces charges of genocide at the International Court of Justice. Here’s why, and how Israel will respond. appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
RSS
University of California Rejects Ethnic Studies Admissions Requirement in Faculty Assembly Vote

Demonstrators holding a “Stand Up for Internationals” rally on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, in Berkeley, California, US, April 17, 2025. Photo: Carlos Barria via Reuters Connect.
The University of California (UC) Faculty Assembly has rejected a proposal to establish passing ethnic studies in high school as a requirement for admission to its 10 taxpayer-funded schools for undergraduates.
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, the campaign for the measure — defeated overwhelmingly 29-12 with 12 abstaining — was spearheaded by Christine Hong, chair of the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies department at UC Santa Cruz. Hong believes that Zionism is a “colonial racial project” and that Israel is a “settler colonial state.” Moreover, she holds that anti-Zionism is “part and parcel” of the ethnic studies discipline.
Ethnic studies activists like Hong throughout the University of California system coveted the admissions requirement because it would have facilitated their aligning ethnic studies curricula at the K-12 level with “liberated ethnic studies,” an extreme revolutionary project that was rejected by California Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2023. Had the proposal been successful, school officials of both public and private schools would have been forced to comply with their standard of what constitutes ethnic studies to qualify their students for admission to UC.
Being indoctrinated into anti-Zionism and “hating Jews” would essentially have become a prerequisite for becoming a UC student had the Faculty Assembly approved the measure, Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, executive director of antisemitism watchdog AMCHA Initiative, told The Algemeiner on Friday. AMCHA Initiative first raised the alarm about the proposal in 2023, calling it “a deeply frightening prospect.”
“Ethnic studies never intended to be like any other discipline or subject. It was always intended to be a political project for fomenting revolution according to the dictates of however the activists behind the subject defined it,” Rossman-Benjamin explained. “And anti-Zionism has been at the core of the field, and this became especially clear after Oct. 7. Most of the anti-Zionist mania on campuses that day — the support for the encampments, the Faculty for Justice in Palestine chapters — it was a project of Ethnic Studies. At UC Santa Cruz, 60 percent of Faculty for Justice in Palestine members were pulled from the ethnic studies department.”
Founded in the 1960s to provide an alternative curriculum for beneficiaries of racial preferences whose retention rates lagged behind traditional college students, ethnic studies is based on anti-capitalist, anti-liberal, and anti-Western ideologies found in the writings of, among others, Franz Fanon, Huey Newton, Simone de Beauvoir, and Karl Marx. Its principal ideological target in the 20th century was the remains of European imperialism in Africa and the Middle East, but overtime it identified new “systems of oppression,” most notably the emergent superpower that was the US after World War II and the nation that became its closest ally in the Middle East: Israel.
UC Santa Cruz’s Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES) department is a case study in how the ideology leads inexorably to anti-Zionist antisemitism, AMCHA Initiative argued in a 2024 study.
Following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, CRES issued a statement rationalizing the terrorist group’s atrocities as political resistance. Additionally, the department days later participated in a “Call for a Global General Strike,” refusing to work because Israel mounted a military response to Hamas’s atrocities — an action CRES called “Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza.” Later, the department held an event titled, “The Genocide in Gaza in our [sic] Classrooms: A Teaching Palestine Workshop,” in which professors and teaching assistants were trained in how to persuade students that Zionism is a racist and genocidal endeavor.
Imposing such noxious views on all California students would have been catastrophic, Rossman-Benjamin told The Algemeiner.
“The goal of admissions requirements is to make sure that students are adequately prepared for college,” she noted. “Their goal was to use their power to force students to take the kind of Critical Ethnic Studies that is taught at the university, with the goal of revolutionizing society. The idea should have been dead on arrival, being rejected on the grounds that there is no evidence that it is a worthwhile subject that should be required for admission to the University of California.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post University of California Rejects Ethnic Studies Admissions Requirement in Faculty Assembly Vote first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
RSS
Israeli FM Praises Paraguay Decision to Label Iran’s IRGC, Proxies Hamas and Hezbollah as Terrorist Organizations

Paraguayan President Santiago Peña praying at the Western Wall in Jerusalem on Dec. 12, 2024. Photo: The Western Wall Heritage Foundation
Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar praised Paraguay’s decision to designate Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist organization, and to broaden the country’s previous designation to include all factions of Hamas and Hezbollah.
