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https://scheerpost.com/2024/01/10/central-bank-digital-currencies-cbdcs-near-universal-roll-out-signals-international-power-grab/

Central Bank Digital Currencies’ (CBDCs) Near Universal Roll-Out Signals International Power Grab

Nigeria faced a months-long cash crunch earlier this year when a scarcity of paper notes led to days-long ATM lines, decimated access to basic goods and services, and protests and riots in major cities by a population demanding that cash access be restored. In addition to record levels of inflation — Nigeria recorded a 17-year inflation high of almost 22 percent in March — and a boosted mistrust of the banking system among Nigerians, the lack of physical monies, causing a widespread inability to pay for necessities, even led to deaths at hospitals. 

The culprit behind the cash crisis? Nigeria’s botched Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) roll-out. 

Launched in late 2021, Nigeria’s CBDC, the eNaira, rolled out amidst a sudden global push toward researching and implementing CBDCs, which are a digital version of a country’s fiat currency, facilitated by its central bank. Indeed, the Atlantic Council sums up the world’s rapid CBDC uptake on its CBDC Tracker, highlighting that while only 35 countries were considering a CBDC in 2020, 130 countries — representing over 98 percent of the world’s GDP — are doing so now, with 64 countries in an “advanced phase of exploration (development, pilot, or launch).” According to the Tracker, the United States is now in the “development” phase of CBDC exploration.

Despite governments’ acute interest in CBDCs, the extreme eNaira push took place after a prolonged lack of both interest and trust among Nigerians in the digital currency. Notwithstanding the government’s efforts to sweeten the deal, including access restriction removals allowing eNaira use without a bank account, and discounts for those using the CBDC to pay for taxi rides, only .5 percent of Nigerians had used the CBDC by October 2022. Further, the eNaira platform had only recorded 1.4 million transactions as of early May 2023 in a country of over 210 million people.

Rather than heed citizens’ cash preferences, the country’s digital limitations and its largely informal economy, the Nigerian government doubled down on its eNaira roll-out in late 2022, attempting to simultaneously switch out old Naira notes for new ones while removing excess monies from circulation, also capping cash withdrawal limits to promote CBDC uptake. The liquidity mop-up soon made day-to-day financial transactions all but impossible as government policies stunted access to physical money.

For now, Nigeria’s cash crisis has subsided thanks to the government’s softening up on its efforts, distributing paper banknotes and, after extending the deadline for old Naira notes’ end of circulation to the end of 2023, confirming the notes would remain legal tender ad infinitum

But, a critical question remains: why such efforts to force a digital currency on a largely unwilling population? To answer this question, I investigate herein today’s elite-led drive toward CBDCs across the globe, exploring how they’ve been tested or implemented in Nigeria and elsewhere.

While advocates say CBDCs allow for cheap transactions, are secure, convenient, stable and can even promote “financial inclusion,” we shall see that such arguments cannot explain the political and corporate elite’s’ near-universal drive toward CBDCs. Paving the way for a financial system where governments are granted significant oversight over centralized financial transaction records and histories, and therefore, substantial information about one’s daily life, CBDCs’ true significance instead lies within their unprecedented potential for mass surveillance and monitoring and, if made programmable and interoperable between countries, even economic and social control internationally. 

In other words, CBDCs facilitate a financial infrastructure perfect for an elite power-grab.

Tracking the CBDC Craze: What and Why

From the preparation-stage digital euro to the operational Digital Bahamian Sand Dollar, research, pilot projects and launches of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) are taking the world by storm as governments look to move past cash. Countries like Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States have asked for the public’s feedback on possible CBDCs while other countries research, develop, and pilot various projects, including Russia’s digital ruble and Brazil’s digital real pilot involving VISA, Microsoft and other corporate giants. 

In ongoing pilots internationally, CBDCs have been tested in a variety of use-cases, especially for crossborder payments, wholesale use (i.e. larger transactions, especially between banks and other financial institutions), and retail, day-to-day use. Different CBDC designs are also up for consideration: for example, “account-based” CBDCs, where accounts are linked to personal identities, could be used to buy consumer goods (i.e. groceries) with a digital wallet or app on one’s mobile phone. “Token-based” CBDCs, which could operate more like cash and perhaps even offline, have also been considered. 

