Objections to war crime protests, instead of war crimes themselves?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/01/05/wv-israel-hamas

Once again a moral panic arises over college students protesting war crimes, rather than over the war crimes themselves.

It's such a simple, clear cut, obvious thing to refuse to fund ethnic cleansing, and yet America can't seem to manage it.

We'd rather scream about some kids sitting in a tent on a university green, which literally amounts to saying "Get off my lawn."

"Members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition have called for the dropping of a nuclear bomb on densely-populated Gaza, the total annihilation of the territory as a mark of retribution, and the immiseration of its people to the point that they have no choice but to abandon their homeland.

This week alone, a parliamentarian from Netanyahu’s Likud party went on television and said it was clear to most Israelis that 'all the Gazans need to be destroyed.' Then, Israel’s ambassador in Britain told local radio that there was no other solution for her country than to level “every school, every mosque, every second house” in Gaza to degrade Hamas’s military infrastructure.

This accumulating rhetoric forms part of the 84-page application filed by the government of South Africa at the International Court of Justice, accusing Israel of actions that amount to genocide or failure to prevent genocide. Though it condemns Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack, the South African case argues 'no armed attack on a State’s territory no matter how serious — even an attack involving atrocity crimes — can … provide any possible justification for, or defense to, breaches' of the Genocide Convention. Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, it explains, has already 'laid waste to vast areas of Gaza, including entire neighborhoods, and has damaged or destroyed in excess of 355,000 Palestinian homes,' rendering swaths of the territory uninhabitable for a long period of time to come. Israeli authorities, claimed the South African complaint, have failed to suppress 'direct and public incitement to commit genocide' from a host of Israeli politicians, journalists and public officials."