It is finally time to take legal action against Israel at the highest level

By Claudia Webbe MP 

South Africa is right to invoke the Genocide Convention against Israel at the Hague, other countries should now support and follow, argues CLAUDIA WEBBE MP

LAST WEEK, South Africa filed an application with the International Court of Justice (ICJ) instituting proceedings against Israel for “genocidal acts” against Palestinians in Gaza. It is right to do so, both morally and legally.

In analysing the case, it is worth clearing up a common confusion about whether Israel is subject to the International Court of Justice. Unlike the International Criminal Court (ICC), which prosecutes individual war crimes, the International Court of Justice is “the principal judicial organ of the UN… established by the UN charter in June 1945.”

Like any other UN member state, Israel is subject to its jurisdiction. The court consists of fifteen judges elected by the general assembly and the security council of the UN, who will decide the case.

South Africa’s case alleges that Israel has committed genocide both by commission and omission. “Acts and omissions by Israel… are genocidal in character, as they are committed with the requisite specific intent… to destroy Palestinians in Gaza as a part of the broader Palestinian national, racial and ethnic group.”

It continues: “The conduct of Israel — through its State organs, State agents, and other persons and entities acting on its instructions or under its direction, control or influence — in relation to Palestinians in Gaza, is in violation of its obligations under the Genocide Convention.”

The key to the case is the issue of intent, which has previously been very difficult to prove as those intent on committing genocide do not typically announce their intention to do so.

However, perhaps as a result of its sense of impunity stemming from the effective carte blanche support it has enjoyed for decades from the US and Britain, senior figures from the Israeli regime have been anything but reticent about their intentions, even if the Western media outside Israel have been reticent about reporting it.

Israeli minister Avi Dichter told Israel’s Channel 12 in November that Israel would inflict “Gaza’s Nakba” — the Arabic word for “catastrophe” that refers to the violent expulsion of more than 700,000 Palestinians in 1948 and the killing of thousands, including outright massacres.

A week earlier, Dichter’s ministerial colleague Amihai Eliyahu said that one possible resolution for the war was to “flatten Gaza” by dropping a nuclear bomb on it.

In October, Israeli President Isaac Herzog made clear that Israel regards collective punishment of the people of Gaza — a war crime — as justified, saying: “There are no innocent civilians in Gaza.”

And Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu made his and his government’s intentions perfectly clear when he said that Palestinians are “Amalek” — referring to a people group that Israel exterminated entirely in the biblical account.

And now, after beginning as a leaked Ministry of Intelligence document, plans to force the entire population of Gaza across the border into “tent cities” in the Egyptian desert, or even further away to any other nation, are being floated openly by government figures — and even boasted about by Netanyahu, under the disgraceful euphemism of “voluntary migration.”

And of course, Israel’s military actions, which, arguably, have killed more than 30,000 Palestinian civilians in Gaza so far, around 70 per cent of them women and children, support the allegation of genocide.

This is even more so now, as according to the UN, 40 per cent of civilians in Gaza are on the brink of famine. “Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part” are also included in the definition of genocide.

Senior military figures have talked openly about creating the conditions for disease to further reduce the population and the World Health Organisation has predicted that disease will kill more people in Gaza than Israel’s bombs, bullets and missiles.

Genocide by omission is also alleged by South Africa, that Israel is failing to prosecute those who incite genocide — and seems equally clear cut.

Israeli analyst Eliyahu Yossian, who works for the government-sponsored think tank the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS), gave what can only be described as a horrifying interview to Israeli television last month that categorised women, babies, even expectant mothers, as the “enemy.”

Yossian told his host that he believed Israel needed to flatten Gaza “to kill the largest number possible,” because “the woman there is the enemy, the baby there is an enemy and the first-grader there is an enemy… the pregnant woman is an enemy.”

Yossian is not an outlier. Channel 14 presenter Shai Golden ranted: “We are coming to Gaza, we are coming to Lebanon, we are coming to Iran. Can you imagine how many of you we are going to kill and slaughter?”

And Israeli state-owned TV station KAN broadcast a video showing a choir of children singing about the “annihilation” of Gaza: “In another year there will be nothing there… another year and we will annihilate everyone.”

These are far from isolated incidents. Yet the Israeli government has taken no action against anyone for inciting genocide.

So clear-cut is the evidence that UN officials and other legal and historical experts on genocide have described Israel’s behaviour as a “textbook case,” such as Craig Mokhiber, who resigned as director of the UN’s human rights office in New York because of the UN’s lack of effective action.

Mokhiber, who worked for the UN through the genocides against the Tutsis, Bosnian Muslims, the Yazidi and the Rohingya, condemned the “impunity” Israel was given despite its “successive waves of murder and persecution against the Palestinians throughout the life of the UN.”

The UN itself has categorised what Israel is doing as genocide. The UN’s human rights office issued a statement noting that its experts considered they have seen ample “evidence of increasing genocidal incitement, overt intent to ‘destroy the Palestinian people under occupation,’ loud calls for a ‘second Nakba’ in Gaza and the rest of the occupied Palestinian territory, and the use of powerful weaponry with inherently indiscriminate impacts, resulting in a colossal death toll and destruction of life-sustaining infrastructure.”

South Africa, of course, is well placed to assess the actions of a regime that has been categorised, by senior UN figures and human rights groups such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, as operating a system of apartheid.

The solidarity of leading South Africans with the people of Palestine and their opposition to Israel’s occupation and oppression go back decades. Such figures as Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu and Jewish former ANC MP Andrew Feinstein have been absolutely unequivocal in their condemnation of Israel’s conduct and their support for Palestinian self-determination.

And South Africa knows also that peace after such conduct can only come through truth and reconciliation, that former enemies can and must come together to break the cycle of violence if there is to be any hope of peace for either side.

South Africa is absolutely right to bring this case to the International Court of Justice. It brings yet more shame on the political leadership and governments of Britain and US that they not only have failed to do the same but are providing military support and arms to Israel against the Palestinians, killing tens of thousands and maiming many tens of thousands more.

The International Court of Justice could charge Israel with genocide in Gaza. The first hearing for South Africa’s claim is scheduled to take place next week, it’s not too late for the other nation states to support the claim or likewise, invoke the same. Our global movement must act to ensure they do. It could be a turning point in global relations. Watch this space.

Claudia Webbe MP is the member of Parliament for Leicester East. You can follow her at www.facebook.com/claudiaforLE and twitter.com/ClaudiaWebbe