The trend toward centralized digital currencies is clear; arguments for adopting CBDCs are less so. While CBDC advocates often bring up CBDCs’ convenience, cheaper transaction costs and ability to enhance financial transparency, such arguments do little to frame CBDCs as a catch-all solution to the financial system’s problems, which could instead be addressed through other legislative means. Economists concur: remaining “skeptical that a Federal Reserve CBDC would solve any major problem confronting the U.S. payment system,” Christopher J. Waller, member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, opined that CBDCs were a “solution in search of a problem.” 

Other advocates push CBDCs’stability, supposing that government-facilitated digital currencies are an alternative for Bitcoin and cryptocurrency enthusiasts tired of volatility. Yet, as Thomas Fazi writes for UnHerd, people invest in Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies “precisely because they are decentralized systems beyond the control of governments, and because they hope their value will rise over time,” and thus are unlikely to want involvement with highly centralized systems like CBDCs.

In other cases, Central Banks, like Canada’s, argue that CBDCs may help their respective currencies maintain dominance as cryptocurrencies and other cash alternatives flood the market. But this talking point is debated: while the Treasury and Bank of England judged a retail CBDC necessary “to anchor the value and robustness of all monies circulating in the [UK],” The Economist disagrees, opining that “it is hard to see why creating [CBDCs] would be the simplest way to prevent monetary fragmentation.”

As they would give governments direct or near-direct access to financial transaction histories, CBDCs’ potential for monitoring and surveillance are clear. And yet, CBDC advocates rarely address privacy concerns or other possible problems: in this respect, Duke University’s FinReg blog highlights a striking gap in the existing literature on CBDCs, elucidating that while scholarship and other relevant writing focuses on CBDCs’ technical design and macroeconomic implications, “[m]issing in these discussions is CBDC’s potential to infringe on citizens’ privacy.”

Despite the glaring literature gap, CBDCs’ potential for abuse is a real and imminent threat to both civilians’ livelihoods and whatever democratic structures and processes still exist internationally. To elucidate CBDCs’ surveillance and control prospects, among other severe ethical issues CBDCs bring to the table, we return to Nigeria’s recent cash debacle — and the forces behind it.

Nigeria’s Recent Cash Crunch as a CBDC Crash Course 

The eNaira’s stated objective is to enable “households and businesses to make fast, efficient, and reliable payments, while benefiting from a resilient, innovative, inclusive, and competitive payment system.” Such goals seem humble enough; a second look at Nigeria’s botched eNaira effort, however, ultimately showcases the myriad questionable elite-backed efforts and goals baked into the CBDC’s development and release. Indeed, under the guise of “modernity” and “financial inclusion,” the eNaira roll-out crystallizes and signals precedents for a CBDC infrastructure prime for data collection and connectivity with other crossborder governance initiatives and projects, like digital ID — all while striving toward the increasingly visible elite goal of a cashless society. 

For example, the eNaira’s website says that, instead of replacing cash, the eNaira “will complement cash as a less costly, more efficient, generally accepted, safe, and trusted means of payment.” But the website’s words conflict with consistent political and financial elite language that instead suggests CBDCs could help facilitate or otherwise direct society toward a cashless economy. On the anniversary of the eNaira’s launch, for example, Nigeria Central Bank Governor Godwin Emefiele said that the country’s aim was toward a “100 per cent cashless economy.” The statement was well in line with the likes of the cashless society-minded World Economic Forum (WEF), which, in 2017, published an article elucidating that the “gradual obsolescence of paper currency” was a “characteristic of a well-designed CBDC.”

Such cashless prospects, of course, suggest that, if CBDCs are successfully implemented, civilians who prefer cash’s anonymity or are otherwise worried about CBDCs’ privacy issues may eventually be unable to opt out of such a system, even if they can do so at first.

