FOR DECADES South Africa’s ruling ANC has clung to the notion that solidarity with the Palestinian cause translates into influencing events on the ground. Yet the upshot of expelling the Israeli ambassador Eliav Belotsercovsky following the atrocity of 7/10, appears to be an ingress into the conflict arena, a tit-for-tat expulsion of Ebrahim Rasool from Washington.
Our ICJ case has emboldened Republicans to call for sanctions and boycotts against our country (one of many consequences of taking sides) leading SA Jewish Report’s Howard Sackstein to write, Cyril , was it worth it? Worse , South African lawfare has turned into a political circus — with a veritable line-up of dictators, rogues and monarchs in the region, diluting what may be said to comprise our nation’s democratic appeal and moral clarity before the court.
If like Swaziland and the Saudis, we condone absolute monarchy, and are not promoting the secular frame of our democratic constitution, with its emphasis on human rights, equality, religious freedom and protection of minorities within the general body politic, what exactly are we pursuing other than sheer blindness to ‘rule of law’?
Where the late Nelson Mandela was decidedly bipartisan on the issue, promoting a two-state solution that would allow both sides to coexist, successive ANC administrations have gradually adopted the maximalist view, consistent with those like ‘Islamic Jihad for Palestine’ who wish to eliminate Israel, to remove the Jews from the Middle East. All of which begs the question, where would half of all the Jews living in the world go, if they were removed under objectives outlined by Hamas, or promoted by Fatah with its ‘pay-for-slay’ programe?
Barrister Natasha Hausdorff of ‘UK Lawyers for Israel’ asserts South Africa’s ‘claims of genocide, occupation and apartheid’, are a canard, an ‘untrue blood libel without basis in international law’. In the instance of our ICJ case, our claim, she says, is merely a legal hook on which to draw Israel before the court, since Israel is a signatory to the Genocide Convention, which came about because of the Holocaust. In addition the legal definition she says, requires intention to commit genocide, an element that she avers is entirely missing given the sequence of events following 7/10.
Absent the Hamas-led, live-streamed slaughter of Israelis on that tragic day, which included disabled victims considered too much trouble to hold hostage, or the cold-blooded slaying of black Kenyan students, one may well be mislead into believing Israel has a genocidal motive in the conflict. The resulting war has been particularly devastating for the population of Gaza given Hamas refusal to provide shelter and aid for its citizens. Instead of bomb shelters we have seen tunnels with munitions, secondary explosions, as Israel plays wackamole, in one of the densest urban environments, this whilst the Islamic group is accused of denying access to food aid transferred during the ceasefire period.
According to Hausdorff’s evidence before the UK House of Commons Foreign Affairs committee, last week, the UN famine review committee found claims of famine by the IPC implausible considering the amount of aid which has entered Gaza. She points to calorific content exceeding NHS guidelines and the sheer weight of aid delivered during the recent ceasefire, amounting to several months of food for each and every Gazan. Instead she fingers Hamas’ active diversion of aid, as one of the tactics used to blame Israel in a psychological war that has deployed martyrdom as a tactic.
While pro-Israel attorneys such as Hausdorff are quick to promote the idea of a ‘moral army fighting terrorism’, with one of the ‘lowest combatant to civilian kill ratios of any conflict in the world’, the mounting death-toll and prospect of starvation of the general population caused by the Jihadist logic behind the conflict, puts paid to the notion that anyone can simply, step back from actively promoting a cessation to hostilities on both sides.
Particularly appalling is the manner in which South Africa has repeated the mistakes of its near distant past. Our nation’s own complicity in the humanitarian crisis occurring in Gaza harks back to Hitler’s ‘Final Solution’, a programme of euthanasia of Europe’s Jewish population by the Nazis which came about following then Minister of Interior ( under the Smuts government) DF Malan, who introduced legislation before the House of Assembly curtailing Jewish immigration to South Africa. A policy which predates the 1938 Evian Conference where world leaders all agreed to implement similar embargoes on Germany with a tragic result — Germany’s solution to the problem of Jewish refugees streaming into places like Palestine, was to engage in industrial scale murder.
As one watches the brutal targeting of Gaza, by IDF artificial intelligence, with rockets and missiles still being launched into Israel by Middle East states, some of whom, are pro-slavery and the very antithesis of our secular democracy, one can only remark at how a perfect storm of martyrdom has created the necessary conditions for the wholesale sacrifice of human beings at the mercy of bureaucrats such as those in Pretoria. If our country were providing guaranteed aid and refuge for Gazans and Israelis alike, in fact anyone wishing to flee the conflict, I might think differently.
In both these tragic instances, instead of walking back our allies from an historical pressure cooker, we have encouraged more pressure. We may yet live to regret it, having repeated the mistakes of our nations’ past in not considering peaceful alternatives
