Apartheid against Palestinians

On December 29th, 2023, in a case titled, “Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v. Israel),” South Africa, whereby invoking their “obligation to prevent genocide” as a signatory to the United Nations Genocide Convention, successfully took Israel to the International Court of Justice (ICJ), thereby accusing it of committing genocide against Palestinians and violating the Geneva Conventions. In this trial, the South African team of lawyers consists of John Dugard, Adila Hassim, Tembeka Ngcukaitobi, Max du Plessis, Tshidiso Ramogale, Sarah Pudifin-Jones, Lerato Zikalala, Vaughan Lowe and Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh. Additionally, they have also appointed the former Deputy Chief Justice Dikgang Moseneke as an ad hoc judge.

Although the world had become desensitized to the occasional attacks on the Palestinian people, there was something quite tragic about the violence that began on October 7th. It was a few days after Netanyahu’s promise to create a “greater Israel” at the UN conference, and it was an attack that astoundingly began surmounting massive Zionist support across the world, and especially within Israel.

Instead of the usual silence that followed the previous Nakbas, or the condemnation from the Western countries, there was alarmingly quite a lot of support. Yoav Gallant, Israeli Minister of Defense, stated “We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly,” and prominent Israeli politicians like Avi Dichter and Ariel Kallner called for this “Nakba” to be greater than the previous ones, so much so, that Omer Bartov of the New York Times wrote that this “deeply alarming language” could in itself be a case for genocide. The tragedy was further heightened by the Palestinian outcry documented on social media that began a tirade of political discussions that polarized the world. This furthered the evidence of what was occurring and ignited, within the South Africans, a remembrance and conviction to prove that what was occurring in Palestine bared resemblance to what they had suffered not so long ago.

Recognizing the Palestinian plight and Israel’s targeted cleansing has been at the crux of the issue since the Nakbas began. The late Palestinian scholar, Edward Said, who, among his numerous accolades, was equally brilliant in his advocacy for peace in the region, also claimed that the crux of the issue of Palestine lay in the blatant ignorance of what had been occurring there. The arrogance of the Israeli and American governments in failing to recognize the atrocities and war crimes that the Palestinians have continuously faced is where the injury lies for when there is no recognition, there is inevitably no accountability. It is harrowing to witness that the world has been comfortable with the mass murder of thousands of people and the displacement of millions of families for so long.

Quite aptly, the main purpose of South Africa’s insistence to take Israel to court lies in its urgency to legally recognize and declare that the Palestinian massacre, which Israel has been committing in the name of “self-defense” since its conception in 1948, is in fact a genocide, and that recognition is solely affirmed through evidence that substantiates that there is an “intent” of genocide. In legal terms, a genocide denotes a deliberate killing of a people to specifically erase their ethnicity or race. Should South Africa be able to do that, it would be clear that what Israel is carrying out in their territory, is in fact a targeted mass cleansing of a homogenous group of people.