The top Israeli diplomat congratulated the South American country and described President Santiago Peña’s decision as a “landmark move” in addressing security challenges and fostering international peace.
“Iran is the world’s leading exporter of terrorism and extremism, and together with its terror proxies, it threatens regional stability and global peace,” Sa’ar wrote in a post on X. “More countries should follow suit and join the fight against Iranian aggression and terrorism.”
I commend Paraguay and @SantiPenap for the landmark decision to designate the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, Hamas, and Hezbollah as terrorist organizations.
Iran is the world’s leading exporter of terrorism and extremism, and together with its terror proxies, it threatens… https://t.co/OzWACbWcno— Gideon Sa’ar | גדעון סער (@gidonsaar) April 24, 2025
On Thursday, Peña issued an executive order designating the IRGC as a terrorist organization “for its systematic violations of peace, human rights, and the security of the international community.”
The executive order also expanded Paraguay’s 2019 proscription of the armed wings of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, the al-Qassam Brigades, and Hezbollah, the Iran-backed terrorist group in Lebanon, to encompass the entirety of both organizations, including their political wings.
“With this decision, Paraguay reaffirms its unwavering commitment to peace, international security, and the unconditional respect for human rights, solidifying its position within the international community as a country firmly opposed to all forms of terrorism and strengthening its relations with allied nations in this fight,” Peña wrote in a post on X, emphasizing the country’s strategic relationship with the United States and Israel.
Iran is the chief international backer of Hamas and Hezbollah, providing the Islamist terror groups with weapons, funding, and training. According to media reports based on documents seized by the Israeli military in Gaza last year, Iran had been informed about Hamas’s plan to launch the Oct. 7 attack months in advance.
Last year, Peña reopened Paraguay’s embassy in Jerusalem, making it the sixth nation — after the US, Guatemala, Honduras, Kosovo, and Papua New Guinea — to establish its embassy in the Israeli capital. During the same visit, he condemned the Hamas-led massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, calling the perpetrators “criminals” in a speech at the Knesset, the Israeli parliament.
The Trump administration also praised Paraguay’s decision to officially label the IRGC as a terrorist organization, describing it as a major blow to Iran’s terror network in the Western Hemisphere.
“Iran remains the leading state sponsor of terrorism in the world and has financed and directed numerous terrorist attacks and activities globally, through its IRGC-Qods Force and proxies such as Hezbollah and Hamas,” US State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce said in a statement.
The US official said Paraguay’s action will help disrupt Iran’s ability to finance terrorism and operate in Latin America — particularly in the Tri-Border Area, where Paraguay borders Argentina and Brazil, a region long regarded as a financial hub for Hezbollah-linked operatives.
“The important steps Paraguay has taken will help cut off the ability of the Iranian regime and its proxies to plot terrorist attacks and raise money for its malignant and destabilizing activity,” the statement read.
“The United States will continue to work with partners such as Paraguay to confront global security threats,” Bruce added. “We call on all countries to hold the Iranian regime accountable and prevent its operatives, recruiters, financiers, and proxies from operating in their territories.”
During his first administration, Trump designated the IRGC as a foreign terrorist organization (FTO), citing the Iranian regime’s use of the IRGC to “engage in terrorist activities since its inception 40 years ago.”
At the time, Trump said this designation “recognizes the reality that Iran is not only a state sponsor of terrorism, but that the IRGC actively participates in, finances, and promotes terrorism as a tool of statecraft.”
“The IRGC is the Iranian government’s primary means of directing and implementing its global terrorist campaign,” he continued.
