By Shabbir Rizvi
The day is nearly upon us: the Israeli regime will face charges of genocide at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) later this week, thanks to a lawsuit brought in by the South African government.
The lawsuit invokes the Geneva Convention, which both South Africa and Israel are signatories of.
Both sides are making last-minute preparations to put together their legal teams to represent them at the Haque-based court, which is one of the six principal organs of the United Nations.
It is important to note that the ICJ is a civil tribunal that hears disputes between its members and not a criminal tribunal. Its rulings could lead to isolation, and cause political, economic and social harm.
To cut it short, an ICJ ruling that Israel is committing genocide spells absolute disaster for the apartheid regime. It comes at a time when the death toll in Gaza tops 23,000, about half of them being children.
There is not only a multitude of compelling, video evidence of Israeli war crimes being brought to the table. There are also statements of Israeli officials themselves using genocidal language that South African legal counsel intends to bring to the court.
With this evidence being brought to court, Israeli legal strategy will be largely resorting to three things: obfuscating the context and implications of Israel’s official statements, using wartime rules of engagement in order to justify its genocidal actions, and lastly, challenging the Geneva Convention definition of genocide as it applies to the ongoing aggression on Gaza.
For such a tall order, US and Israeli media have reported that Alan Dershowitz has been personally brought in by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to represent his regime at the ICJ.
The name Dershowitz should sound familiar: he has taken on a multitude of high-profile cases, defending and advising seemingly the worst of the worst: convicted sex offender and child trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, former US president Donald Trump, Hollywood producer and sexual offender Harvey Weinstein, and many more comprising the hall of infamy.
He has been a noted Harvard law professor for several decades, known for his ability to use gray areas within the US law to secure bargains and diminish the severity of an accusation.
Multiple Epstein witnesses accused Dershowitz of being someone who engaged in pedophilia and rape with a girl trafficked by Epstein, an American sex offender who died in August 2019.
Ironically, shortly after news broke out of Israel has chosen Dershowitz as its representative at ICJ, newly released and highly controversial documents known as the “Epstein Papers” further solidified the claim of Dershowitz raping an underage girl multiple times.
Dershowitz first met Epstein in 1996, placing him with Epstein during the same time and location as the human trafficking and abuse charges Epstein faced.
Epstein died in prison four years ago awaiting his day in court for conspiracy and record falsification charges. Many have speculated that his death, ruled a suicide, was under suspicious circumstances.
The documents released last week also mention Prince Andrew, Bill Clinton, Stephen Hawking, and other powerful Western socio-political figures meeting with Epstein on his plush island, or in other settings that included the presence of trafficked minors.
Dershowitz has claimed innocence while acknowledging the newly surfaced court evidence implicating him in sex crimes with Epstein.
Doubling down, Dershowitz went on a livestream where he addressed the evidence, which he dismissed as false allegations, and interestingly changed the subject completely to Hamas and Israel, without commenting on his potential appearance in the UN court to defend the Netanyahu regime.
Since then, Dershowitz has gone on the offensive and kept the media limelight close to him, maintaining his innocence despite the damning evidence against him that has piled up over the years.
Clearly, Dershowitz is a man with a lot of baggage on him – and the worst kind. But, birds of a feather flock together as they say, and the Israeli link to Epstein and Dershowitz also seems to grow deeper by the day.
Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s primary business partner throughout the years, is also a convicted sex offender and human trafficker, who is serving 20 years on multiple charges related to her criminal activities with Epstein.
Maxwell’s father was Robert Maxwell, a British MP and media mogul, who was given a state funeral in Israel. Robert Maxwell was suspected of being a spy for the Israeli Mossad agency.
Both the Maxwells and Epstein are also suspected of running an elaborate blackmail operation on behalf of Mossad – entrapping famous and powerful figures using evidence of them committing rape and pedophilia – in order to make them puppets for the Israeli regime.
It adds up that Dershowitz would then be a name floated by Israeli officials – particularly Netanyahu – for defending Israel in a high-profile case with serious implications.
For much of Dershowitz’s career, he has been a staunch defender of the Zionist regime. Dershowitz also advocated for delisting Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), an anti-Iran terror cult, as a terrorist group in the US and has had an anti-Iranian orientation to his political beliefs.
But even more so than loyalty to the Israeli regime (whether forced or not), Dershowitz is remorseless in his practice. Dershowitz routinely uses his X (formerly Twitter) account to challenge the age of consent laws and obfuscate laws and the contexts they can be applied to, in response to the allegations against him for raping a minor trafficked by Epstein.
Netanyahu is likely looking for the same brand of defense, rather than offense, from Dershowitz.
Dershowitz was able to secure a plea deal for Epstein in 2008 on the crime of procuring a minor for prostitution- despite the damning evidence against him – to be knocked down to just 13 months.
He also advised the high-profile OJ Simpson defense in the 90s, which led to a ‘not guilty’ verdict in two charges of first-degree murder against Simpson.
Dershowitz’s ability to exploit gray areas within US criminal and constitutional law has given him multiple, high-profile cases that many would hesitate to consider touching.
In his own words, “The job of a criminal defense attorney is to try to get the best possible deal.”
Diluting the charges against Israel in this context could be the difference between global isolation and normalization by UN court standards.
If Israel moves forward with Dershowitz – a suspected pedophile and rapist – that would illustrate the desperation of the regime to water down or deflect the charges of genocide it is facing in the ICJ.
Dershowitz has not always been successful, but the fact that his name is on a shortlist shows that the embattled Israeli regime premier is in a critical situation – while also revealing just how deep the Dershowitz-Epstein connection goes with Israel.
However, if Israel does not move forward with Dershowitz, considering the amount of baggage on him, Dershowitz is still someone that many should pay attention to.
His close association with the Zionist regime and his direct involvement in sex trafficking crimes may reveal the extent of criminality Israeli intelligence is willing to go to keep major figures in their pockets.
Shabbir Rizvi is a Chicago-based political analyst with a focus on US internal security and foreign policy.
(The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of Press TV)