Another concern is digital currencies’ possible, if not likely, entwinement with controversial digital ID schemes, which have gained ground internationally despite fears that digital ID could facilitate additional barriers to society and employment, pose surveillance and privacy risks, or could otherwise be weaponized against minority groups. Despite CBDC hiccups, Nigeria has had significant success advancing its own digital ID infrastructure, with about 100 million Nigerians registering for a digital ID by late May 2023.

Critically, Nigeria has clear intentions to connect digital ID with its CBDC, which, by centralizing much of one’s personal information and financial records in one place, could make the monitoring and surveillance of civilians an even simpler prospect for governments. In fact, a Bank for International Settlements report stated that Nigeria’s eNaira would not be anonymous under any circumstances, even for “lower-tier [digital] wallets” holding less money. The same report suggested such systems were also brought about to help facilitate “financial inclusion,” elucidating that “[u]niversal access to eNaira is a key goal of the [Central Bank of Nigeria] CBN, and new forms of digital identification are being issued to the unbanked to help with access.”

But, Nigeria’s “financial inclusion” argument for CBDCs is not unique; rather, groups like the World Economic Forum and the International Monetary Fund twist the term to depict CBDCs as a benign endeavor beneficial to marginalized groups’ financial needs. The phrases “inclusion” and “unbanking the unbanked,” are pushed despite the populations’ mixed and negative attitudes toward government-facilitated digital currencies.

“The fact that [the eNaira] was government-led caused trust in it to be significantly low,” a Lagos-based researcher told Rest of World. “People don’t trust the government to hand over their financial transaction information directly to them.” And other CBDC announcements and proposals have received substantial backlash: when the U.S. Federal Reserve solicited public comments on a prospective CBDC, for example, commenters flooded the request with concerns about financial stability, privacy and freedom.

Ultimately, Nigeria’s disastrous CBDC roll-out, and the many elite-backed tools and goals baked into its launch, is a prime manifestation of the political class’ drive for technocratic oblivion. And the eNaira’s chaotic launch, eventually spurring a cash shortage that devastated CBDC-resistant Nigerians, only demonstrates the wicked lengths the powerful will go to accomplish their goals.

CBDCs’ Grave Dangers to Civil Liberties

Despite the eNaira’s rocky roll-out, the efforts behind the Nigerian CBDC, such as strides toward going cashless and CBDC compatibility with digital ID schemes, reveal intentions to develop and expand the CBDC in ways that perpetuate, rather than address, common concerns about CBDCs’ potential for abuse. And yet, Nigeria’s problematic roll-out is not unique; rather, CBDCs pose significant ethical problems everywhere.

Of CBDCs’ potential hazards, programmability, roughly defined as the ability to build-in or establish terms and limits on a digital currency’s use, is perhaps the most dangerous because it offers unlimited possibilities for CBDC facilitators (i.e., governments and their third-party collaborators) to limit or block access to money as desired, or to otherwise manipulate civilians’ finances to nudge or force certain behaviors. 
Discussing programmability, International Monetary Fund (IMF) Deputy Managing Director Bo Li alluded to CBDCs’ use as a policy-implementing instrument — with significant power over individuals’ daily lives — at an October 2022 high-level roundtable on CBDC:

CBDC can allow government agencies and private sector players to program — to create smart contracts — to allow targeted policy functions. For example, welfare payment; for example, consumption coupons; for example, food stamps…By programming a CBDC, money can be precisely targeted for what people can own and what [people can do.]

Facilitating finance- and policy-related decisions with the push of a few buttons, further, programmability could make bypassing traditional policymaking processes a simple endeavor for governments. Considering QR-code based COVID-19 vaccination passports functionally banned people from society in recent years, it’s not hard to imagine governments similarly weaponizing CBDC programmability to financially “punish” civilians for unwanted behaviors in the future — likely without needing to consult the public or other governing bodies about the decision.

