South Africa’s willingness to file a case with the International Court of Justice is a sign that the old tactics used to police discourse about genocide have lost much of their power.
This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.
I find Westerners in general, and Europeans in particular, extremely indoctrinated and obsessed with perceptions of their own uniqueness. Many see themselves as chosen people, after going through a one-sided education and after relying on their media outlets, without studying alternative sources.
— André Vltchek, Soviet-born US political writer, 1963-2020.
On 20 March 2006, on the third anniversary of the illegal invasion of Iraq, BBC diplomatic correspondent Bridget Kendall declared on the Six O’Clock News:
‘There’s still bitter disagreement over invading Iraq. Was it justified or a disastrous miscalculation?’
The supposed ‘justification’ claimed by Prime Minister Tony Blair was the ‘serious and current threat’ posed by Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction. The BBC’s false notion of ‘balance’ was to present ‘disastrous miscalculation’ as the counterargument. In fact, as we detailed at the time in media alerts and in our books, the invasion was considered by many legal experts to be a ‘war of aggression’, the ‘supreme international crime’ as judged by the standards of the post-WW2 Nuremberg trials.
But such a view is deemed too extreme for respectable BBC discourse. Even today, the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg glibly notes:
Labour nerves still jangle over what went so terribly wrong in Iraq, even after all these years.
The implication, endlessly channelled by the BBC, is that a ‘disastrous miscalculation’ occurred, rather than an international war crime leading to the deaths of over one million Iraqis; a crime for which no western leader, or their media cheerleaders, has ever been tried in court. That outcome, in any serious responsible society, would have been more fitting than mere ‘jangling nerves’ among politicians.
But such narrative control is an endemic feature of state-corporate media, wrongly labelled ‘mainstream’. It is a fundamental requirement of political journalists and editors that they magically transform the crimes of ‘our’ governments into ‘miscalculations’, ‘mistakes’ or ‘misguided’ attempts to do good. This transformation is a power-serving alchemy turning the base metal of brutal realpolitik into the gold of benign intention, all for public consumption.
Noam Chomsky succinctly explained the ideological underpinning of ‘mainstream’ news coverage:
In discussion of international relations, the fundamental principle is that “we are good” – “we” being the government, on the totalitarian principle that state and people are one. “We” are benevolent, seeking peace and justice, though there may be errors in practice. “We” are foiled by villains who can’t rise to our exalted level.
— Chomsky, Interventions, Penguin Books, London, 2007, p. 101.
It does not matter how frequently, or how horrifically, this benevolent claim is violated by Western countries, journalists can be relied upon to perform the necessary whitewashing: the Gulf War in 1990-91, Nato’s bombing of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, Iraq sanctions from 1990-2003, the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, the destruction of Libya in 2011, the US-sponsored toppling of the Ukrainian government in 2014, US-Nato air strikes against Syria, participation in the Saudi-led bombing of Yemen, and now the attacks on ‘Iran-backed’ Houthi rebels. (Of course, convention decrees that the Houthi are always described as ‘Iran-backed’, whereas Israeli forces are not routinely labelled ‘US-backed’.)
The list goes on and on. You might well ask: at what point do supposedly astute, well-informed, senior editors and political correspondents simply stop regurgitating government propaganda; even start challenging it? How much blood has to be spilled, how many lives lost, how much vital infrastructure – homes, hospitals, power plants – destroyed by ‘our’ weaponry, with ‘our’ diplomatic, political and economic support?
But, of course, serious media challenge of elite power is highly unlikely. ‘Successful’ media professionals are fed through an industrial filter system that rewards steady adherence to state-approved narratives. As Chomsky once so memorably told a discombobulated Andrew Marr:
I’m sure you believe everything you’re saying. But what I’m saying is that if you believed something different, you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.’
Misleading The Public Is State Policy
In several powerful books, based on careful research of formerly secret UK government documents, historian Mark Curtis, co-founder of Declassified UK, has laid bare the motivations and reality of British foreign policy. Ethical concerns and morality are notable in these internal state records by their absence. Curtis observed:
a basic principle is that humanitarian concerns do not figure at all in the rationale behind British foreign policy. In the thousands of government files I have looked through for this and other books, I have barely seen any reference to human rights at all. Where such concerns are evoked, they are only for public-relations purposes.
— Curtis, Unpeople: Britain’s Secret Human Rights Abuses, Vintage, London, 2004, p. 3.
He added:
in every case I have ever researched on past British foreign policy, the files show that ministers and officials have systematically misled the public. The culture of lying to and misleading the electorate is deeply embedded in British policy-making.
— Ibid., p. 3.
This is especially true when it comes to Western terrorism. But what exactly is terrorism? The definition from a US army manual is:
The calculated use of violence or threat of violence to attain goals that are political, religious, or ideological in nature. This is done through intimidation, coercion, or instilling fear.
— Chomsky, ‘The new war against terror’, talk given at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on 18 October 2001.
By this definition, the major source of international terrorism is the West, notably the United States, supported by its ‘special relationship’ ally, the UK. Curtis wrote:
The idea that Britain is a supporter of terrorism is an oxymoron in the mainstream political culture, as ridiculous as suggesting that Tony Blair should be indicted for war crimes. Yet state-sponsored terrorism is by far the most serious category of terrorism in the world today, responsible for far more deaths in many more countries than the “private” terrorism of groups like Al Qaida. Many of the worst offenders are key British allies. Indeed, by any rational consideration, Britain is one of the leading supporters of terrorism in the world today. But this simple fact is never mentioned in the mainstream political culture.
— Curtis, Web of Deceit: Britain’s Real Role in the World, Vintage, London, 2003, p. 94.
