At the inaugural hearing of the International Court of Justice of the United Nations, hereafter ICJ (not to be confused with the International Criminal Court), Israeli ad hoc judge Aaron Barak got off to a very intense start. “The court imputes Cain’s crime to Abel in a totally erroneous way.” It goes without saying that, for the judge, Abel is Israel, the unjustly presumed guilty by the Court; and “the other side”, the real Cain, would be Hamas or two million Gazans. We are dealing with a case that is both brutally simple to assess, but very complex to deploy before the ICJ. Surprisingly, Judge Barak, throughout his well-developed argument, makes it clear that, in his case, the case should have been approached from the legal instrument of Crimes Against Humanity or War Crimes, instead of of trying to approach it from the forceful accusation of Genocide. Because? As Professor Alicia Gil y Gil explained a few days ago in an article in El País: “Genocide, a difficult crime to prove and to commit”. You want to ask: Really? Difficult to commit? Well, if you want to be a real genocidal and be judged in due course as such, it won’t be easy for you. The professor got it right, and here we get right to the heart of the matter, the Bermuda triangle that makes up morality, international humanitarian law and wars. If the reader wants to go deeper into this unattractive topic, he can go to Philippe Sands’s book, Calle Este-Oeste (Anagrama), a dazzling work on how two jurists, Lauterpacht and Lemkin, make the foundations of this debate that it started around the Nuremberg trials. They didn’t know each other as children, but they lived on the same street, Carrer Est-Oest in a city that has experienced a lot of turbulence from the 19th century until today. It is called Lviv (today), it was called Lvov (under the Soviet Union), formerly Lemberg (with the Austro-Hungarian Empire), and still today Léopolis.

Without moving from home, a family has lived under several empires, dictatorships, and even today, any afternoon, it can receive Russian bombs.

In summary, conventional morality, for the general public, would demand that the more violence, the more punishment, but law has rules and, if it is law, they are demanding rules. At the Nuremberg trial, when the Second World War ended, it was about two things, doing justice on the monstrosities experienced, but with a certain prudence. For example, against the Nazis, that of the new legal types was obvious, despite the fact that, of course, the court and prosecutors all belonged to the victorious powers. Judge and party in a trial? The world demanded it, somehow. But, at the same time, the cities of Dresden and Hamburg were razed in two nights by allied aviation and more than 100,000 civilians died. There were no military installations or large concentrations of troops. There was a desire for revenge for the bombs dropped in London and Coventry and a desire to end the war. If you look at photographs of Berlin in 1945, no stone was left unturned either. Here we can see the darkest part of the triangle: Nuremberg yes, but from here it is a long way from turning it into a new form of universal criminal justice, with all the procedural complexity it entails.

Judge Barak, of enormous (and well-deserved) prestige accumulated in his country over decades, lists in his private vote all the demands that “the Israeli soldier carries in his rucksack in terms of the law of war and humanitarian law”, which formally is a considerable burden.

However, there is a but. The data provided by some Israeli human rights organizations, which with great merit give us the figures: we are talking about Pau Ara, BetSelem and others. The but also includes the images, on the networks or on television, which leave no doubt.

The dull narrative of the various military spokespersons in their day-to-day life. Or the words and deeds of the worst of an Israeli government (ministers Ben-Gvir or Smotrich), such as that the text of the ICJ “for us is toilet paper”.

The 2,000,000 Gazans who must go to the Sinai or return to the north of the strip, where there is nothing left to destroy, or, lastly, we will put them on an artificial island in the Mediterranean, under the military control of ‘Israel.

And morale goes haywire if we think that the 1,300 Jews killed on October 7 are a reliving holocaust, while the 28,000 Palestinians (50% minors, i.e. children) are collateral damage ·siders or terrorists of Hamas or ISIS. And, after all, in times of war, we knew that morality, politics and humanitarian law do not mix at all… but so little?