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MALAIKA MAHLATSI: I SUPPORT MY GOVT – WHAT IS HAPPENING IN GAZA IS GENOCIDE

 * Hamas and Israel
 * Genocide
 * Israel hammers Hamas
 * International Court of Justice

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Malaika Lesego Samora Mahlatsi | 04 January 2024 14:24




OPINION



A week ago, South Africans woke up to breaking news that the government had
filed a case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) alleging that the state
of Israel is engaging in genocidal acts in Gaza.

The application, which has been confirmed by the United Nations (UN) court and
will be heard on the 11th and 12th of January 2024, contends that Israel is
committing human rights violations under the United Nations Convention on the
Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, commonly referred to as the
Genocide Convention.

The Genocide Convention was conceived in response to the Second World War, where
atrocities such as the Holocaust, the genocide of European Jews, lacked an
adequate legal definition. By the time the Second World War took place, there
were already multilateral treaties that addressed the conduct of warfare – the
Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907.

These international treaties and declarations were among the first formal
statements outlining the laws of war and war crimes. However, these conventions
did not provide an adequate description or legal definition of genocide –
something that would only happen three years after the devastating Second World
War.

Following the Holocaust, the term “genocide” was defined using a specific set of
criteria in the Genocide Convention, which, as of January 2024, has been adopted
by 152 of the 193 member states of the UN.

The convention defines genocide as “any of the acts committed with intent to
destroy, in whole or part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, such
as (a) killing members of the religious group; (b) causing serious bodily or
mental harm to members of the group; (c) deliberately inflicting on the group
conditions of life calculated to bring its physical destruction in whole or in
part; (d) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group and; (e)
forcibly transferring children of the group to another group”.
Victims of genocide are not random – they are targeted on account of their
membership to a group, whether such membership is real or perceived. The
Convention deems as criminal complicity, incitement, and the attempt to pursue
the commission of genocide and prohibits member states from engaging genocide.
Significantly, the Convention also obligates member states to pursue the
enforcement of the prohibition of genocide through the instrument of the ICJ.

South Africa, a founding member state of the UN, has correctly hurled the state
of Israel to the ICJ as a result of the ongoing genocide occurring in Gaza.

There can be no question that based on the set of criteria outlined in the
Genocide Convention, what is occurring in Gaza and other parts of occupied
Palestine is a genocide.

The Israeli state has vowed to intensify its attacks on Palestinians, which it
conveniently refers to as attacks on Hamas – a political and military
organisation governing the Gaza Strip of the Israeli-occupied Palestinian
territories. But it is not Hamas that is under attack, it is the entire
Palestinian population.

According to Al Jazeera, more than 22,000 Palestinians have been killed by
Israel in Gaza, with a majority of them being women and children. Nearly 60,000
people have been seriously injured, and over a million displaced.

And yet, just a few days ago, on Christmas morning, Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu told members of his party that the Israeli military campaign
in Gaza was far from over. The Israeli state has inflicted on the Palestinian
people a life calculated to being physical and economic destruction, with access
to water, farmland, electricity, food, and even medical treatment being
affected.

The killing of women and children, achieved through the targeted attacks on
hospitals and refugee centres, is intended not only to wipe out Palestinians,
but to also prevent the continuation of its population. What is happening in
Palestine is genocide.

There is a narrative that seeks to suggest that the South African government
should not hold Israel accountable for the genocide in Palestine because we have
many unresolved problems of our own in South Africa, many of which the
government is failing to resolve.

Such an argument ignores the fact that our own democracy as a country was
attained precisely because countries that had their own problems to resolve
decided to make apartheid a problem.

During apartheid in South Africa, countries facing serious challenges stood with
us, going as far as to place their own citizens in danger. This is especially
true of frontline states, particularly Lesotho, Mozambique, Zambia, Angola, and
Tanzania, whose citizens were subjected to raids and bombings by South African
state security.

Countries such as Nigeria issued passports to South Africans to enable them to
escape the clutches of the brutal regime, and even went as far as to implement a
tax on its citizens aimed at funding national liberation movements in South
Africa.

If these countries had adopted the “We have our own problems, so South Africa
must resolve its own apartheid problem”, I would still be in Soweto in a house
without running water and electricity, attending a school without textbooks, and
spending my afternoons playing on unpaved roads in the shadow of South African
Defence Force (SADF) patrolling vehicles. Or perhaps, I would be in prison being
tortured and starved.

Another narrative seeks to suggest that the stance taken by the South African
government is populism. But there is nothing populist about South Africa’s
stance on Israel.

Successive democratic governments have been consistent in their criticism of the
Israeli state over the years. It is for this reason that there has been no South
African ambassador in Israel for half a decade, and that following the genocide
in late 2023, diplomats were recalled from Israel.

Our country’s decisions on Israel are neither populist nor convenient. In fact,
the opposite is true. These decisions have not been without a significant impact
on the country, particularly as South Africa is Israel’s biggest trading partner
on the African continent.

In 2021, trade between Israel and sub-Saharan Africa reached over US$750
million. Most of this was machinery, electronics, and chemicals. Almost
two-thirds of this trade was with South Africa.

We could benefit greatly from maintaining good relations with Israel, a country
that has the unwavering support of Western nations that control some of the
world’s biggest economies. But by taking Israel to the ICJ, we are making the
uncomfortable decision to suffer for the Palestinian cause – a cause that we
know too well because in the not-too-distant past, we were the ones on the
receiving end of a genocide.

As South Africa prepares to stand before the ICJ in defence of international law
and of human rights, I could not be more proud of my government.

I am honoured to be a citizen of a country that, despite its own problems, is
prepared to fight on the side of a people who have been persecuted and subjected
to the tyranny of apartheid.

It gives me hope that someday, from the river to the sea, Palestine will be
free.

Malaika is a geographer and researcher at the Institute for Pan African Thought
and Conversation at the University of Johannesburg. She is a PhD candidate at
the University of Bayreuth, Germany.


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