The US-UK-supported genocidal attacks by Israel on the people of Gaza, now extending to over 100 days, have made it ever more difficult for politicians and managers of public perception to maintain the myth of western benevolence and a ‘global rules-based order’.
The Financial Times reported last October:
Western support for Israel’s assault on Gaza has poisoned efforts to build consensus with significant developing countries on condemning Russia’s war against Ukraine, officials and diplomats have warned.
The FT article continued:
“We have definitely lost the battle in the Global South,” said one senior G7 diplomat. “All the work we have done with the Global South [over Ukraine] has been lost…Forget about rules, forget about world order. They won’t ever listen to us again.”
The senior G7 diplomat added:
What we said about Ukraine has to apply to Gaza. Otherwise we lose all our credibility. The Brazilians, the South Africans, the Indonesians: why should they ever believe what we say about human rights?
Why indeed.
Naledi Pandor, South Africa’s foreign minister, observed recently that:
I think this notion of international rules is very comfortable for some people to use when it suits them but they don’t believe in international rules when it doesn’t suit them. Because they don’t apply international rules or law equally in all circumstances.
She added:
You can’t say because Ukraine has been invaded, suddenly sovereignty is important, but it was never important for Palestine.
To put it bluntly, the notion of the West upholding a rules-based international system is a blood-drenched myth.
Gaza – A War ‘To Save Western Civilisation’
Last week, South Africa presented a detailed 84-page submission to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) – essentially the UN’s global law court – arguing that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. The case was brought under the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
The South African legal team showed ample evidence of Israeli genocidal acts in Gaza, as well as the stated intention to commit genocide, indicated in public statements by numerous senior Israeli political and military leaders. On 28 October last year, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered a speech in which he compared the Palestinians to the Biblical people of Amalek. In the first Book of Samuel, God commanded King Saul to kill every person in Amalek, a rival nation to ancient Israel:
Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.
We could find no reference to Netanyahu’s genocidal comparison of the Palestinians to the Amalekites on the BBC News website.
Around 24,000 people have been killed in Gaza since 7 October last year, including over 10,300 children and 7,100 women. There may be another 7,000 buried under the rubble. In other words, over 70 per cent of those killed are women and children. Around four per cent of Gaza’s population has either been killed, wounded or is missing under rubble.
According to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, by the end of 2023, 1.9 million people – nearly 85 per cent of the total population of Gaza – had been internally displaced under Israel’s attacks. These include many families who have been displaced multiple times, forcibly and repeatedly moved to try to flee Israel’s bombardment. But, as the UN has warned, there is no safe place in Gaza. Oxfam reported that Israel’s military is killing Palestinians at an average rate of 250 people a day, exceeding the daily death toll of any other major 21st century conflict. Many more lives are at risk from hunger, disease and cold, warned Oxfam.
As of 30 December, about 65,000 residential units in Gaza had been destroyed or made uninhabitable and over 290,000 housing units had been damaged, meaning that over half a million people will have no home to return to. Thirty out of Gaza’s thirty-six hospitals are not functioning, and the remaining six are only partially functioning.
Jonathan Cook noted that the West is now standing in the dock alongside Israel at the ICJ:
Israel expects support from western capitals because they have nearly as much to fear from a verdict against Israel as Israel itself. They have staunchly backed the killing spree, with the US and UK, in particular, sending weapons that are being used against the people of Gaza, making both potentially complicit.
Cook pointed out that it is significant that South Africa has brought the case of genocide against Israel. Both countries ‘bear the trauma of Europe’s long history of racial supremacism, but each has drawn precisely opposite lessons.’ As Nelson Mandela, South Africa’s first post-apartheid president, said:
We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.
Israel’s most brutal assault in Gaza’s history is a continuation of its long war of oppression against the Palestinians. Israeli president Isaac Herzog described the genocidal attacks on Gaza as a war ‘to save Western civilization, to save the values of Western civilisation.’ As the political writer Caitlin Johnstone pointed out, Herzog was right; but not in the way he intended. She explained:
The demolition of Gaza is indeed being perpetrated in defense of western values, and is itself a perfect embodiment of western values. Not the western values they teach you about in school, but the hidden ones they don’t want you to look at.
Johnstone continued:
For centuries western civilization has depended heavily on war, genocide, theft, colonialism and imperialism, which it has justified using narratives premised on religion, racism and ethnic supremacy — all of which we are seeing play out in the incineration of Gaza today.
She added:
What we are seeing in Gaza is a much better representation of what western civilization is really about than all the gibberish about freedom and democracy we learned about in school.
A BBC News report on the ICJ proceedings was titled, with fake balance, ‘South Africa’s genocide case against Israel: Both sides play heavy on emotion in ICJ hearing’. This was a distortion of the truth: the South African case was presented with dignity, clarity and forensic detail. As the BBC conceded deep in its report, it was Israel who made a strong appeal to emotions, displaying the images of 132 missing Israelis – most of them still being held hostage in Gaza. But, as Kenneth Roth, former executive director of Human Rights Watch, noted of Israel’s legal case:
Its repeated invocation of Hamas’s horrible 7 October attack and alleged genocidal aspirations are irrelevant because atrocities by one side do not justify genocide by another. Its argument of self-defence is beside the point because a legitimate defence does not allow genocide.
BBC News marked one hundred days of the current phase of the Israel-Palestine crisis with a classic example of propaganda bias. The BBC website headlined a major 3,000-word piece on the October 7 attacks. Underneath, there was a tiny link to a one-minute video of footage from Gaza that clearly underplayed the level of destruction. This is called BBC ‘impartiality’.
