What does it mean for South Africa to be the one suing Israel before the Court of Justice in The Hague on charges of serious genocide and committing war crimes?
As everyone knows, South Africa is not an Arab or Muslim country.
It is not linked to the majority of Arab countries by any special economic and cultural relations, nor are there historical roots between us, as is the case with countries such as: Senegal, Mali, or Chad.
It is also not in direct conflict with Israel, as there are no borders between the two countries and no outstanding problems between them.
The Zionist narrative was based primarily on the oppression suffered by the Jews, a historical fact that only a foolish racist would deny. But the question was and will remain: Does your oppression give you the right to be unjust, especially towards those who have never wronged you?
So what is the significance of South Africa’s behavior when it appears – as the French proverb says – more royal than the king? Who is more affectionate towards Arabs than Arabs?
To answer these puzzling questions, some may see the need to search for what distinguishes between Israel and South Africa.
The irony is that a deep understanding of the South African initiative does not pass through knowing the differences, but rather remembering the commonalities that made the two countries two sides of the same coin, from the end of World War II until the mid-1990s.
Perhaps it is not a coincidence that the apartheid laws that the world knew under the name apartheid were enacted in South Africa in 1948, that is, the year the State of Israel was established.
But what is not a coincidence is all the commonalities between the two countries, which are the product of the same history, the same ideology and the same governance mechanisms, basically as follows:
- Appropriating other people’s land by force, within the framework of European colonial expansion, to all continents of the world, starting in the sixteenth century.
- Adopting a racist religious ideology to justify invasion and settlement and give it legitimacy that the colonizers adhere to and that the colonized reject.
- Pursuing a policy of genocide and displacement to acquire the lands of indigenous people, or placing them in Bantustans that enable them to be monitored and managed remotely without taking care of their material needs, let alone respecting their human rights.
- Creating a reality of permanent war with the indigenous population and with neighboring countries; To impose control it must be complete and final.
- Creating a toxic climate within society based on power, arrogance, and arrogance for the victors, and contempt and humiliation for the oppressed.
Throughout my youth – that is, between the 1960s and the 1990s – my generation did not differentiate between Israel and South Africa because they closely shared these characteristics. Therefore, we were not surprised by the level of cooperation between the two countries that was said at the time; It includes nuclear weapons, or that the same old colonial countries supported the two countries in the same way.
Then the absolute rupture occurred at the beginning of the 1990s, when South Africa took the opposite path, and Israel took the opposite path. While Mandela and Duke Clark were agreeing to end the apartheid system, build a state of law and institutions – for a people of citizens regardless of their ethnic and religious origins, and establish peace at home and with the African neighbourhood – we saw someone like Netanyahu and those with him on the right, and then the extreme right, opposing all political solutions. Including the establishment of two states, then we saw the policy of moral and political suicide through settlement, siege, and widespread wars that led us to the current disaster.
When you examine the two paths, you will see with insight and insight the huge difference between the wise men of South Africa – led by the great Mandela – when they spared South Africa and Africa a bloodbath, and the dangerous fools like Netanyahu, Ben Gvir and Smotrich who are causing their country to appear in The Hague on charges of genocide and war crimes.
In conclusion, it can be said; In this trial, South Africa does not speak in its own name, but in the name of values that enabled it to cross the most difficult ordeals that could destroy two human groups that were placed face to face by fate. Values that we desperately need today. Among them is that nothing is more guaranteed for peace – for the individual and for the peoples – than respecting the rights and dignity of others… and vice versa. That is, there is nothing more dangerous to a person or a people than contempt for others and violating their rights. Because paying the expensive bill is only a matter of time.
We are not facing two competing states, but rather two schools of politics, as this could open the gates of hell for everyone. It is the Israeli school, and the other one that could be closed is the South African school.
This is what makes this trial something unprecedented in history, and the two choices are placed before all of humanity: Which future are we trying to create, which South Africa symbolizes, or which Israel symbolizes? Therefore, we must expect that the option that the court will prevail is qualified to be a legal reference and a political lesson, and perhaps a warning to everyone who imagines that the Israeli example could be the solution, which is the root of the problem.
