On Dec. 29, 2023, South Africa sued Israel in the International Court of Justice on charges of genocide. In a landmark trial at the Hague tribunal, whose jurisdiction is the Genocide Convention, post-apartheid South Africa sues Israel, a state that, to this day, is governed by an apartheid regime.
It is not easy to ascertain that the massacre of a large number of people, in war or in peacetime, is a case of genocide. In fact, one of the main criteria is the explicit or implicit intention to exterminate an entire ethnic group. For that matter, it has never yet happened that a genocide was recognized as such while it was happening. Indeed, there are genocides that even today are not recognized either by the Hague tribunal or by history.
A historic moment
Whatever the end results, the very establishment of this process is a historic moment that highlights a number of changes at the international level.
In the first phase of the trial, which began January 11th and 12th 2024, South Africa must only prove that a genocide charge is plausible. Although the trial could take years, the South African legal team has requested that interim measures be instituted against Israel, which include the immediate cessation of military activities. Unfortunately, given that the Court will rule in South Africa’s favour in the coming weeks, it is not certain that the interim measures will be implemented.
The only international body capable of putting pressure on Israel is the UN Security Council, in which the United States has already repeatedly used its veto power to block any initiative aimed at holding Israel accountable for its violations of international law.
Despite this less-than-ideal picture, South Africa’s decision to sue Israel appears to be an attempt to finally break with the wall of silence built by Western powers around the crimes of the State of Israel against the Palestinian people.
The positions of other states
Just days before the start of the trial, Germany has stated that it wants to constitute itself as a third party in court and give support to Israel in the trial against the genocide charge. Apart from the historical connection between Germany and Israel, compared to last year the flow of German arms exported to Israel in 2023 increased 10-fold.
Namibia, a former German colony, has been quick to cast doubt on Germany’s ability to offer a relevant point of view with respect to a case of genocide, considering that the first genocide of the 20th century happened at the hands of Germans against Namibia’s Herero and Nama peoples. To this day, the German government refuses to pay compensation to the descendants of the massacred populations.
What South Africa implicitly seeks to do with this process is to recontextualize the Palestinian issue from the perspective of liberation from colonialism, old and new, and freedom from apartheid.
But wasn’t it a war on terrorism?
This is an antithetical perspective to the one proposed by Israel, which instead places the current conflict in the perspective of the Global War on Terrorism . The perspective of the war on terror has dominated the foreign policy of the United States and its allies since 9/11, and has justified, for example, the 2003 invasion of Iraq (including the crimes committed by the U.S. military at Abu Ghraib) by exploiting growing anti-Arab and Islamophobic sentiment.
The fact that two African countries, along with a much larger group of countries from the so-called Global South, sided so clearly with the Palestinian people should not be surprising. Between the 1950s and the 1970s, during the golden age of the struggles for decolonization and independence, many liberation movements forged close relationships both politically and militarily. These included Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress (ANC) and Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).
Achievements in the fight against colonialism
Multilateral relations between former colonies, based on the recognition of a shared history of oppression and of liberation from the colonial yoke, led to the creation of a strong coalition within the newly formed international society. While Israel and apartheid South Africa had each other’s backs internationally, it was precisely that kind of anti-colonial coalition that succeeded in giving a strong impetus in the fight against institutional racism and colonialism, achieving important results both culturally and politically. One example is UN General Assembly Resolution 37/43, which reaffirms “the legitimacy of the struggle of peoples for independence, territorial integrity, national unity and liberation from colonial domination and foreign occupation by all possible means, including armed struggle.”
South Africa picks up this tradition and relaunches with a new front opposing openly not only the Israeli apartheid but pointing to the United States and allies as complicit in genocide. With the due limits of these historical parallels, the post-apartheid ANC today reaffirms before the world the need to see the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for what it is: the struggle of an oppressed people against an oppressor colonial state. Not only that, but it honours the memory of its most famous member, Nelson Mandela, who said that no one will be free until Palestine is free.
When will Palestine be finally free?
Peace is not created out of nothing but must be built. And often peace does not mean non-violence.
The association between the Palestinian resistance and Nelson Mandela may seem strange to many. We always think of Nelson Mandela as a symbol of peace, while we imagine the Palestinians as the representation of an eternal conflict. However, Mandela in the 1990s was considered a terrorist for founding the military arm of the ANC, which was hardly a nonviolent movement.
It is often mistakenly thought that being for peace is equivalent to being against all kinds of violence. But in a context of oppression, it is not possible to equate the violent reaction of the oppressed with that of the oppressor.
Laying down arms, as Israel invoked on Friday at the International Court of Justice, is not an option for the Palestinian liberation movement, despite the ongoing massacre. And not because the Palestinians are necessarily bloodthirsty terrorists who use the civilian population as a shield, but because, whether Hamas surrenders or is actually eradicated by Israel, the situation of the Palestinian people will hardly change for the better.
In the context of a conflict between a nuclear power and an armed group, leaving arms means giving up the only remaining chance for the Palestinians to come out of the conflict alive, both physically and as a people, leaving the absolute domination of violence in the hands of the State of Israel.
Looking at the past but thinking about the future.
So, does peace mean non-violence?
Despite this, it is clear that on both the Palestinian and Israeli sides there is a peace front that uses nonviolent methods. They obviously take different forms on one side and the other.
Consider, for example, the Great March of Return. Starting on 30 March 2018, and for more than two months, Palestinians marched to the separation wall between Israel and the Gaza Strip, peacefully protesting against apartheid, occupation, and for the return of Palestinian refugees to their homes. The result? About 200 dead and more than 33,000 wounded, according to UN calculations.
On the Israeli side, on the other hand, the peace front focuses on demilitarization and the search for a political solution. It consists of 18-year-olds who refuse to enlist, veterans who have decided to denounce the occupation, and many others who criticize the Zionist government and seek to build a dialogue between Israeli and Palestinian society.
If there is anything we can be sure of, judging from the last three months, it is that there will be no military exit from the conflict. Instead, there is a need for political reversal and accountability, as well as justice to repair the enormous damage this conflict has brought to Palestinian society, and to varying degrees, to Israeli society.
In giving another impetus to the international solidarity movement with the Palestinian people, South Africa is helping to build an international framework that will make this change possible and lead not only to peace and an end to violence in all its forms, but to just liberation for the Palestinian people.