True to form, Washington is doing its utmost to protect Israel. During a press briefing, US national security spokesman John Kirby told reporters:
South Africa’s lawsuit against Israel is “meritless, counterproductive and completely without any basis in fact whatsoever”.
Interviewed by Andrew Napolitano, a former judge and law professor, Jeffrey Sachs, Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University responded to Kirby’s dismissive remark:
I just wish there were grown-ups in power. Grown-ups who are responsible, who are honest, who are decent, who would read an 84-page detailed complaint and give a serious answer, rather than a one-sentence smack-off like that.
He added:
I wish, at the same time, that the White House press corps would follow up more seriously. Actually, if I remember correctly, that question started with a few words, “Just a quick one”. And then the question was asked and Kirby responded in this utterly disgusting way when the most important issue on the planet is in front of him, and couldn’t do more than one dismissive, phony and false statement. But then there’s no follow-up [by the journalists at the press briefing]. Then they move on to the next topic. And the next topic.
Sachs continued:
Why don’t the journalists do their job, rather than feeding us the propaganda from the White House? They should be questioning the propaganda. That’s why I was grateful for today’s [ICJ] court proceedings because there were hours to put forward the evidence. There is a detailed legal complaint. There are dozens of countries that have supported this. But the US government is all spin, all propaganda, and all attempt at narrative control.
This is, of course, standard behaviour for the world’s major perpetrator of terrorism.
The Language Of Genocide
Media academics have analysed Israel-Palestine coverage and found that Palestinian perspectives are given ‘far less time and legitimacy’ than Israeli views in the British media. Last month, Greg Philo and Mike Berry of the highly-respected Glasgow Media Group examined four weeks (7 October – 4 November, 2023) of BBC One daytime coverage of Gaza to identify which terms were used by journalists themselves – i.e. not in direct or reported statements – to describe Israeli and Palestinian deaths.
They found that ‘murder’, ‘murderous’, ‘mass murder’, ‘brutal murder’ and ‘merciless murder’ were used a total of 52 times by journalists to refer to Israelis’ deaths but never in relation to Palestinian deaths. Philo and Berry noted that:
The same pattern could be seen in relation to “massacre”, “brutal massacre” and “horrific massacre” (35 times for Israeli deaths, not once for Palestinian deaths); “atrocity”, “horrific atrocity” and “appalling atrocity” (22 times for Israeli deaths, once for Palestinian deaths); and “slaughter” (five times for Israeli deaths, not once for Palestinian deaths).
But more importantly:
The Palestinian perspective is effectively absent from the coverage, in how they understand the reasons for the conflict and the nature of the occupation under which they are living.
Tim Llewellyn, a former BBC Middle East correspondent, once observed that what is routinely missing from BBC coverage is that Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land:
demeans and degrades people: not just the killing and the destruction, but the humiliation, the attempt to crush the human spirit and remove the identity; not just the bullet in the brain and the tank through the door, but the faeces Israel’s soldiers rub on the plundered ministry walls, the trashed kindergarten; the barriers to a people’s work, prayers and hopes.
Emre Azizlerli, a former senior BBC producer, said recently via X (formerly Twitter):
I worked there for over 20 years. Internal boards determine who gets promoted by a panel of the applicant’s superiors. The political likes and dislikes of those at the very top easily trickle down in this chain mechanism all the way down to how producers behave, since everyone wants to please their boss to move ahead.
No wonder that a Morning Star tribute to the late John Pilger, who reported on Palestine over many years, noted that his death ‘leaves a void’, adding:
There are few investigative journalists of his courage or integrity. And designedly so. From the censorship of “hostile” voices across the internet to the outrageous incarceration of Julian Assange, every effort is being made to stamp out independent journalism.
Throughout his career, Pilger drew attention to the role of the media as ‘an appendage of established power’. Addressing a conference last March, organised by the Morning Star, he called for:
urgent debate and activism around the issue of the media… the media was rarely a friend of working people, but there were spaces for independent journalists in the mainstream.
He continued:
My own career is testament to that. Until a few years ago I worked in mainstream newspapers — in later years the Guardian mainly — but the Guardian like the others is now closed to independent thinking and honest journalism… we need to understand that the media is now fully integrated into an extremist state, and that working people must look elsewhere — to the Morning Star, yes, and to oases on the internet where good journalism flourishes.
Pilger often cast a sceptical eye on those whom we are supposed to regard as the best journalists working in the major news media. They are nevertheless performing a propaganda role by demarcating the permissible limits of reporting. For example:
BBC reporter, Jeremy Bowen, who talks about a war between Israel and Hamas. Bowen knows that’s wrong. It’s an attack on an occupied people by the occupier, Israel, backed by great powers.
State-corporate journalism – BBC News is a prime example – is far removed from the mythical notion of reporting the truth to the public. As the playwright John McGrath once wrote:
The gentlemen at the head of the powerful opinion-forming corporations do not wish to have their articulate mediation of reality disturbed by a group of people going around with a different story, seeing events from a different perspective, even selecting different information. Still less do they wish to have the population at large emerging from their mental retreat – the inner exile of the powerless and alienated – and demanding a share of power, of control, of freedom.’
— McGrath, A Good Night Out: Popular Theatre: Audience, Class and Form, Nick Hern Books, 1981, pp. 89-90.
We should all reject the output of ‘the powerful opinion-forming corporations’ and look elsewhere, to those internet oases of real journalism, in order to understand the world and to radically change it for the better.
The post Gaza: A Brutal Demonstration Of “Western Values” first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
ANALYSIS: By Karen Scott, University of Canterbury
In 2023, the world witnessed a sustained attack on the very foundations of the international legal order.
