It should never have come to this. The finding of an independent commission of inquiry set up by the United Nations that Israel has committed genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip is as grave a charge as can be levelled against a sovereign government and the people who lead it. Israel, it is important always to concede, has its own case to make. The atrocities committed by Hamas on 7 October 2023 were the immediate trigger for this latest phase in a conflict that has been going on for decades. Those atrocities constituted a war crime – acknowledged as such by the UN.
Israel has the right to defend itself. But what it does not have the right to do is commit war crimes or genocide, and it was self-destructive to place itself in a position where such things can even be seriously discussed. Whether that was inevitable, driven by the domestic political needs of the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, or in some sense the only way in which Israel felt it could survive, the state now dismisses the UN commission as another “distorted and false” report.