The second dimension: The significance of the trial on a level even beyond the war on Gaza
Israel does not appear before the Hague Court in a case over a dispute over maritime or land borders, but rather because of the charge of genocide. It is a terrible and shameful accusation for any people, but it becomes even more horrific when it is accused of a people who also suffered from an attempted genocide that remains to this day a stain on humanity. I mean, of course, the Jewish Holocaust that took place in Europe during World War II, which led to the killing of six million Jews. In circumstances neither uglier nor more despicable.
The problem is that the majority of Israelis do not imagine the enormous suffering they have caused to the Palestinians since the establishment of their state. In this case, they stop history at October 7. They do not care about the previous atrocities of the apartheid regime and the occupation in the West Bank, nor the atrocities of the siege of Gaza, nor the atrocities of the systematic destruction of the Strip, and what it caused. There were thirty thousand dead and fifty thousand wounded, most of them women and children.
The world did not know that there were hundreds of children imprisoned in Israeli prisons until the resistance stipulated that children be exchanged for children, and the same was true with women. If the current tragedy had not occurred, hundreds of children and thousands of women would have continued their slow death in prisons that have apparently become schools for torture and ill-treatment of tens of thousands of Palestinians. All of this without the slightest legal basis, but rather a shameless practice of the ugliest types of injustice, the goal of which is oppression and intimidation.
The Zionist narrative was based primarily on the oppression suffered by the Jews, a historical fact that only a foolish racist would deny. But the question was and will remain: Does your oppression give you the right to be unjust, especially towards those who have never wronged you?
Today, the whole world is moving to respond fearlessly to the scale of the crimes of the “Invincible Army,” and new generations in the West have become resistant to the logic that whoever opposes the apartheid, occupation, and settlement regime is anti-Semitic. What is more dangerous than this for non-Zionist Jews is their awareness that using the “Holocaust” as a cover to prevent any criticism of the genocide in Gaza is a trade in the pain of the victims of this Holocaust, a gradual waste of its symbolic value, and a waste of all the lessons that should be learned from it, as the descendants of the victims become executioners in turn.
This means that the dangerous fools who in the 1990s turned their backs on the only solution that could have avoided what we are experiencing are not harming a people struggling for their rights, but rather destroying their people’s chances of living in real peace, not to mention destroying all the moral and symbolic heritage of the sacrifices of the Jews who were crushed by the Nazi machine of racism.
It is truly a tragedy that oppressed peoples become oppressive peoples according to the terrible law enacted by Freud: You never fight an enemy for a long time without becoming like him. When you hear Israeli Defense Minister Gallant talking about the Palestinians as human animals, you wonder: What is the difference between him and Goebbels, who also considered Jews less than human? When you hear Ben Gvir and Smotrich talking about the necessity of displacing the Palestinians; To make room for Jewish settlers, she wonders: What is the difference between them and Hitler and Himmler, who in the 1940s were behind the policy of expelling the Slavic peoples from all of Eastern Europe to settle the Germans?
This policy, which repeats history instead of transcending it, is what will appear before the Hague Tribunal, and its ruling must be clear and unambiguous if we want the massacre to stop and for peace to one day become possible.
Last question: What is the meaning of no Arab country taking the initiative to file a lawsuit, and the fact that many of them bear the consequences of this war directly or indirectly, not to mention that those being slaughtered before our eyes are our people? Why was there not a single Arab leader who would be the first to bring the case before the Hague Court, or at least who would support – as Bolivia did – the South African initiative?
I will not answer this question. All people have to do is ask their leaders?
Someone might provoke me by saying: If you were in power, would you dare to make such a decision? Yes, and Wael Dahdouh’s head when he hesitated for a moment.
Thank you, South Africa and Bolivia, in the name of all Arabs. May God have mercy on the martyrs of the horrific massacres, heal the wounded, and restore to this nation some of its chivalry, and the night must end.