Russia, a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, continued its illegal invasion in Ukraine. Israel’s response to the deadly October attack by Hamas exceeded its legitimate right to self-defence. And Venezuela threatened force against Guyana over an oil-rich area of disputed territory.
But is it all bad news for the international legal order?
There are six ongoing international court cases initiated by states or organisations seeking to clarify the law and hold other states to account on behalf of the international community.
These cases offer smaller countries, such as New Zealand, an opportunity to have a significant role in strengthening the international legal order and ensuring a pathway towards peace.
A departure from the legal norm?
Normally, cases are brought to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) when a state’s direct interests are impacted by the actions of another state.
However, six recent court cases reflect a significant departure from this tradition and mark an important development for international justice.
These cases argue the international community has a collective interest in certain issues. The focus of the cases range from Israel’s actions in Gaza (brought by South Africa) through to the responsibility of states to ensure the protection of the climate system (brought by the United Nations General Assembly).
South Africa’s justice minister Ronald Lamola outlined the country’s genocide case against Israel, as a landmark hearing opened at the International Court of Justice
pic.twitter.com/AvlM8BwhQI
— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) January 11, 2024
Holding states accountable for genocide
Three of the six cases seek to hold states accountable for genocide using Article IX of the 1948 Genocide Convention. Put simply, Article IX says disputes between countries can be referred to the ICJ.
In late December, South Africa asked the court to introduce provisional measures — a form of international injunction — against Israel for genocidal acts in Gaza.
These proceedings build on the precedent set by a 2019 case brought by The Gambia against Myanmar for its treatment of the Rohingya people.
In 2022, the ICJ concluded it had jurisdiction to hear The Gambia’s case on the basis that all parties to the Genocide Convention have an interest in ensuring the prevention, suppression and punishment of genocide.
According to the ICJ, The Gambia did not need to demonstrate any special interest or injury to bring the proceedings and, in effect, was entitled to hold Myanmar to account for its treatment of the Rohingya people on behalf of the international community as a whole.
South Africa has made the same argument against Israel.
In the third case, Ukraine was successful in obtaining provisional measures calling on Russia to suspend military operations in Ukraine (a call which has been reiterated in several United Nations General Assembly resolutions).
While Ukraine is directly impacted by Russia’s actions, 32 states, including New Zealand, have also intervened. These countries have argued there is an international interest in the resolution of the conflict.
In November 2023, following the example of intervention in Ukraine v Russia, seven countries — Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom (jointly) and the Maldives — filed declarations of intervention in The Gambia v Myanmar, in support of The Gambia and the international community.
States can apply for permission to intervene in proceedings where they have an interest of a legal nature that may be affected by the decision in the case (in the case of the ICJ, under Article 62 of the ICJ Statute). That said, intervening in judicial proceedings in support of the legal order or international community more generally was relatively rare until 2023.
South Africa is taking Israel to the ICJ, accusing it of committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.
Al Jazeera’s @nabilabana explains what’s behind the case
— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) January 11, 2024
Climate change obligations under international law
But it is not just acts of genocide that have attracted wider international legal involvement.
In 2023, three proceedings seeking advisory opinions on the legal obligations of states in respect of climate change under international law have been introduced before the ICJ, the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.
These cases can be similarly characterised as having been brought on behalf of the international community for the international community. New Zealand has intervened in the Law of the Sea case.
Collectively, these six cases comprise actions taken on behalf of the international community with the overarching purpose of strengthening the international legal order.
They demonstrate faith in and support for that legal order in the face of internal and external challenges, and constitute an important counter-narrative to the prevailing view that the international legal order is no longer robust.
Instituting proceedings does not guarantee a positive outcome. But it is worth noting that less than three years after the ICJ issued an advisory opinion condemning the United Kingdom’s continued occupation of the Chagos Archipelago, the UK is quietly negotiating with Mauritius for the return of the islands.
New Zealand’s support for the global legal order in 2024
The international legal order underpins New Zealand’s security and prosperity. New Zealand has a strong and internationally recognised track record of positive intervention in judicial proceedings in support of that order.
In 2012 New Zealand intervened in the case brought by Australia against Japan for whaling in the Antarctic. Following our contributions to cases before the ICJ and ITLOS in 2023, we are well placed to continue that intervention in future judicial proceedings.
Calls have already been made for New Zealand to intervene in South Africa v Israel. Contributing to this case and to The Gambia v Myanmar proceeding provides an important opportunity for New Zealand to make a proactive and substantive contribution to strengthening the international legal order.
Dr Karen Scott is professor in Law, University of Canterbury. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
In a historic appearance before the International Court of Justice (ICJ or World Court) in The Hague, the legal team representing the Republic of South Africa presented a powerful and compelling case that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza. South Africa asked the court to impose nine emergency “provisional measures” to stop the slaughter.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
It should surprise no one that the prize-match fight for the rule of international law has pitted Israel and South Africa against each other at the International Court of Justice at The Hague.
The world is split between those who have crafted a self-serving global and regional order that guarantees them impunity whatever their crimes, and those who pay the price for that arrangement.
Now the long-time victims are fighting back at the so-called World Court.
Last week, each side presented its arguments for and against whether Israel has implemented a genocidal policy in Gaza over the past three months.
South Africa’s case should be open and shut. So far Israel has killed or seriously wounded close to 100,000 Palestinians in Gaza, almost one in every 20 inhabitants. It has damaged or destroyed more than 60 percent of the population’s homes. It has bombed the tiny “safe zones” to which it has ordered some two million Palestinians to flee. It has exposed them to starvation and lethal disease by cutting off aid and water.
