Here’s the introduction. Well worth reading / bookmarking the whole piece
On 29th December 2023, South Africa filed an application at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), instituting proceedings against Israel. In its application, it asked the ICJ – the judicial organ of the United Nations – to determine whether Israel had violated its obligations under the Genocide Convention in relation to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. The public hearings requesting provisional measures took place in The Hague on 11th and 12th January 2024. This is a historic case for the Palestinians. It is also a historic case for all those keen to see whether international law and its primary judicial institution positions itself on the side of the oppressed and racialised, or whether it supports imperial wars.
Why is this case important?
The case is important because it intervenes in a ‘hot conflict’, with the stakes being the very survival of the Palestinians. Although Palestinians were under substantial restraint, brought on through living under occupation and a regime of apartheid, before October 7th 2023, the current siege has been described as ‘a second Nakba’. Nakba in Arabic means ‘catastrophe’ and was first used in relation to 1948, the year of the founding of the State of Israel, and the year in which 750,000 Palestinians were forced to flee from their land. On October 7th 2023, Hamas, the de facto governing authority in the Gaza Strip, instituted an attack on Israel, killing approximately 1200 people and taking around 200 hostages with the stated goal of an exchange of hostages. In the following weeks, Israel responded to these atrocities by dropping the equivalent of two atomic bombs on Gaza, destroying civilian infrastructure and killing at least 23,000 people to date, according to Oxfam, an average of 250 people per day. Palestinians in the Gazan strip have been forced to leave the North, which according to reports has been reduced to rubble, and have been confined to ever smaller spaces in the South of the Strip, where a humanitarian catastrophe has been unfolding: Extreme food insecurity, a physically and mentally traumatised population, and a high risk of infectious diseases has been declared. South Africa’s application to the ICJ asks for provisional measures by the ICJ, including calling on Israel to implement an immediate suspension of military operations in and against Gaza to mitigate the risk of genocide. Previous proposals for resolutions calling for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire at the UN Security Council have failed on account of the US’s veto.
Although that is certainly enough to justify the importance of this case, the case’s importance goes beyond the immediate political (and moral) demands for a ceasefire to prevent a genocide. The case is not only perceived as a case between two states; is also representative of a North-South divide. The West continues to protect Israel in its siege on Gaza, most notably the US and Germany, who justify Israel’s actions as covered by its right to self-defence. Indeed, in a dogmatic and misguided application of the ‘never again’ axiom, Germany declared on Friday that it would be intervening in the case as a third party in support of Israel. Procedurally, this is permitted by Art. 63 of the ICJ’s Statute. States of the Global South have time and again seen international law utilised by powerful states of the Global North to justify militarism, exploitation, and oppression. Regularly, the military might of these states is a tool of imperialism, used to open new opportunities for enriching themselves. Racialised language is often employed to then blame underdevelopment on Global South states. How quick Western states are to once more deploy bombs in the Global South when the flow of capital is threatened can be seen with last week’s bombing in Yemen.
Such interventions are regularly (perversely) justified on humanitarian grounds. Indeed, Israel extraordinarily claimed in its oral application at the ICJ that it was operating in Gaza with a view to ‘create a better future for Israelis and Palestinians alike’, an opportunity denied solely through Hamas’s activities. Further, it claimed that it was not bombing hospitals in Gaza, but rather offering assistance. In line with (settler-) colonial arrogance, Israel claimed that Gaza – which was long before October 7th described as an open-air prison – had all the opportunities for development (‘a coastal area with the potential to become a political and economic success story’), were it not for Hamas’s activities.
Why South Africa?
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