The post Israeli FM Praises Paraguay Decision to Label Iran’s IRGC, Proxies Hamas and Hezbollah as Terrorist Organizations first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
RSS
Yale’s Silence Is Allowing Blatant Campus Antisemitism — and Betraying the Promise of ‘Never Again’

Yale University students at the corner of Grove and College Streets in New Haven, Connecticut, U.S., April 22, 2024. Photo: Melanie Stengel via Reuters Connect.
As darkness fell over Yale University on Wednesday evening, Jewish students faced intimidation that echoed history’s darkest chapters. The following day, as the sun rose on Holocaust Remembrance Day, the world solemnly reflected on the devastating consequences of unchecked hatred.
Yet, disturbingly, at Yale, the shadows of that same hatred linger once again.
For several nights now, radical anti-Israel activists, primarily organized by “Yalies for Palestine,” an anti-Israel hate group, have targeted Jewish students at Yale — in many cases, based solely on their outwardly Jewish appearance.
On Wednesday, protestors blocked walkways, physically intimidated Jewish students, and hurled bottles and sprayed liquids at them — all while campus police stood by and did nothing.
One Jewish student described her chilling encounter with the protesters the night before, on Tuesday: “When I tried to get through, they blocked me, ignored my requests to pass, and handed out masks to those obstructing me. Yale security told me they couldn’t help.”
The immediate trigger for this harassment is the invitation extended by Shabtai, a Yale Jewish society, to Itamar Ben-Gvir, an Israeli government minister. Whether one supports or opposes Ben-Gvir’s politics is beside the point. Notably, Naftali Bennett, a former Israeli prime minister, was also protested and disrupted during a separate campus event in February, underscoring a broader trend of hostility toward Israeli speakers regardless of their political affiliation.
These events signal more than isolated protests; they constitute a redux of hatred that historically escalates when met with institutional silence or indifference.
Yale’s administration, under President Maurie McInnis and Dean Pericles Lewis, has failed to adequately respond. Though Yale revoked official recognition from Yalies for Palestine, its tepid actions have not halted the dangerous slide toward overt hostility. The silence — from both the university and the Slifka Center, Yale’s center for Jewish life — is deafening.
This isn’t the first troubling instance at Yale. A year ago, similar demonstrators disrupted campus life with vitriolic anti-Israel rhetoric, silencing dialogue and fostering an atmosphere hostile to Jewish students.
Earlier this year, CAMERA on Campus documented Yale’s Slifka Center pressuring students to erase evidence of anti-Jewish harassment during a pro-Israel event, effectively whitewashing antisemitism and emboldening extremists.
As CAMERA’s Ricki Hollander has powerfully documented, the rhetoric of anti-Zionism today often revives the antisemitic patterns of the past, particularly those propagated by the Nazi regime in the 1930s. These tactics, she explains, echo Nazi-era propaganda that portrayed Jews as subhuman, sinister, and uniquely malevolent — a narrative used to justify marginalization and, ultimately, genocide.
These dynamics — scapegoating, dehumanizing, and ostracizing Jews under the guise of “anti-Zionism” — are not relics of history. They are alive and active across elite American campuses. And now, unmistakably, they have taken root at Yale.
McInnis must break the silence and condemn the open harassment and assault of Jewish students. She must also hold the perpetrators of the heinous actions and those responsible for the safety of students accountable for their inaction.
This week has revealed a grave failure of moral and institutional duty on many fronts. When law enforcement stands by as Jewish students face intimidation and assault, it sends a chilling message: their safety matters less.
We must demand a full investigation and real accountability. Condemnations of antisemitism are not enough. Policies must be changed to ensure Jewish students and organizations can freely exercise their right to free expression without being subject to harassment and assault. Anything less would betray Yale’s stated values — and the promise of “never again.”
Douglas Sandoval is the Managing Director for CAMERA on Campus.
The post Yale’s Silence Is Allowing Blatant Campus Antisemitism — and Betraying the Promise of ‘Never Again’ first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
You must be logged in to post a comment Login