Meanwhile, senior Israeli political and military officials have openly and repeatedly expressed genocidal intent, as South Africa’s submission so carefully documents.
Back in September, before Hamas’ break-out from the Gaza prison on 7 October, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had shown the United Nations a map of his aspiration for what he termed “the New Middle East”. The Palestinian territories of Gaza and the West Bank were gone, replaced by Israel.
Despite the mass of evidence against Israel, it could take years for the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to reach a definitive verdict – by which time, if things carry on as they are, there may be no meaningful Palestinian population left to protect.
South Africa has therefore also urgently requested an interim order effectively requiring Israel to stop its attack.
They are in opposite corners because each drew a different lesson from their respective traumatic historical legacies.
Israel raised its citizens to believe that Jews must join the racist, oppressor nations, adopting a “might makes right” approach to neighbouring states. A self-declared Jewish state sees the region as a zero-sum battleground in which domination and brutality win the day.
It was inevitable that Israel would eventually spawn, in Hamas and groups like Hezbollah in Lebanon, armed opponents who view their conflict with Israel in a similar light.
South Africa, by contrast, has aspired to carry the mantel of “moral beacon” nation, that western states so readily ascribe to their top-dog, nuclear-armed Middle Eastern client state, Israel.
South Africa’s first post-apartheid president, Nelson Mandela, famously observed in 1997: “We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.”
Israel and apartheid South Africa were close diplomatic and military allies until apartheid’s fall 30 years ago. Mandela understood that the ideological foundations of Zionism and apartheid were built on a similar racial supremacist logic.
He was once cast as a terrorist villain for opposing South Africa’s apartheid rulers, much as Palestinian leaders are by Israel today.
It should also not surprise us that lined up in Israel’s corner is most of the West – led by Washington and Germany, the country that instigated the Holocaust. Berlin asked last Friday to be considered a third party in Israel’s defence at The Hague.
Meanwhile, South Africa’s case is backed by much of what is called the “developing world”, which has long felt the jackboot of western colonialism – and racism – on its face.
Notably, Namibia was incensed by Germany’s support for Israel at the court, given that at the outset of the 20th century, the colonial German regime in south-west Africa herded many tens of thousands of Namibians into death camps, developing the blueprint for the genocide of Jews and Roma it would later refine in the Holocaust.
The Namibian president, Hage Geingob, stated: “Germany cannot morally express commitment to the United Nations Convention against genocide, including atonement for the genocide in Namibia, whilst supporting the equivalent of a holocaust and genocide in Gaza.”
The panel of judges – 17 of them in total – do not exist in some rarified bubble of legal abstraction. Intense political pressures in this polarised fight will bear down on them.
As former UK ambassador Craig Murray, who attended the two days of hearings, observed: most of the judges looked as if they “really did not want to be in the court”.
The reality is that, whichever way the majority in the court swings in its decision, the crushing power of the West to get its way will shape what happens next.
If most of the judges find it plausible that there is a risk Israel is committing genocide and insist on some sort of interim ceasefire until it can make a definitive ruling, Washington will block enforcement through its veto at the UN Security Council.
Expect the US, as well as Europe, to work harder than ever to undermine international law and its supporting institutions. Imputations of antisemitism on the part of the judges who back South Africa’s case – and the states to which they belong – will be liberally spread around.
Already Israel has accused South Africa of a “blood libel”, suggesting its motives at the ICJ are driven by antisemitism. In his address to the court, Tal Becker of the Israeli foreign ministry argued that South Africa was acting as a legal surrogate for Hamas.
The US has implied much the same by calling South Africa’s meticulous amassing of evidence “meritless”.
On Saturday, in a speech littered with deceptions, Netanyahu vowed to ignore the court’s ruling if it was not to Israel’s liking. “Nobody will stop us – not The Hague, not the axis of evil, and not anybody else,” he said.
On the other hand, if the ICJ rules at this stage anything less than that there is a plausible case for genocide, Israel and the Biden administration will seize on the verdict to mischaracterise Israel’s assault on Gaza as receiving a clean bill of health from the World Court.
That will be a lie. The judges are being asked only to rule on the matter of genocide, the gravest of the crimes against humanity, where the evidential bar is set very high indeed.
In an international legal system in which nation-states are accorded far more rights than ordinary people, the priority is giving states the freedom to wage wars in which civilians are likely to pay the heaviest price. The gargantuan profits of the West’s military-industrial complex depend on this intentional lacuna in the so-called “rules of war”.
If the court finds – whether for political or legal reasons – that South Africa has failed to make a plausible case, it will not absolve Israel of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Indisputably, it is carrying out both.
Nonetheless, any reticence on the part of the ICJ will be duly noted by the International Criminal Court (ICC), its heavily compromised sister court. Its job is not to adjudicate between states like the World Court but to gather evidence for the prosecution of individuals who order or carry out war crimes.
It is currently gathering evidence to decide whether to investigate Israeli and Hamas officials over the events of the past three months.
But for years, the same court has been dragging its feet on prosecuting Israeli officials over war crimes that long predate the current assault on Gaza, such as Israel’s decades of building illegal Jewish settlements on Palestinian land, and Israel’s 17-year siege of Gaza – the rarely mentioned context for Hamas’ break-out on 7 October.
The ICC similarly baulked at prosecuting US and British officials over the war crimes their states carried out in invading and occupying Afghanistan and Iraq.
That followed an intimidation campaign from Washington, which imposed sanctions on the court’s two most senior officials, including freezing their US assets, blocking their international financial transactions and denying them and their families entry to the US.
Israel’s central argument against genocide last week was that it is defending itself after it was attacked on 7 October, and that the real genocide is being carried out by Hamas against Israel.
