Commentary
There can be no justice in a colonial system
The March 27 rulings reveal that the Israeli Supreme Court is a colonial court, protecting the rights of the settler population while legitimizing dispossession, displacement and horrific violence.
One of the questions I am often asked when talking about Israel and Palestine is about the internal resistance to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government. My interlocutors point to the fact that hundreds of thousands of Israelis have gone into the streets to protest the government and its efforts to introduce an overhaul of the judicial system and ask me why I am not enthusiastic about the efforts to end Netanyahu's government.
My answer is that the real problem in Israel is not the current government. The government might fall, but until we radically transform the nature of the regime, not much will change, particularly regarding the fundamental rights of the Palestinians.
An Israeli Supreme Court decision from last week underscores my point. On March 18, 2024, five Israeli human rights organizations submitted an urgent petition to the Supreme Court, asking it to order the Israeli government and armed forces to fulfill their obligations under international humanitarian law and to respond to the humanitarian needs of the civilian population living in catastrophic conditions in Gaza.
The petition was filed at a time when aid was still entering Gaza, but the amount crossing the border was far from sufficient to meet the minimum needs of the population, 75% of whom had already been displaced. The human rights groups wanted the government to lift all restrictions on the passage of aid, equipment and personnel into Gaza, particularly in the north, where cases of children dying from malnutrition and dehydration had already been documented.
It took more than a year for the court to issue a ruling, effectively giving the government a free hand to continue to restrict aid in the meantime. Three weeks after the petition was filed, the Court met only for the purpose of giving the government more time to update its preliminary response to the request.
This set the tone for how things would go with the petition over the next twelve months: each time, the petitioners would provide data on the worsening conditions of the civilian population and stress the urgent need for judicial intervention, while the Court did nothing more than ask the government for more updates.
In the April 17 update, for example, the government insisted that it had significantly increased the number of incoming aid trucks, claiming that between October 7, 2023 and April 12, 2024 it had allowed 22,763 trucks through the checkpoints. This is equivalent to 121 trucks per day, which according to all humanitarian agencies working in Gaza is not enough to meet the needs of the population.
In October 2024, more than six months after the petition was filed, rights organizations asked the court to issue an injunction after the government deliberately blocked humanitarian aid for two weeks. In response, the government said it had been closely monitoring the situation in northern Gaza and that “there was no food shortage.” Two months later, however, the government confessed that it had underestimated the number of Palestinian residents trapped in northern Gaza, thus acknowledging that incoming aid was insufficient.
On March 18, 2025, after Israel violated the ceasefire agreement and resumed airstrikes on Gaza and the Minister of Energy and Infrastructure cut off the supply of electricity, the petitioners filed another urgent request for an injunction against the government's decision to prevent the passage of humanitarian aid.
Again, the court failed to rule. It was only on March 27, more than a year after the initial petition was filed, that Chief Justice Yitzhak Amit and Justices Noam Sohlberg and David Mintz unanimously ruled that the petition was invalid.
Justice David Mintz garnished his opinion with Jewish religious texts, characterizing Israel's attacks as a war of divine duty and concluding that “the IDF and the respondents went above and beyond the call of duty to allow the delivery of humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip, even taking the risk that the transferred aid would reach the hands of the Hamas terrorist organization and be used by it to fight against Israel.”
Thus, at a time when humanitarian agencies have repeatedly emphasized the acute levels of malnutrition and hunger, the Israeli Supreme Court ignored Israel's legal obligation to refrain from depriving the civilian population of items essential to its survival, including intentionally obstructing aid supplies. It did so both in the way it handled the judicial process and in its ruling. In effect, the Court sanctioned the use of starvation as a weapon of war.
This is the Court that hundreds of thousands of Israelis are trying to save. The March 27 rulings – and many other rulings involving the Palestinians – reveal that the Supreme Court is a colonial court, protecting the rights of the settler population while legitimizing dispossession, displacement and horrific violence perpetrated against the indigenous Palestinian population.
Although the Supreme Court may not entirely share the values of the current government – particularly on issues regarding political corruption – there is no doubt that it reflects, and has always reflected, the values of the colonial regime. Thus, the liberal Zionists filling up the streets of Tel Aviv every weekend are not demonstrating against a judicial reform that endangers democracy, but against one that endangers Jewish democracy.
Few of these protesters have any real qualms about the appalling humanitarian aid ruling or, for that matter, about the Court consistently upholding the pillars of Israeli apartheid and colonialism. In other words, the regime can continue to eliminate the Palestinians unimpeded as long as the rights of Israel's Jewish citizens are protected.
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/non-ce-giustizia-in-un-sistema-coloniale on 2025-04-02