Critically, nations’ own CBDC projects likely will not stand alone; rather, prospects for crossborder and international CBDC projects are being explored. The Atlantic Council’s CBDC tracker lists the myriad ongoing crossborder CBDC projects, such as Project Sela, Project Icebreaker and Project Jura, which have been testing crossborder payment methods for a variety of countries’ CBDCs, thereby further expanding CBDCs’ prospective reach.

Meanwhile, efforts toward “interoperability,” which Bank for International Settlements (BIS) defines as “[t]he technical or legal compatibility that enables a system or mechanism to be used in conjunction with other systems or mechanisms,” which “allows participants in different systems to conduct, clear and settle payments or financial transactions across systems,” could even facilitate or pave the way toward a more centralized, or perhaps even singular, CBDC system worldwide. 

In fact, IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva confirmed in June 2023 that the IMF is  “working on the concept of a global CBDC platform” for cross-border transactions, explaining at a conference attended by representatives of African central banks that “CBDCs should not be fragmented national propositions … To have more efficient and fairer transactions we need systems that connect countries: we need interoperability.” 

Within the context of CBDCs’ almost unilateral consideration or adoption among the worlds’ powers, such possibilities for CBDC interoperability, and, therefore, the further centralization of payment methods and the relevant data they would use, collect, or track internationally, should frighten anyone concerned about CBDCs’ prospects for surveillance and control.

Importantly, the global CBDC push occurs within the context of growing elite financial abuses, such as the de-banking of political dissidents, like the 2022 Canadian Trucker Convoy protestors and European journalists including Alina Lipp, and a multitude of dissident publications’ and journalists’ PayPal suspensions and GoFundMe donation freezes, already occurring without a CBDC. Such abuses should only signal that those pushing CBDCs cannot be given the benefit of the doubt. 

Perhaps most damning, the political and corporate elites have even admitted to CBDCs’s propensity for political control. Fooling European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde into a prank phone call, an impersonator of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky posited that “the problem [with CBDCs] is [people] don’t want to be controlled,” prompting an oblivious Lagarde to admit that through CBDCs, “there will be control, you’re right. You’re completely right.” 

Lagarde’s subsequent qualification during the phone call that CBDCs could only provide a “limited amount of control” can only be described as ludicrous, considering the bevy of issues CBDCs pose to society at large.

Towards a Global Financial Control System?

Efforts to depict CBDCs as inclusive, convenient, secure and even inevitable ultimately do little to hide their potential for surveillance and even perhaps social control wherever implemented. In this respect, CBDCs’ near universal consideration signals significant threats to civil liberties and (what’s left of) democratic policymaking processes and structures internationally. 

At the time of writing, the rapid pace of CBDC exploration signals that a kind of “race” among nation-states to develop and roll-out digital currencies has begun, thus making it all the more likely CBDCs will become mainstream without critical public debate about their possible ethical ramifications. After all, failing to establish a digital currency when rival or hostile nations already have their own could jeopardize a country’s financial future in ways currently difficult to predict.

At the same time, the international drive toward CBDCs must force a fundamental reconsideration of today’s geopolitical fault lines. Many posit the growing BRICS bloc of countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, and as of August, also Saudi Arabia, Iran, Ethiopia, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates) can directly challenge the West in a bid for multipolarity, where non-western countries will have a greater ability to act on their own accord on the global stage. The BRICS’ own embrace of CBDCs, however, instead suggests that the international political and corporate elite agree about a vital issue concerning the globe’s financial, political and social trajectory. Even as a U.S.-Russia proxy war rages in Ukraine and Israel besieges and ethnically cleanses Gaza, both situations where genuine geopolitical hostilities may expand into larger regional wars or even a world war, the apparent CBDC consensus signals universal strides toward a technocratic dystopia are also a key elite priority: in such efforts, CBDCs are the lynchpin.

Fortunately, there is good news: many people do not want CBDCs, or otherwise remain keen on keeping physical cash, perhaps blocking CBDCs’ capture of the financial system. Some U.S. states, including North Carolina and Florida, are considering or have preemptively banned or restricted CBDCs’ use. Prioritizing cash’s longevity, meanwhile, Swiss civilians gathered enough signatures earlier this year to force a future referendum which, if successful, will enshrine the availability of cash in the Swiss Government’s constitution. 

