Israel has just announced the creation of special tribunals to prosecute those responsible for the October 7 attacks. The news has been welcomed as evidence that Israel acts as a democracy governed by the rule of law, in contrast to the barbarity of its enemies.
But its usefulness ends there, because the factual and legal framework within which it situates the events paves the way for its own conviction of genocide in international courts.
The consequences are far from theoretical.
They include the proliferation of cases against Israeli citizens in foreign courts, the growing legitimacy and dissemination of hostile narratives across media platforms, and the encouragement such narratives provide to acts of direct persecution and violence in the streets.
The first strategic mistake lies in validating the factual basis upon which the international accusation rests.
If the cases before the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the International Court of Justice (ICJ) confine October 7 to a single day’s events in order to portray Israel’s actions from October 8 onward as a separate act of aggression, the Israeli jurisdiction replicates the same framework, adopting its adversaries’ narrative.
This self-incrimination is serious because the state itself pretends to ignore that the events included kidnappings, enforced disappearances, torture, and murders in captivity – continuing crimes that only ceased on January 26, 2026, when the remains of the last victim were recovered.
It also disregards the sustained attacks against its civilian population throughout that period. Worse still, it endorses a distortion whose correction would strengthen its own position.
If it is established that Israel’s defensive response began simultaneously with the massacre, then its actions must be understood – from the outset until the cessation of those crimes – as those of a victim responding to an ongoing attack rather than those of an aggressor.
This is no minor issue, since the genocide allegations against Israel rest on the existence of a specific intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a protected population.
Therefore, the more clearly it can be shown that Israel’s actions formed part of a response to an ongoing aggression – aimed primarily at recovering hostages, ending continuing crimes, and neutralizing sustained attacks against its civilian population – the more difficult it becomes to attribute to it an intent to destroy the Palestinian people as such.
The continuing nature of the October 7 crimes also makes it possible to encompass the other aggressors involved in the attack: Hezbollah, from October 8, 2023, onward; and the Islamic Republic of Iran, from June 2024, onward, both largely excluded by the temporal fragmentation advanced by the international accusers.
Why the legal characterization matters
This factual flaw is compounded by a legal one: classifying the events that began on October 7 as “terrorist acts” when they should fall within the category of “genocide” as defined in the Crime of Genocide Law (5710–1950), enacted by the Knesset in 1950.
The conceptual abdication is significant: “terrorism” describes a method; “genocide” describes a purpose. One explains how an attack is carried out; the other, why it is carried out.
In substance, the overlooked law reproduces the same definition of genocide applied by the ICJ and the ICC: the total or partial destruction of a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group.
And it punishes not only the commission of the crime but also conspiracy, incitement, attempt, and complicity, extending potential liability to other actors.
The specific intent required by the law does not appear to be an obstacle.
The will to eliminate the group (the Jewish people) is set out in Hamas’s founding charter, in Hezbollah’s manifesto, in the repeated programmatic statements of their leaders, and in the explicit promise to repeat October 7.
When these elements are coupled with the persistent and deliberate attacks against civilians, there is a sufficient basis to sustain a genocide charge under the terms of that very law.
It is difficult to understand why, despite the existence of this law for 75 years, the state chooses not to invoke it at the very moment it faces international accusations of the same crime.
Especially when it would strengthen its own defense in universal jurisdiction proceedings.
Because the difference between terrorism and genocide does not merely alter the legal characterization of the aggressor; it also shapes the legal interpretation of the victim’s response to an existential threat.
In that respect, it matters whether the aggression is understood as a limited cross-border incursion or as an attack aimed at the destruction of the national group itself.
Israel still seems not to grasp that the main battle is being fought not in Jerusalem but in The Hague, where its adversaries have succeeded in consolidating a narrative that reverses the roles, turning the victim into the perpetrator: the genocidal actor is the Jewish state.
Yet the accused responds in its own courts by assigning quasi-police categories to those who openly seek its destruction.
No one doubts that Hamas will be condemned in Jerusalem. But what value will that have in preventing Israel’s condemnation in The Hague? Because that’s where the serpent’s egg lies.
That is where the legal truth is forged and spread across the world.
The Hague is the source of the narrative that today legitimizes persecution. Israel still fails to recognize this. It is staging tribunals invoking Eichmann when the historical analogy it faces is that of Dreyfus.
It must be understood: Israel is the accused today. Domestic proceedings may help strengthen its international defense, but they are insufficient to shift the center of gravity of the dispute.
Israel’s judgments lack resonance beyond its borders. We are no longer in 1962.
Since the entry into force of the Rome Statute in 2002, a transnational legal order has emerged, producing categories, narratives, and decisions capable of shaping legal truth worldwide.
Yet there remains an alternative: to enter a jurisdiction belonging to that order and take the offensive.
Argentinian jurisdiction appears to be the natural venue for such a strategy.
Not because it could replace the ICC, but because it allows the introduction – within its legal ecosystem – of a reverse prosecution platform capable of issuing rulings that challenge the narrative currently taking shape in The Hague.
It offers a concrete opportunity to contest that libel before it becomes a verdict. Perhaps it’s time to launch a new J’Accuse…!, in defense of the sovereign Jew.
The writer is an architect, author, and journalist. He has published several books and recently initiated a criminal case in Argentina under international jurisdiction to prosecute the October 7 massacre as crimes against humanity and genocide.