Such a claim should be roundly dismissed by the World Court. Israel has no right to defend its decades-long occupation and siege of Gaza, the background to the events of 7 October. And it cannot claim it is targeting a few thousand Hamas fighters when it is bombing, displacing and starving Gaza’s entire civilian population.
Even if Israel’s military campaign is not intended to wipe out the Palestinians of Gaza, as all statements by the Israeli cabinet and military officials indicate, it is nonetheless still directed primarily at civilians.
On the most charitable reading, given the facts, Palestinian civilians are being bombed and killed en masse to cause terror. They are being ethnically cleansed to depopulate Gaza. And they are being subjected to a horrifying form of collective punishment in Israel’s “complete siege” that denies them food, water and power – leading to starvation and exposure to lethal disease – to weaken their will to resist their occupation and seek liberation from absolute Israeli control.
If all of this is the only way Israel can “eradicate Hamas” – its stated goal – then it reveals something Israel and its western patrons would rather we all ignore: that Hamas is so deeply embedded in Gaza precisely because its implacable resistance looks like the only reasonable response to a Palestinian population ever more suffocated by the tightening chokehold of oppression Israel has inflicted on Gaza for decades.
Israel’s weeks of carpet bombing have left Gaza uninhabitable for the vast majority of the population, who have no homes to return to and little in the way of functioning infrastructure. Without massive and constant aid, which Israel is blocking, they will gradually die of dehydration, famine, cold and disease.
In these circumstances, Israel’s actual defence against genocide is an entirely conditional one: it is not committing genocide only if it has correctly estimated that sufficient pressure will mount on Egypt that it feels compelled – or bullied – into opening its border with Gaza and allowing the population to escape.
If Cairo refuses, and Israel does not change course, the people of Gaza are doomed. In a rightly ordered world, a claim of reckless indifference as to whether the Palestinians of Gaza die from conditions Israel has created should be no defence against genocide.
The difficulty for the World Court is that it is on trial as much as Israel – and will lose whichever way it rules. Legal facts and the court’s credibility are in direct conflict with western strategic priorities and war industry profits.
The risk is the judges may feel the safest course is to “split the difference”.
They may exonerate Israel of genocide based on a technicality, while insisting it do more of what it isn’t doing at all: protecting the “humanitarian needs” of Gaza’s people.
Israel dangled just such a technicality before the judges last week like a juicy carrot. Its lawyers argued that, because Israel had not responded to the genocide case made by South Africa at the time of its filing, there was no dispute between the two states. The World Court, Israel suggested, therefore lacked jurisdiction because its role is to settle such disputes.
If accepted, it would mean, as former ambassador Murray noted, that, absurdly, states could be exonerated of genocide simply by refusing to engage with their accusers.
Aeyal Gross, a professor of international law at Tel Aviv University, told the Haaretz newspaper he expected the court to reject any limitations on Israel’s military operations. It would focus instead on humanitarian measures to ease the plight of Gaza’s population.
He also noted that Israel would insist it was already complying – and carry on as before.
The one sticking point, Gross suggested, would be a demand from the World Court that Israel allow international investigators access to the enclave to assess whether war crimes had been committed.
It is precisely this kind of “war business as usual” that will discredit the court – and the international humanitarian law it is supposed to uphold.
As ever, it is not the West that the world can look to for meaningful leadership on the gravest crises it faces or for efforts to de-escalate conflict.
The only actors showing any inclination to put into practice the moral obligation that should fall to states to intervene to stop genocide are the “terrorists”.
Hezbollah in Lebanon is putting pressure on Israel by incrementally building a second front in the north, while the Houthis in Yemen are improvising their own form of economic sanctions on international shipping passing through the Red Sea.
The US and Britain responded at the weekend with air strikes on Yemen, turning up the heat even higher and threatening to tip the region into a wider war.
With its own investments in the Suez Canal threatened, China, unlike the West, seems desperate to cool things down. Beijing proposed this week an Israel-Palestine peace conference involving a much wider circle of states.
The goal is to loosen Washington’s malevolent stranglehold on pretend “peace-making” and bind all the parties to a commitment to create a Palestinian state.
The West’s narrative is that anyone outside its club – from South Africa and China to Hezbollah and the Houthis – is the enemy, threatening Washington’s “rules-based order”.
But it is that very order that looks increasingly self-serving and discredited – and the foundation for a genocide being inflicted on the Palestinians of Gaza in broad daylight.
• First published in Middle East Eye
The post Western Racism laid the Foundations for Israel’s Genocide in Gaza first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
In the Hague trial, both sides have largely avoided evidence contradicting their case. Yet South Africa’s arguments are strong
Watching lawyers for South Africa and Israel debate whether Israel is committing genocide in Gaza was like observing two versions of reality that barely intersect.
Each set of counsel, appearing before the international court of justice at The Hague, largely avoided the most powerful evidence contradicting their case, and the absence of a factual hearing or any questioning left it unclear how the judges will resolve the dispute. Yet I would wager that South Africa’s case was strong enough that the court will impose some provisional measures on Israel in the hope of mitigating the enormous civilian harm caused by Israel’s approach to fighting Hamas.
Kenneth Roth, former executive director of Human Rights Watch (1993-2022), is a visiting professor at Princeton’s School for Public and International Affairs
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
Marwan Bishara, Al Jazeera’s senior political analyst, assesses Israeli defence submitted at the ICJ over South Africa’s genocide allegations. Image: AJ
Al Jazeera’s senior political analyst Marwan Bishara says Israel’s legal team “started off weak” but made a few strong points near the end.