Meanwhile, the world’s first operational CBDC, the Digital Bahamian Sand Dollar, appears to be quite unpopular among Bahamians, with few merchants accepting the CBDC as payment years after its 2020 launch. According to the IMF, the Sand Dollar only represented .1 percent of [The Bahamas’] currency in circulation as of 2022, with the Bahamas’ infrastructure providing “limited avenues” for the Sand Dollar’s use.

The powerful can work around the clock to create and implement CBDCs; they will only be successful if the population accepts and uses them.

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https://www.jonathan-cook.net/2024-01-09/dock-israel-genocide-court/

The West will stand in the dock alongside Israel at the genocide court

Israel’s allies aren’t just turning a blind eye to Gaza’s killing fields. They have cheered on the bloodshed, provided diplomatic cover and supplied the arms

Israel is urging western states to rally to its side as the International Court of Justice prepares to hear this week South Africa’s case that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.

The court is being asked by Pretoria to issue an immediate injunction ordering Israel to halt its military assault on the tiny enclave, to avoid further casualties.

Some 23,000 Palestinians are known to have been killed by Israel so far, a majority of them women and children, and many thousands more are believed to be lying under the rubble. Tens of thousands are seriously wounded. A majority of the population have lost their homes to the three-month bombing campaign. 

Israel has intensively and repeatedly targeted the supposedly “safe zones” to which it has ordered Palestinian civilians to flee.

It has destroyed almost all of Gaza’s infrastructure and is blocking most aid from reaching the enclave. Famine and disease are likely to rapidly increase the death toll.

South Africa’s 84-page brief argues that Israel’s bombing campaign and siege breaches the 1948 Genocide Convention, which defines genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”.

Israel expects support from western capitals because they have nearly as much to fear from a verdict against Israel as Israel itself. They have staunchly backed the killing spree, with the US and UK, in particular, sending weapons that are being used against the people of Gaza, making both potentially complicit.

According to a cable from the Israeli foreign ministry, leaked to the Axios website, Israel hopes that, given the difficulties of making a legal case in defence of its actions, diplomatic and political pressure on the court’s justices will win the day instead.

The Biden administration led the way late last week in dismissing South Africa’s detailed legal brief as “meritless, counterproductive and completely without any basis in fact whatsoever”.

That would sound patently ridiculous to western audiences had they been provided with serious coverage of Gaza. But Israel has been heavily restricting access to the enclave, while killing Palestinian journalists there at an unprecedented rate to stop their reporting.

In addition, western media are willingly – and secretly – submitting to an onerous Israeli censorship regime.

Incitement to genocide

Israel’s “strategic goal” at the court, according to the leaked cable, is to dissuade the judges from making a determination that it is committing genocide. But more pressing is Israel’s need to prevent the Hague court from ordering an interim halt to the attack.

Israeli officials will argue, Axios reports, that its sustained assault on Gaza fails to reach the threshold of genocide, which requires “creating conditions that don’t allow the survival of the population, together with the intent to annihilate it”.

Israel will try to convince the judges that it has been seeking to increase humanitarian aid to Gaza and minimise the toll on civilians. 

Its argument flies in the face of the evidence South Africa has amassed. 

Its brief contains nine pages of declarations by Israeli leaders showing clear genocidal intent, including statements from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, senior figures in the cabinet, President Isaac Herzog and many serving and former Israeli military commanders. 

Giora Eiland, an adviser to war council minister, Benny Gantz, has called Israel’s goal the creation of “conditions where life in Gaza becomes unsustainable”. An Israeli military spokesman stated from the outset that the aim was to inflict “maximum damage” on Gaza.

Herzog suggests the entire civilian population is a legitimate military target, while Netanyahu refers to the Palestinians as “Amalek”, a biblical enemy. In the Old Testament, God commands the Israelites to annihilate the Amalekites, putting “to death men and women, children and infants”.

