(1) Yesterday, my post was on the interim decision by the International Court of Justice in the matter brought by South Africa against Israel, accusing Israel of violating the Genocide Convention through its actions in the Gaza Slip. If you have not read it, I suggest that you do. This morning, we heard a presentation by University of Baltimore Law Professor Nienke Grossman on the ICJ decision. Grossman is a member of our synagogue, although I have never met her, and a wonderful presenter, exceptionally clear.

I am not going to repeat here what I said yesterday, because Grossman basically told the same story (a little fuller, a little better), and she confirmed everything that I said with one exception, and she let me conclude that I only left out one material item. The correction: I said that the ICJ was ignoring a number of disputes around the world where genocide could certainly be argued, and one of the places I mentioned was Myanmar and the fate of the Rohingyas. It turned out that there is a case pending against Myanmar, brought in 2019 by The Gambia, and presumably a ways off from the release of a final decision.

The matter that I ignored was what could transpire at the International Criminal Court, the court that presumably has authority over war crimes, as well as genocide, and can find individuals (and not just member states) guilty of such crimes. There is a fascinating article that I have skimmed, and now will read more carefully at jurist.com, by Professor Leila Sadat of the Washington University Law School on the International Criminal Court and its authority with regard to the Hamas-Israel battle. There is pressure to have actions against both sides of the war, and this is the place that Israeli government officials may find themselves defendants personally, although Sadat says that there are jurisdictional issues. What I got from skimming this article is that, compared to the limited and definable jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice, the authority of the International Criminal Court is, in all ways, much more difficult to pinpoint.

There have also been two updates today from what I reported yesterday in my discussion of the ICJ’s ruling. One of the things that I wondered is why additional cases against other countries are not brought more often, since any member country has the standing to bring a case against any other member country. This morning, I read in the Times of Israel, that Knesset member Gideon Sa’ar has stated that he is beginning the preparation of a genocide case against Iran to be filed in the ICJ. In addition, and I did not mention this, the only one of the 17 judges to vote against South Africa on all counts, was Julia Sebutinde of Uganda, who argued that this was a political, and not a legal, case. This morning, the government of Uganda stated that her opinion was not to be considered to be the opinion of the Uganda government.

More to come on this one.

(2) We spent yesterday afternoon at the National Gallery of Art, which shows films on weekends, films that you don’t normally see elsewhere, either connected to current exhibits, or important to the history of film in general. This week they presented, and we saw, four such films, each about a half hour in length. Two were to accompany the current exhibit (which I discussed a month or so ago) of photographs by Dorothea Lange. The two films (or perhaps it would be better to say it was one film, divided into two sections) showed interviews with Lange, shortly before she passed away and when she was suffering from cancer, as she was helping prepare for a large retrospective exhibition of her work at the MOMA in New York. I must say that I didn’t find the interviews very enlightening, and didn’t understand everything she said about what she wanted her legacy to be – but generally it was to display segments of society without concentrating on the exceptional, but on the more mundane, with the thought that combinations of the proper mundane would make a series of photographs historically important. At least that is what I think she was trying to say.

The other two films were, I thought, more special. They were government sponsored films from the mid-1930s, directed by Pare Lorentz. One was concerned with the Great Plains and the second with the Mississippi River.

The film about the Great Plains, “The Plow That Broke the Plains” was I think the better, and it was a very good accompaniment to the Lange exhibit, because it also showed very evocative photography of a historical movement, this time film photography, not still or portrait photography. The film opened with scenes of waving wheat and scenes of large herds of free range cattle, all on what seemed to be endless plains. Once you got behind the opening language which seemed to congratulate ourselves for “eliminating the Indians and the buffalo”, you saw America eliminating 90% of the forest land and creating enormous areas for cattle raising in the late 19th century, and then you saw the cattle dying out because land was being overgrazed, and then wheat was planted. The wheat “won the war” (World War I) by providing food domestically, to our armies overseas, and to Europeans being starved by the fighting. But then, the land was worn out and, at the same time, an extraordinary drought hit the plains. Vegetation died, wheat would not grow, farms fell into ruin, families were devastated, and people began moving west. Only then was attention paid to the need to rebuild the soil, practice responsible agriculture (helped by new equipment and new irrigation techniques, give families a chance to homestead, create towns and villages and so forth.

Each of these stages was demonstrated with remarkable film shot over, I expect, a 40 year period. The narration (while at times over the top) contained just the right amount of statistics to give you a good sense of what was going on. I had never seen this important part of American history told so succinctly and, I think, memorably. I thought that this 90 year old film could be shown to high school (maybe even middle school) students all over the country. It puts an entirely different perspective on the history of what the narrator calls 400 million acres of agricultural land from Texas and New Mexico up to North Dakota and Montana.

The other film, called simply “The River”, talks about the Mississippi, and its importance to the country, historically and at the then present, again the 1930s. It told the story of the regular flooding of the river, and how the flooding affected the river valley everywhere south of where the Ohio enters the Mississippi, again with evocative pictures of the flooding of farms and homes and towns. It then goes into the creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority, and the channeling of the river to prevent its recurrent overflowing of its banks.

As Edie said, we just saw two films about the 1930s – one had not enough water, one had too much water. That’s about it.