Bishara said the lawyers’ efforts at the genocide hearings at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague yesterday to deflect blame for Israel’s attacks and ignore the context of Israel’s 75-year occupation of Palestine came across as “illogical”, the Al Jazeera video clip reports.
Their claims that Israel’s forces are “trying to protect, rather than harm”, civilians were also unconvincing, he said, given the toll of the war: 23,357 Palestinians, including 9,600 children, since October 7.
However, Bishara said Israel’s lawyers did well to zero in on the jurisdiction of the ICJ — pointing out that the court must specifically prove Israel was guilty of genocidal intent, not any other violations.
“You can claim Israel has committed heinous crimes, but if they do not fall under the framework of genocide, the court has no jurisdiction,” Bishara said.
Speaking to reporters outside the ICJ in The Hague, Palestinian Foreign Ministry official Ammar Hijazi said Israel’s legal team was not “able to provide any solid arguments on the basis of fact and law”.
“What Israel has provided today are many of the already debunked lies,” he added, referring to, among others, Israeli clams that hospitals in Gaza were being used as military bases.
“Additionally, we think that what the Israeli team today has tried to provide is the exact thing that South Africa came to the court for — and that is, nothing at all justifies genocide.”
Thomas MacManus, a senior lecturer in state crime at Queen Mary University of London, said the ICJ was likely to see a “massive disconnect” between the picture Israel painted of its humanitarian concern for Gaza and “the reality on the ground where UN agencies say people are starving, lacking water, and seeing attacks on hospitals, schools, and universities.”
‘Nothing can ever justify genocide’
South Africa’s Minister of Justice Ronald Lamola told media “Self-defence is no answer to genocide”.
Here are the main points from his interaction:
Marwan Bishara comments on the Israeli ICJ defence. Video: Al Jazeera
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
Israel is urging western states to rally to its side as the International Court of Justice prepares to hear this week South Africa’s case that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
The court is being asked by Pretoria to issue an immediate injunction ordering Israel to halt its military assault on the tiny enclave, to avoid further casualties.
Some 23,000 Palestinians are known to have been killed by Israel so far, a majority of them women and children, and many thousands more are believed to be lying under the rubble. Tens of thousands are seriously wounded. A majority of the population have lost their homes to the three-month bombing campaign.
Israel has intensively and repeatedly targeted the supposedly “safe zones” to which it has ordered Palestinian civilians to flee.
It has destroyed almost all of Gaza’s infrastructure and is blocking most aid from reaching the enclave. Famine and disease are likely to rapidly increase the death toll.
South Africa’s 84-page brief argues that Israel’s bombing campaign and siege breaches the 1948 Genocide Convention, which defines genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”.
Israel expects support from western capitals because they have nearly as much to fear from a verdict against Israel as Israel itself. They have staunchly backed the killing spree, with the US and UK, in particular, sending weapons that are being used against the people of Gaza, making both potentially complicit.
According to a cable from the Israeli foreign ministry, leaked to the Axios website, Israel hopes that, given the difficulties of making a legal case in defence of its actions, diplomatic and political pressure on the court’s justices will win the day instead.
The Biden administration led the way late last week in dismissing South Africa’s detailed legal brief as “meritless, counterproductive and completely without any basis in fact whatsoever”.
That would sound patently ridiculous to western audiences had they been provided with serious coverage of Gaza. But Israel has been heavily restricting access to the enclave, while killing Palestinian journalists there at an unprecedented rate to stop their reporting.
In addition, western media are willingly – and secretly – submitting to an onerous Israeli censorship regime.
Israel’s “strategic goal” at the court, according to the leaked cable, is to dissuade the judges from making a determination that it is committing genocide. But more pressing is Israel’s need to prevent the Hague court from ordering an interim halt to the attack.
Israeli officials will argue, Axios reports, that its sustained assault on Gaza fails to reach the threshold of genocide, which requires “creating conditions that don’t allow the survival of the population, together with the intent to annihilate it”.
Israel will try to convince the judges that it has been seeking to increase humanitarian aid to Gaza and minimise the toll on civilians.
Its argument flies in the face of the evidence South Africa has amassed.
Its brief contains nine pages of declarations by Israeli leaders showing clear genocidal intent, including statements from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, senior figures in the cabinet, President Isaac Herzog and many serving and former Israeli military commanders.
Giora Eiland, an adviser to war council minister, Benny Gantz, has called Israel’s goal the creation of “conditions where life in Gaza becomes unsustainable”. An Israeli military spokesman stated from the outset that the aim was to inflict “maximum damage” on Gaza.
Herzog suggests the entire civilian population is a legitimate military target, while Netanyahu refers to the Palestinians as “Amalek”, a biblical enemy. In the Old Testament, God commands the Israelites to annihilate the Amalekites, putting “to death men and women, children and infants”.
One of the provisions of the Genocide Convention is an absolute prohibition on incitement to genocide. Israel’s most senior politicians and military commanders have indisputably breached that section of the convention.
A letter to Israel’s attorney general last week from a group of Israeli academics, lawyers, human rights activists and journalists underscored that point. They warned that incitement to genocide had become “an everyday matter in Israel”.
The letter added: “Normalised discourse which calls for annihilation, erasure, devastation and the like is liable to impact the manner by which soldiers [in Gaza] conduct themselves.”
But dehumanisation – the precursor to genocide – is not the only problem.
Israel’s prosecution of what it terms a “war to eradicate Hamas” has fully met its own definition of genocide. “Conditions that don’t allow the survival of the population” were already being created long before the onslaught Israel unleashed immediately after Hamas broke out from Gaza on 7 October. Some 1,140 Israelis and other nationals were killed in the ensuing carnage.