One of the provisions of the Genocide Convention is an absolute prohibition on incitement to genocide. Israel’s most senior politicians and military commanders have indisputably breached that section of the convention. 

A letter to Israel’s attorney general last week from a group of Israeli academics, lawyers, human rights activists and journalists underscored that point. They warned that incitement to genocide had become “an everyday matter in Israel”.

The letter added: “Normalised discourse which calls for annihilation, erasure, devastation and the like is liable to impact the manner by which soldiers [in Gaza] conduct themselves.”

Taking the gloves off

But dehumanisation – the precursor to genocide – is not the only problem.

Israel’s prosecution of what it terms a “war to eradicate Hamas” has fully met its own definition of genocide. “Conditions that don’t allow the survival of the population” were already being created long before the onslaught Israel unleashed immediately after Hamas broke out from Gaza on 7 October. Some 1,140 Israelis and other nationals were killed in the ensuing carnage. 

Mostly forgotten in the back and forth about what is unfolding in the enclave is the context: United Nations officials warned nearly a decade ago that Israel’s siege of Gaza – now 17 years in duration – was designed to make the enclave “uninhabitable”.

In other words, Israel was precisely “creating conditions that don’t allow the survival of the population”. 

Even before its current, extended assault, Israel had placed severe restrictions on access to water for the enclave’s 2.3 million inhabitants. As a direct result, overstretched aquifers under Gaza were allowing in seawater, making the enclave’s drinking water unfit for human consumption.

Food was similarly in short supply. Back in 2012, Israeli human rights groups managed to make public a secret document showing that the army had been tightly controlling food going into Gaza from 2008 onwards. As a result, two-thirds of the population was food insecure, and every 10th child was stunted by malnutrition. The aim was to induce long-term food poverty, effectively putting the population on a starvation diet. 

Israel’s repeated attacks on Gaza over the past 15 years – what Israel calls “mowing the grass” – destroyed many of its homes and much of the infrastructure, creating ever greater overcrowding and unsanitary conditions.

Israel’s repeated bombing of Gaza’s only power station, and its chokehold on supplying additional energy, limited electricity to a few hours a day.

The Israeli siege blocked medicines and medical equipment from entering the enclave, often making serious health conditions difficult or impossible to treat. And given the Israeli-imposed restrictions of goods in and out of Gaza, the economy was already in ruins, with nearly half the population unemployed.

Long ago, back in 2016, the head of Israeli military intelligence, Herzi Halevi, warned that the catastrophe Israel was engineering in Gaza could blow up in its face – as indeed it did on 7 October.

Israel’s three-month rampage has simply accelerated and intensified all the genocidal policies that had long been established. Hamas’s break-out simply gave Israel licence to take the gloves off. 

Gaza ‘uninhabitable’

This is why the UN’s head of humanitarian affairs, Martin Griffiths, declared last week that Gaza had reached the point where it was indeed “uninhabitable”.

He added: “People are facing the highest levels of food insecurity ever recorded. Famine is around the corner.”

With the vast majority of the population homeless and most hospitals no longer functioning, infectious disease was spreading. 

Israel’s “complete siege” policy meant aid could not get in. According to Griffiths, Israel had destroyed roads, blocked communication systems, and was shooting at UN trucks and killing aid workers. 

Returning from a visit to the border crossing with Egypt, two US senators observed at the weekend that Israel had imposed unreasonable conditions creating endless delays that prevented aid from reaching the people of Gaza.

In other words, Israel has now successfully “created conditions that don’t allow the survival of the population”. 

The aim of the 1948 Genocide Convention, drafted in the immediate wake of the Second World War and the Nazi Holocaust, was not simply to punish those who carry out genocides.

It was designed to help identify a genocide in its early stages, and create a mechanism – through the rulings of the International Court of Justice – by which it could be halted.

In other words, the purpose of South Africa’s case is not to arbitrate what happens once Israel has annihilated the Palestinians of Gaza, as far too many observers appear to imagine. It is to stop Israel from annihilating the people of Gaza before it is too late.

