South Africa Just Made Its Case at The Hague. What’s Next?

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South Africa’s genocide charges against Israel were formally brought to The Hague today, with the post-apartheid nation facing off against Israel for two days of emergency hearings. South Africa’s immediate aim is to win a ruling later this month — perhaps as early as next week — ordering Israel to cease and desist its assault of Gaza. 

Today’s hearing at The Hague was South Africa’s opportunity to lay out its case; tomorrow Israel will respond. The case they made (watch it here), which played live on TVs set up outside the building for crowds to watch, was straightforward: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has spoken in biblical terms about wiping out the Palestinians and followed up by urging them to flee to safe zones, and then flattening those safe zones with 2,000 bombs. South Africa also played clips of Israeli soldiers echoing Netanyahu’s genocidal rhetoric, vowing to wipe out “the seed of Amalek.” “What more evidence could be required?” one South African lawyer asked. My colleague Jeremy Scahill has more of the blow-by-blow.

A preliminary ruling to cease the assault, if it’s made, would then raise the question of how it would be enforced and who would be willing to stand up to the United States to enforce it. It would also give new global legitimacy to the Yemeni blockade of shipping in the Red Sea destined for or originating from Israeli ports.  

In the hours before the hearing, the number of countries backing the genocide charges exploded. In our hemisphere, Brazil, Colombia, and Nicaragua signed on; Malaysia, Turkey, Brazil, the Maldives, Namibia, Jordan, Iran, Bangladesh, Algeria, Bahrain, Comoros, Djibouti, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates, and Yemen also joined. Many of these countries endorsed the charges through the Arab League, whose support is a body blow to the Abraham Accords.

South Africa needs to win over eight of the 15 ICJ judges hearing the case, and it’s hard to imagine many of them supporting a charge of genocide. The judges are from the United States, Russia, China, France, Australia, Brazil, Germany, India, Jamaica, Japan, Lebanon, Morocco, Slovakia, Somalia, and Uganda. The U.S. judge, obviously, won’t be easy to win over, but neither will the Russian, as their country faces charges for its invasion of Ukraine, and China may tread lightly given its own treatment of Uyghurs in western China. China, however, is also poised to benefit geostrategically if the crisis can help displace American power in the Mideast.

The makeup gives South Africa at least a plausible path toward victory; judges are not necessarily under instructions from their home countries, though they are, of course, aware of the political pressures at work.

U.S. President Joe Biden, meanwhile, is being sued in federal court for his failure to stop the genocide, a case now joined by 77 human rights and civil society organizations, my colleague Prem Thakker reports. On Wednesday, we covered the South African charges on “Counter Points.”

Netanyahu is clearly feeling the weight of the charges. He posted an English-language video to social media Wednesday afternoon that was markedly different from his bellicose rhetoric to date. “I want to make a few points absolutely clear: Israel has no intention of permanently occupying Gaza or displacing its civilian population,” Netanyahu said in the video, a break from his previous willingness to entertain the idea, which is regularly floated by ministers in his government. “Israel is fighting Hamas terrorists, not the Palestinian population, and we are doing so in full compliance with international law.”

But the rest of his government continues to reiterate that mass displacement is their goal. Here is his minister of communications on Wednesday: “We certainly need to encourage emigration so that there’s as little pressure as possible inside the Gaza Strip from people who, yes, at the moment they’re uninvolved, but they’re not exactly lovers of Israel and they educate their children to [embrace] terror. And we’d like to see, and we’ve talked about this in government meetings, by the way, there aren’t any countries that want to take them in. No one wants them, even if we pay a lot of money. Voluntary emigration is important. It doesn’t in any way harm human rights,” he said. “We should encourage voluntary migration and we should compel them until they say they want it.”

“How?” he was asked by an Israeli presenter. 

“The war does what it does,” he explained. 

That the Israeli ministers are still speaking openly like this — talking about the war as one against an entire population — as the hearings are underway at The Hague only strengthens South Africa’s case. 

A new report from Save the Children has found that, on average, 10 children in Gaza have lost at least one limb on every day of Israel’s bombing campaign. For those who required amputations, many were performed without proper anesthesia, they note, as well as a lack of access to antibiotics, due to Israel’s blockade of the area. 

In the Senate yesterday, Bernie Sanders moved forward on a privileged resolution that will force a vote on whether to order the State Department to investigate whether Israel is committing human rights violations with U.S. weapons. After 30 days, Congress can then vote to block the weapons transfers. Sanders is relying on an obscure provision of the Foreign Assistance Act, Section 502(b), which, believe it or not, I floated back in November as a path available to Sanders after he told my colleague Dan Boguslaw in the Capitol hallway he was considering forcing a vote on the issue of arms sales to Israel. Unless I’m mistaken, this is the first time this has ever been tried.