Cyril’s also playing domestic politics in The Hague
SRamaphosa ... will use his support for the Palestinian cause to unite his party ... ahead of the elections
outh Africa did itself no harm this week when it argued before the UN’s International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague that Israel’s bombardment and invasion of Gaza are genocidal in intent and are thus in violation of international law and should immediately cease pending a full hearing.
President Cyril Ramaphosa’s decision to use established international legal apparatus to intervene in the war between Israel and the Hamas militants who control the Palestinian enclave was a clever ploy that has won the country global admiration.
The South African team’s presentations to the court on Thursday were praised by a world hungry for the violence to end and success for the team would put immense pressure on Israel and its Western allies to stop the war.
I thought the presentations themselves, though passionate, were ordinary. We have all watched the destruction of Gaza, and seeing the misery piled on the citizens of the enclave has been excruciating. But little the South Africans said added to our knowledge about the conflict.
Fresh insight was possibly not the point, though. What happened in The Hague was diplomatic theatre. A ruling for South Africa would establish attempted Israeli genocide as a “fact”, however contested, and could rewrite the Middle East political script for a generation.
That the victims of the greatest genocide in history could now be found guilty of potentially committing the same act less than a century later beggars belief, but a South African victory in The Hague, however improbable, is not impossible. The 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, under which the ICJ will make a decision within the next few days, defines genocide as including “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”, such as “killing members of the group, deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part, [or] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group”.
On the face of it, it’s a slam dunk. The bar is low. But form also matters — or it should. When Ukraine went to the ICJ in 2022 for a similar genocide ruling after it was invaded and bombed and had its children kidnapped by Russia, a South African ally, Ramaphosa and South Africa did absolutely nothing.
The obvious danger to the world now though is that the conflict spirals out of control — the US and the UK have bombed Houthi targets in Yemen in retaliation for Houthi attacks, done out of sympathy for the Palestinians being killed by Israel, on vital international shipping through the Red Sea.
The Houthi rebels, like Hamas, are Iranian accomplices, but for Ramaphosa the wider regional conflict is probably a secondary consideration. Just as US politicians in this election year will fight it out over which is the better friend of Israel, so Ramaphosa, failing at almost every domestic governance metric imaginable, will want to use his support for the Palestinian cause to unite his rapidly fragmenting party and the wider South African Left ahead of the elections here.
Resurrecting at least the outlines of the struggle against apartheid for the next few months would suit Ramaphosa just fine. The savagery unleashed on Israel on October 7 last year by Hamas is uncontested. It seems obvious they had banked on a brutal, enraged, Israeli response and they were right. More than 1,200 Israelis were butchered, but Israel’s reply has been to kill a vastly disproportionate 22,000 Palestinians. Its Western allies have had to grit their teeth to continue their support, and some may have quietly welcomed Pretoria’s approach to the ICJ.
Israel may not practise apartheid, but for the majority of South Africans the way Palestinians are obliged to live is deeply triggering. It may not be apartheid, but it sure can feel like it. Former Rand Daily Mail deputy editor Benjamin Pogrund, now an Israeli citizen, said as much in a controversial article last year, and he should know. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu leads arguably the most extreme right-wing government in his country’s history.
The South African case in The Hague in fact rests on statements encouraging the destruction of Gaza by many of Netanyahu’s own ministers. Ahead of the hearing, Netanyahu tried to explain that his forces are merely trying to destroy Hamas and rescue hostages taken by the Islamist group, but it isn’t a sticky message. You cannot kill thousands of children and hope, in today’s world, to escape international rebuke.