Gaza and the US-Israeli international fascism charter

“The allegations that Israel is committing genocide are false and not new. They are part of a broader campaign to delegitimize the State of Israel and the Jewish people, and to justify and encourage terrorism against them.”

Those words were not part of a speech by Benjamin Netanyahu or one of his ministers, nor were they remarks from an official in Trump’s administration. They appeared instead in the opening lines of the official memorandum the US formally submitted to the International Court of Justice, defending the occupying state against the genocide case brought by South Africa.

Is it really plausible that Washington would intervene at the last moment, just as the March 12 deadline for Israel’s defense closed, while Trump continues issuing daily decisions that expose the collapse of the international order and a return to a pre-Westphalian age—before peace treaties, national sovereignty, or even the idea of states as juridical equals?

Is Trump not the same man—thin on knowledge, thinner on judgment—who presides over a phantom “Board of Peace” hostile to the UN,  who oversaw the abduction of Venezuela’s president, and stands with Netanyahu in a reckless assault on Iran? How, then, does his secretary of state, Marco Rubi, his “best assistant”, intervene in a case whose simple message is that law still exists, and crimes must still be pursued?

Another question is equally logical: when Washington joins the case with states that follow its lead—Hungary, Paraguay, Fiji—backing Israel in every forum, does it not entrench international justice as another arena of political struggle? More directly, is this not the clearest expression of the international fascism advanced by Trump and Netanyahu through brute force, extermination, and the dismantling of old rules?

A heavy-handed intervention

Amid a war where doctrine and religious obsession merge with long-term aims to remake the Middle East and eliminate any future challenge to Israel—despite the potential collapse of Gulf security doctrine and soaring costs for Washington and its allies—a plain reading of Zionist-American conduct suggests a boycott of international justice, deeper contempt for law, and an open faith in brute force and the “extermination” of the moral values underpinning the legal order.

That expectation proved superficial. In fact, Tel Aviv has worked to clear Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and overturn ICC arrest warrants for war crimes and crimes against humanity, filing three appeals—the latest rejected in mid-December. Three days later, Washington sanctioned two pretrial judges, accusing them of “illegitimately targeting Israel.”

Then, in parallel with events in Venezuela and later Iran, Israel marshaled US legal power to form a small camp on its side in the genocide case, even as the number of states backing the Palestinian cause rose to 16 from every continent in the world: Libya, Mexico, Spain, Turkey, Chile, the Maldives, Bolivia, Ireland, Cuba, Belize, Brazil, Belgium, the Netherlands, Iceland, Namibia and, in addition, Palestine.

The Zionist-American push to engage in legal proceedings while exerting political and media pressure to avoid condemnation reflects no faith in the international system, nor merely a drive to win everywhere. Rather, it reveals the core crisis of this “international fascism”: an acute awareness of its own illegitimacy and of enduring moral, legal, and historical threats that could one day unravel it from within.

A blinkered view

Such is the misery of this age: amid vast, uncertain change, elites in Egypt and across the Arab and Islamic worlds still treat legal, media, and cultural fronts as either foregone or Western conspiracies. Voices continue to justify Egypt’s and other Arab states’ absence from the ICJ genocide case, citing its supposed irrelevance or their diplomatic and economic ties with the occupation.

Had the legal battle been futile, a whole camp would not now be rallying behind the enemy in The Hague. Washington, Berlin, and others would not be shielding it at the ICJ and ICC, especially as it faces no immediate threat. Proceedings may last years—no genocide ruling is expected before 2027—and evading a war crimes warrant is hardly difficult for Netanyahu, given his support in major capitals, as seen in Budapest and New York last year.

And if cordial official relations were truly enough to block legal action, South Africa itself would never have brought the case, despite its solid economic ties with Israel. Nor would states the occupation can scarcely do without—such as the Netherlands and Belgium—have joined, especially when their intervention stirred broad domestic controversy.

One “Israel” is not enough

Washington’s messages before the ICJ do not end there. They point instead to the course that “international fascism” wants to entrench and slip past unchallenged, so that it can be repeated more easily in the future by its various arms across the globe. We can already see it in Sudan’s civil conflict, in what may befall Iran should events escalate further, and in the standing threats directed at countries in Central and South America.

The US memorandum argues that international forums have been abused against Israel for half a century, and that the concept of genocide must be confined to the presence of “specific intent to destroy, in whole or in part.” It insists that “acts occurring during armed conflict should not be construed as genocide in the absence of such specific intent,” and calls for a “strict standard,” resistant to expansion, in order to prevent “attempts to misuse the Genocide Convention to bring other unrelated disputes before the Court.”

The world’s paralysis in the face of what has been done to the Palestinian people has pushed international law into a tunnel of embarrassment and public contempt.

Thus does the world’s sole superpower cling, in plain language, to the legitimation of genocide—phrasing its arguments so as to generalize impunity, to bar other cases from slipping into the arena of international justice.

In their view, whatever happens in war should remain in the field of war: “Civilian casualties, even on a large scale, do not necessarily constitute evidence of genocidal intent, especially when they occur in the context of armed conflict involving fighting in urban areas.” They added another pitiable argument, claiming that “the detention of prisoners of war from among the protected group, and permitting their release or exchange, may constitute evidence negating genocidal intent.”

On a similar wavelength, Hungary, in its own memorandum, tried to frighten the court with the prospect of “the disappearance of the dividing line between law and politics.” Fiji, for its part, objected to the court’s reliance in its earlier provisional measures against Israel on UN reports, arguing that they were inaccurate and did not reflect neutral and objective witnesses. The aim was to block any possible effect of the UN commission of inquiry report issued last September, which found evidence that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza since October 2023.

The world’s incapacity in the face of what the Zionist machine has done to the Palestinian people over two and a half years has shoved international law into a corridor of humiliation and open disdain. It has laid bare the grave structural defects in that system—defects that hollow out state sovereignty in the sense of equality and independent will, strip peoples of protection and prevent justice from being achieved even in its most elementary form.

But none of this means yielding to Zionist-American efforts to normalize war crimes and crimes against humanity, or to spread the extermination model itself in a manner closer to chaos—as the optimal solution for settling conflicts under the myth of deterrence, a doctrine that evolved from the theorizing of Revisionist Zionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky into Netanyahu’s executive plans.

Here, the ambitions of “international fascism” go beyond subduing Israel’s neighbors and turning it into the sole axis around which the region moves. They extend to manufacturing other small “Israels,” east and west alike, that know only how to devastate and exterminate as the twin instruments of domination and resource extraction.

That is why the case before the ICJ carries doubled significance. It also gives us every right to ask why Egypt did not carry through on the pledge it made in May 2024 to intervene in the case.

Egypt is the first line of defense for the Palestinian cause, the only state capable of making a real difference in international forums, and the primary witness to the obstruction of aid, the sealing of borders, demographic engineering by force, forced displacement, the sabotage of mediation efforts and the other practices that the Zionist-American camp is trying to erase in preparation for the next genocide.