Israel appoints new representative to ICJ, where it is on trial for genocide

The Israeli government will replace Aharon Barak with Ron Shapira as its representative at the International Court of Justice, the UN’s highest judicial body, which is trying the Israeli state for genocide following a lawsuit initially filed by South Africa and which has since been joined by other countries.

Barak announced his resignation last month for “personal family reasons” and will be replaced by Shapira on the 15-judge panel charged with judging the case.

Shapira is a lawyer by training and the rector of the Peres Academic Center in Rehovot. He also teaches at Bar-Ilan University and Tel Aviv University.

Barak, a Holocaust survivor with a long career as a lawyer, was appointed in January. At the time, Shapira said the ICJ was “an organization that almost all Israelis believe is untrustworthy.”

“The consensus in Israel is that this body embodies and takes to the extreme all the errors of legal discourse: intellectual dishonesty, manipulative use of ambiguous definitions, dubious tools of verification and denial, and concealing the motives of judges under the guise of neutrality,” he said in a Facebook post.

Shapira expressed his respect for Barak, but said that sending such a renowned jurist “is not due to the respect we have” for that organization.

On May 24, the ICJ ordered Israel to immediately halt its military offensive on the southern Gaza Strip city of Rafah and urged the Israeli government to allow unrestricted entry into the Strip to any commission the United Nations decides to establish to investigate a possible genocide in the Palestinian enclave.

He also criticized Israel for failing to comply with the preliminary measures imposed by the United Nations court to prevent genocide in Gaza.