South Africa’s charge of “genocide” against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) at The Hague on Thursday turns reality on its head by making the victim of the October 7 genocidal terror attack stand trial for the crimes of the aggressor.
The case against Israel is inflammatory — and absurdly weak. It does not even rely on the actions Israel has taken in Gaza since October 7, but rather places that response “in the broader context of Israel’s conduct towards Palestinians during its 75-year-long apartheid [sic], its 56-yearlong belligerent occupation of Palestinian territory [sic] and its 16-year-long blockade of Gaza.”
In other words, Israel’s very existence is defined as “apartheid”; the fact that Israel left Gaza completely in 2005 is considered of no consequence.
South Africa has no credibility to bring such a charge against Israel. In the post-apartheid era, it has fallen from a paragon of human rights to a pariah. The South African government protected the Zimbabwean regime during Robert Mugabe’s reign of terror — which included the ethnic cleansing of white farmers — and has likewise defended other rights-delinquent countries, including Sudan, Russia, and China. The ruling party even recently entertained representatives of the Hamas terrorist group.
Moreover, South Africa actively discriminates against racial minorities within its own borders. A wave of violent crime against white farmers has led serious critics to raise the question of whether South Africa itself should be accused of “genocide.” South Africa is prone to outbursts of mob attacks against immigrants from other African countries, and its police committed mass murder against workers in Marikana in 2012 — just as apartheid police murdered anti-apartheid protesters at Sharpeville in 1960.
The essence of South Africa’s case does not focus on what Israel is doing in Gaza, where the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) tries to avoid civilian casualties. Rather, it relies on what Israeli political figures have said, casting careless statements made in anger — such as a suggestion to “flatten Gaza” as if they constitute actual government policy or an incitement to commit genocide.
This is a standard that should see Hamas, with its explicitly genocidal charter, in the dock — but instead, Israel is the one accused.
As the Times of Israel’s Jeremy Sharon points out, the South African filing minimizes Hamas’s crimes in its effort to paint Israel as the guilty party: “In the entirety of its 84 pages, South Africa’s application makes no mention of Hamas’s documented practice of embedding its military installations and combatants in all aspects of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure, including hospitals, mosques, schools, homes, UN facilities and other similar sites, even when mentioning Israeli attacks on such infrastructure.”
But Sharon also warns that the ICJ could still make a preliminary finding against Israel simply because the standard of proof is so low.
It might not mean anything in practical terms, because the U.S. could veto any punitive santions at the United Nations Security Council.
Still, a negative ruling by the ICJ could have a major diplomatic impact. It would bolster the attacks on Israel in western cities and on college campuses, and likely encourage more antisemitism.
South Africa’s Daily Maverick reported Tuesday that the South African government’s real agenda is to stop international arms sales to Israel — in other words, to aid Hamas by depriving Israel of the means with which to defend itself from the truly genocidal violence that Hamas said it intends to repeat.
But if the ICJ rules against Israel, it will cause permanent damage to its own reputation.
The entire purpose of such institutions, created after the horrors of the Holocaust, was to prevent what happened to the Jews of Europe from ever happening again. If the ICJ sides with Hamas against Israel, reversing the positions of the aggressor and the victim, it will have effectively endorsed a new genocide against Israelis and the Jewish people.
It will never be effective again — if it ever has been — in stopping real genocides.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the 2021 e-book, “The Zionist Conspiracy (and how to join it),” now updated with a new foreword. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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