Roni Kaplan: the spokesman as the trophy of an anticipated verdict

The political act has clothed itself in legal language. The complaint brought by the PIT-CNT and a group of organisations against Roni Kaplan pretends to open a serious debate on international law, war and state responsibility. But it lacks precision: it offers slogans. It seeks the symbolic criminalization of a state through a local face.

The law distinguishes between accusation and sentence, between precautionary measures and conviction, between political responsibility and individual criminal responsibility.

Legal distinctions separate law from propaganda. In January 2024, the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to prevent genocidal acts, to punish incitement and to facilitate humanitarian assistance; it did not issue a finding of genocide. The case is still pending. In November 2024, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants against Benjamin Netanyahu, Yoav Gallant and Mohammed Deif for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity; these are not final convictions, nor do they constitute, for those accused, a charge of genocide.

Genocide is not a placard. It is the supreme crime of international law. It demands specific intent, determinate acts, proof and individual responsibility. A war can produce ruin, hunger, displacement and civilian death without each of those fractures amounting to genocide. Precision does not absolve: it orders the accusation.

The suffering of the Palestinian people is real and brutal. Tens of thousands of civilians have died, the destruction in Gaza is massive, and the flow of humanitarian aid has been blocked, delayed, disputed, diverted and instrumentalised by the parties to the conflict. The allegations of possible war crimes by international bodies deserve rigorous investigation.

October 7 does not exempt Israel from responsibility. Having suffered a massacre of extreme brutality does not release a state from its international obligations. The initial horror does not make every subsequent action legitimate, does not erase the distinction between combatant and civilian, does not suspend proportionality, and does not legitimise indifference to hunger. No right of defence is an absolute licence. Justice cannot select its compassion according to the flag.

If there were war crimes or individual criminal responsibilities, let those who must answer, answer.

To recognise the possible responsibility of the State of Israel does not oblige us to tolerate a political operation that erases the responsibility of Hamas, amputates the causal sequence and turns Roni Kaplan into the media trophy of a cause that pronounced its verdict before hearing the proof.

That is the core of the manoeuvre.

The war in Gaza must be examined. But what we are witnessing here is the capture of justice as a stage for political lynching. The complaint against Kaplan seeks to bind a recognisable name to the gravest words of the criminal code and displays him before public opinion as if the conviction had already been signed.

The PIT-CNT denounces bias while exhibiting its own. What it presents as a universal defence of human rights is a text that omits the founding massacre of October 7, the abductions, the reported sexual violence, the hostages and the terrorist nature of Hamas. It omits, above all, Hamas’s military architecture embedded in civilian areas, including underground structures and the immediate vicinity of hospitals, schools and densely populated neighbourhoods.

To amputate the antecedent produces an unquestionable narrative: without October 7, the war is unilateral aggression; without Hamas, Gaza is a pure victim with no internal criminal agency; without the strategy of using the civilian population as a shield, the law of war is reduced to scenery.

Scenery produces narrative.

The Israel Defense Forces are the central institution of a democracy at war, made up of Jews, Druze, Bedouins, Circassians and Christian and Muslim Arabs, subject to the debate of its own society, the oversight of its courts and the scrutiny of a free press. That does not make them immune to error, to abuse or to moral degradation.

Blind defence of the state is as poor as automatic accusation.

To seek to extend the accusation of genocide to a spokesman for the act of publicly explaining his country’s position is a leap into the void. To confuse institutional spokesmanship with criminal co-perpetration forecloses the law. Criticise him. Refute him. Question him. But to turn communication into direct criminal participation demands a standard of proof that the complaint replaces with indignation.

Is that the precedent we want to establish in Uruguay? That the spokesmen of any state at war be charged criminally for defending their country’s official narrative?

The moral capital of human rights corrupts itself when wielded along factional lines. To demand justice compels us to look at the whole picture. It compels us to name the Palestinian victims and the Israeli hostages. It compels us to investigate the responsibilities that might fall to Israel without erasing the criminal responsibility of Hamas. To demand justice is to demand that it not be turned into a placard.

One detail seals the nature of the dossier: the complaint labels as a “genocidal operation” the 2012 Israeli operation “Pillar of Defense” — almost eleven years before the current war, which Israel calls “Swords of Iron”. To extend the charge of genocide retroactively to a different operation, separated in time and context, reveals the method: the word “genocide” operates as an all-encompassing category, not as a precise criminal offence.

To speak with the lightness of a placard is not justice: it is moral theatre.

Justice demands proof. It demands proportion. It demands the antecedent.

Selective indignation demands only a culprit.