It is clear from the ICJ’s ruling that it is fully aware of the magnitude of Israel’s crimes. This makes the decision not to call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza all the more distressing. But the court did deliver a devastating blow to the mystique Israel has used since its founding: it made the word genocide, when applied to Israel, credible.

Joe Biden’s inner circle of strategists for the Middle East—Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan and Brett McGurk—have little understanding of the Muslim world and a deep animus towards Islamic resistance movements. They see Europe, the United States and Israel as involved in a clash of civilizations between the enlightened West and a barbaric Middle East.

Genocide is not a political problem. It is a moral one. We cannot support those who commit or are accomplices to genocide. Genocide is the crime of all crimes. We must stand unequivocally with Palestinians and the jurists from South Africa. We must demand justice. We must hold Biden accountable for the genocide in Gaza.

The Holocaust was weaponized from almost the moment Israel was founded. It was bastardized to serve the apartheid state. If we forget the lessons of the Holocaust, we forget who we are and what we are capable of becoming. We seek our moral worth in the past, rather than the present. We condemn others, including the Palestinians, to an endless cycle of slaughter.

Israel is a pariah state. This was publicly on display on December 12 when 153 member states at the UN General Assembly voted for a ceasefire, with only 10 abstaining. Israel’s campaign in Gaza means there will be no peace. There will be no two state solution. Apartheid and genocide will define Israel. This presages a long conflict, one Israel cannot win.

The savagery of the air strikes and indiscriminate attacks, the cutting off of food, water and medicine, the genocidal rhetoric of the Israeli government, make this a war whose sole objective is revenge. This will not be good for Israel or the Palestinians. It will fuel a conflagration throughout the Middle East. This war is not over. It has not even begun.

The global ruling class will counter the destabilizing forces of inequality, curtailment of civil liberties, collapsing infrastructure, failing health systems and increasing shortages caused by an accelerating climate crisis, by branding all who resist as “human animals.” As Chris Hedges writes, this new world order began in Gaza. It ends at home.

We have failed you. This is the awful guilt we carry. We tried. But we did not try hard enough. We will go to Rafah. Many of us. Reporters. We will stand outside the border with Gaza in protest. We will write and film. This is what we do. It is not much. But it is something. We will tell your story again. But we are not there. Not this time. We cannot get in. We are locked out.

Israel, with the backing of its US and European allies, is preparing to launch not only a scorched earth campaign in Gaza but the worst ethnic cleansing since the wars in the former Yugoslavia. The goal is to drive tens, most probably hundreds of thousands of Palestinians over the southern border at Rafah into refugee camps in Egypt.

Israel taught the Palestinians to communicate in the primitive howl of hatred, war, death and annihilation. But it is not Israel’s assault on Gaza I fear most. It is the complicity of an international community that licenses Israel’s genocidal slaughter and accelerates a cycle of violence it may not be able to control.