Based on strange logic, Israel’s supporters imply that the genocide charge is unwarranted because the real aim is not to exterminate the Palestinians of Gaza but to induce them to flee. 

Israeli leaders have encouraged this assumption. In an interview on Sunday, the national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, noted of Gaza’s population that – after being bombed, made homeless, starved and left vulnerable to disease – “hundreds of thousands will leave now”. Duplicitiously, he termed this a “voluntary” mass emigration.

But such an outcome – itself a crime against humanity – entirely depends on Egypt opening its borders to allow Palestinians to flee the killing fields. If Cairo refuses to submit to Israel’s violent blackmail, it will be Israel’s bombs, the famine it inflicted, and the lethal diseases it unleashed that decimate Gaza’s population.

The International Court of Justice must not adopt a wait-and-see approach, pondering whether Israel’s bombing campaign and siege lead to extermination or “only” ethnic cleansing. That would strip international humanitarian law of all relevance.

Line in the sand

If Israel and its western allies fail to bludgeon the court into submission, and South Africa’s case is accepted, it will not only be Israel in legal difficulties. 

A genocide ruling from the court will impose obligations on other states: both to refuse to assist in Israel’s genocide, such as by providing arms and diplomatic cover, and to sanction Israel should it fail to comply.

An interim order halting Israel’s attack will serve as a line in the sand. Once made, any state that fails to act on the injunction risks becoming complicit in genocide. 

That will put the West in a serious legal bind. After all, it has not just been turning a blind eye to the genocide in Gaza; it has been actively cheering it on and colluding in it. 

Leaders in the UK such as Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and opposition leader Keir Starmer have steadfastly opposed a ceasefire and thrown their weight behind a central pillar of Israel’s genocidal policy: the “complete siege” of Gaza that has left the population starving and facing lethal epidemics.

The British and US governments have rejected all calls to stop the flow of arms. The Biden administration has even bypassed Congress to speed up the supply of weapons to Israel, including indiscriminate “dumb” bombs that are laying waste to civilian areas.

Israel’s ambassador to the UK, Tzipi Hotovely, has regularly been featured by British media making genocidal statements. Just last week, when an interviewer noted that she appeared to be calling for the destruction of the whole of Gaza – every school, mosque and home – she answered: “Do you have another solution?”

British and US media have given airtime to Israeli officials who openly incite genocide.

All that would have to stop immediately after a ruling. The police in western nations would be expected to investigate and the courts prosecute those inciting genocide or providing a platform for incitement. 

States would be expected to deny Israel weapons and impose economic sanctions on Israel – as well as on any states that collude in the genocide. 

Israeli officials would risk arrest for travelling to western countries. 

Double standards

In practice, of course, none of that is likely to happen. Israel is far too important to the West – as a projection of its power into the oil-rich Middle East – to be sacrificed. 

Any effort to enforce a genocide ruling through the UN Security Council will be blocked by the Biden administration. 

Meanwhile, the UK, along with Canada, Germany, Denmark, France and the Netherlands, have already demonstrated how unabashed they are about their own double standards. 

Weeks ago they submitted formal arguments to the International Court of Justice that Myanmar was committing genocide against the Rohingya ethnic group. Their central argument was that the Rohingya were being subjected “to a subsistence diet, systematic expulsion from homes, and the induction of essential medical services below minimum requirement”.

But none of these western states is backing South Africa’s genocide submission to the same court – even though conditions in Gaza engineered by Israel are even worse. 

The truth is that a genocide ruling by the court will open up a can of worms for the West, and its readiness to accept that the provisions of international law apply to it too.

Israel has been at the forefront of efforts to unravel international law in Gaza for more than a decade. Now it is ostentatiously flaunting its perpetration of the crime of genocide, as if daring the world to stop it. 

Perversely, it is reversing the very international safeguards put in place to stop a repeat of the Nazi Holocaust. 

Will the West defy Israel or the court? The post-war consensus that serves as the foundation for international law – already shaken by the failure to address the West’s war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan – is on the verge of complete collapse.

And no one will be happier with that outcome than the state of Israel.