“South Africa came to the Court seeking the immediate suspension of the military operations in the Gaza Strip. It has wrongly sought to impute the crime of Cain to Abel.” Those are the sentences from the International Court of Justice that catch our eye. They are from the pen of the court’s only Israeli judge, Aharon Barak, who is also the court’s only survivor of a genocide. And it’s hard not to think that Judge Barak’s powerful mind had a salutary effect.

The ICJ rejected South Africa’s demand that the court order Israel to cease its war against Hamas, never mind that Hamas has ruled Gaza via a reign of terror for a generation. Better still, in a little-noticed facet of the ruling, the Hague-based court on Friday called for the “immediate and unconditional release” of Israeli hostages who, since October 7, have been held incommunicado in Hamas’s tunnel dungeons.

Yet as Israelis savor a sense of relief that The Hague, for now, won’t abridge their right to self defense, they resent the court’s finding that with its acts in Gaza Israel is “capable” of violating the genocide convention. With that statement, the ICJ is leaving the door ajar for a future ruling in favor of Pretoria’s smear. It takes some brass to accuse of committing genocide the state midwifed by the UN amid the ashes of the worst genocide in history.

To add insult to injury, the ICJ’s American chief judge, Joan Donoghue, read into the record lies, factoids, and half truths that could eventually be used to convict Israel of genocide. The insult is that Ms. Donoghue, an Obama-era State Department legal adviser, did all this on the UN’s own “International Holocaust Memorial Day.” She relied heavily on statements from various UN agencies, including Unrwa, which is complicit in October 7.

Mr. Barak’s finding was a separate opinion. He is Israel’s former chief justice. He recalled his own plight as a 5-year-old at Kovno, Lithuania, where the Nazis murdered 9,000 Jews in one day in 1941. Young Barak escaped in a sack of potatoes and hid inside a wall until the end of the war.* To say the Jewish state’s act of defense against a murderous terror group amounts to genocide is, wrote he, “personally difficult for me.”

The denouement of the case so far is exactly what our Benny Avni predicted yesterday. He had spoken with a former legal adviser to Israel’s foreign ministry, Alan Baker. As Mr. Baker put it, the ICJ ruling was “parve” — neither meat nor dairy in kashrut laws. It orders Israel to “ensure” that the IDF commits no genocide, to prevent “incitement” to genocide, to aid Gazans, and to report back to The Hague in a month.

Israel scoffs at the notion that it harbors genocidal intent, so none of these writs should present a problem. Yet, at the UN even the smallest accusation against Israel is bruited in the loudest terms. Per the UN charter, Secretary General Guterres will “promptly” transmit the court’s findings to the Security Council. The Palestinian UN observer, Riad Mansour, immediately gathered Arab diplomats to “consider the next steps.”

Which brings us back to Cain and Abel. Arab diplomats are already trying to palm off on a weary public the idea that the ICJ has called for a unilateral cessation of IDF activities. That would not be a problem were, say, John Bolton or Nikki Haley representing America at Turtle Bay. Washington now, though, has an appetite for appeasement. It’s a moment to remember which of the biblical brothers was guilty.

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* Five percent of Lithuania’s Jews survived.