Hooray for South Africa!
Hooray for South Africa!
Junious Ricardo Stanton
On December 29, 2023 the government of South Africa went before the International Court of Justice in The Hague to officially file charges against Israel accusing that nation of the crime of genocide against the people of Gaza. This was an historic initiative on several levels; first because Israel has been aggressively conducting illegal territorial expropriation and land grabs and has illegally usurped, stolen, occupied and displaced hundreds of thousand of Palestinians since 1967. Following the 1967 Arab-Israeli war Israel has subjected the residents of Palestine to brutal, ruthless military occupation on their own land, constant assaults on their dignity and person and knowingly and deliberately deprived Palestinians of natural resources such as water, destroyed and expropriated their farm lands displacing them off of their land and illegally detaining them without just cause. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2017/06/israel-occupation-50-years-of-dispossession/
Israeli settlers have an extremely hostile attitude towards the Palestinians and have worked incessantly to undermine their efforts at indigenous internal organization and self-determination. Israel colluded with it prime enablers the US and UK to create a counterweight to the Palestinian Liberation Organization which vehemently opposed the ongoing settler expansion. Together the US, UK and Israel played a pivotal role in the creation and promotion of Hamas. https://theintercept.com/2018/02/19/hamas-israel-palestine-conflict/ https://tribune.com.pk/story/2302309/how-and-why-israel-helped-create-hamas
Hamas started out as a charity organization far less political and militant than the PLO; but once it gained Israeli support it overshadowed the PLO (a classic divide and rule tactic by the Israelis) because many rank and file Palestinians felt the PLO sold them out by negotiating a ”peace” deal with Israel.
Hypocritically, the United States of America, the greatest purveyor of violence and conflict on this planet today in its role as a global arms seller and instigator labeled both the PLO and Hamas terrorist organizations. This act of psychological projection (ascribing to others what you yourself are guilty of) allows the US to support the crimes against humanity being conducted by it allies and proxies or in the case of Israel its master!
The details and narratives of the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack which ironically is being called Israel’s 9-11 are highly suspicious. Gaza is one of the most thoroughly policed, spied upon and monitored spaces on this planet; even the Israelis say a mouse can’t move anywhere in Gaza without them detecting it! Similar to the US 9-11, astute people should be asking: how did such a highly sophisticated, costly occupation, intelligence/monitoring system get caught flat footed, how did well armed entities with advanced detection/defense systems like the kind the US and Israel deploy, have such feeble initial responses to these two attacks?!
The theory both the US and Israel allowed their attacks to occur makes the most sense to me. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/30/world/middleeast/israel-hamas-attack-intelligence.html Allowing it to happen provided Israel with the rational to rapidly do what it has been gradually doing for fifty years: ethnically cleanse Gaza, displace the people either via death or massive destruction and disruption. The attack provided an excuse for Israel to go full speed ahead with their plans for a Greater Israel stretching from the Nile to the Tigris Euphrates Rivers. https://www.jagranjosh.com/general-knowledge/what-is-greater-israel-why-is-the-idea-not-acceptable-to-the-muslim-community-1621507466-1
The South African government had a Popeye moment “That’s alls I can stands and I can’t stand no more.” witnessing the impact of Israel’s deadly overhanded response to the October 7, 2023 attack by Hamas. After watching drones, missiles and artillery murder innocent civilians and decimate large swaths of Gaza territory, South Africa said enough. South Africa filed charges against Israel in the International Court of Justice charging Israel with genocide! Their presentation laid out the facts of collective punishment and indiscriminate violence against civilians. “In an 84-page filing to the ICJ, South Africa argued that Israel is committing genocide by killing Palestinians in Gaza, causing serious mental and bodily harm, forced evacuation, widespread hunger, and by creating conditions “calculated to bring about their physical destruction.” It also accused Israel of failing to stem incitement to genocide in the public pronouncements of its officials. During three hours of oral argument, lawyers representing South Africa asked the ICJ to order a suspension of Israel’s campaign in Gaza to protect the rights of Palestinians in Gaza ‘from imminent and irreparable loss.’
Such ‘provisional measures,’ as they are known, function as a kind of restraining order to stop a dispute from escalating while the court considers the full merits of the case, which could take years. For provisional measures the court need only decide if prima facie, or ‘at first glance,’ the acts complained of could fall foul of the genocide convention… South Africa presented widely reported evidence that it said showed a “systematic pattern of conduct” by Israel ‘from which genocide can be inferred.’ The UN defines genocide as an act ‘committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.’” South Africa accuses Israel of genocide and urges top UN court to halt Gaza war by Christian Edwards https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/11/middleeast/south-africa-israel-genocide-icj-hague-day-one-intl/index.html
While the ICJ has no power whatsoever to enforce any ruling it may make, we can applaud at least one nation, an African nation that knows first hand the horrors of settler/invader racial oppression that had the courage to do the right thing! Meanwhile Israel and its lapdogs attempt to justify the unjustifiable, defend the indefensible and promote the slaughter of innocents.
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posted by Junious Ricardo Stanton @ 7:58 AM
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