The BBC and other media outlets keep revisiting the crimes Hamas committed on October 7, but have failed to report on growing evidence that Israel killed its own citizens that day, often in grotesque fashion.
My latest article can be read here: https://t.co/MHxdUxRrCV
— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) December 15, 2023
Mostly forgotten in the back and forth about what is unfolding in the enclave is the context: United Nations officials warned nearly a decade ago that Israel’s siege of Gaza – now 17 years in duration – was designed to make the enclave “uninhabitable”.
In other words, Israel was precisely “creating conditions that don’t allow the survival of the population”.
Even before its current, extended assault, Israel had placed severe restrictions on access to water for the enclave’s 2.3 million inhabitants. As a direct result, overstretched aquifers under Gaza were allowing in seawater, making the enclave’s drinking water unfit for human consumption.
Food was similarly in short supply. Back in 2012, Israeli human rights groups managed to make public a secret document showing that the army had been tightly controlling food going into Gaza from 2008 onwards. As a result, two-thirds of the population was food insecure, and every 10th child was stunted by malnutrition. The aim was to induce long-term food poverty, effectively putting the population on a starvation diet.
Israel’s repeated attacks on Gaza over the past 15 years – what Israel calls “mowing the grass” – destroyed many of its homes and much of the infrastructure, creating ever greater overcrowding and unsanitary conditions.
Israel’s repeated bombing of Gaza’s only power station, and its chokehold on supplying additional energy, limited electricity to a few hours a day.
The Israeli siege blocked medicines and medical equipment from entering the enclave, often making serious health conditions difficult or impossible to treat. And given the Israeli-imposed restrictions of goods in and out of Gaza, the economy was already in ruins, with nearly half the population unemployed.
Long ago, back in 2016, the head of Israeli military intelligence, Herzi Halevi, warned that the catastrophe Israel was engineering in Gaza could blow up in its face – as indeed it did on 7 October.
Israel’s three-month rampage has simply accelerated and intensified all the genocidal policies that had long been established. Hamas’s break-out simply gave Israel licence to take the gloves off.
This is why the UN’s head of humanitarian affairs, Martin Griffiths, declared last week that Gaza had reached the point where it was indeed “uninhabitable”.
He added: “People are facing the highest levels of food insecurity ever recorded. Famine is around the corner.”
With the vast majority of the population homeless and most hospitals no longer functioning, infectious disease was spreading.
Israel’s “complete siege” policy meant aid could not get in. According to Griffiths, Israel had destroyed roads, blocked communication systems, and was shooting at UN trucks and killing aid workers.
Returning from a visit to the border crossing with Egypt, two US senators observed at the weekend that Israel had imposed unreasonable conditions creating endless delays that prevented aid from reaching the people of Gaza.
In other words, Israel has now successfully “created conditions that don’t allow the survival of the population”.
The aim of the 1948 Genocide Convention, drafted in the immediate wake of the Second World War and the Nazi Holocaust, was not simply to punish those who carry out genocides.
It was designed to help identify a genocide in its early stages, and create a mechanism – through the rulings of the International Court of Justice – by which it could be halted.
In other words, the purpose of South Africa’s case is not to arbitrate what happens once Israel has annihilated the Palestinians of Gaza, as far too many observers appear to imagine. It is to stop Israel from annihilating the people of Gaza before it is too late.
Based on strange logic, Israel’s supporters imply that the genocide charge is unwarranted because the real aim is not to exterminate the Palestinians of Gaza but to induce them to flee.
Israeli leaders have encouraged this assumption. In an interview on Sunday, the national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, noted of Gaza’s population that – after being bombed, made homeless, starved and left vulnerable to disease – “hundreds of thousands will leave now”. Duplicitiously, he termed this a “voluntary” mass emigration.
But such an outcome – itself a crime against humanity – entirely depends on Egypt opening its borders to allow Palestinians to flee the killing fields. If Cairo refuses to submit to Israel’s violent blackmail, it will be Israel’s bombs, the famine it inflicted, and the lethal diseases it unleashed that decimate Gaza’s population.
The International Court of Justice must not adopt a wait-and-see approach, pondering whether Israel’s bombing campaign and siege lead to extermination or “only” ethnic cleansing. That would strip international humanitarian law of all relevance.
If Israel and its western allies fail to bludgeon the court into submission, and South Africa’s case is accepted, it will not only be Israel in legal difficulties.
A genocide ruling from the court will impose obligations on other states: both to refuse to assist in Israel’s genocide, such as by providing arms and diplomatic cover, and to sanction Israel should it fail to comply.
An interim order halting Israel’s attack will serve as a line in the sand. Once made, any state that fails to act on the injunction risks becoming complicit in genocide.
That will put the West in a serious legal bind. After all, it has not just been turning a blind eye to the genocide in Gaza; it has been actively cheering it on and colluding in it.
Leaders in the UK such as Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and opposition leader Keir Starmer have steadfastly opposed a ceasefire and thrown their weight behind a central pillar of Israel’s genocidal policy: the “complete siege” of Gaza that has left the population starving and facing lethal epidemics.
The British and US governments have rejected all calls to stop the flow of arms. The Biden administration has even bypassed Congress to speed up the supply of weapons to Israel, including indiscriminate “dumb” bombs that are laying waste to civilian areas.
Israel’s ambassador to the UK, Tzipi Hotovely, has regularly been featured by British media making genocidal statements. Just last week, when an interviewer noted that she appeared to be calling for the destruction of the whole of Gaza – every school, mosque and home – she answered: “Do you have another solution?”
British and US media have given airtime to Israeli officials who openly incite genocide.
All that would have to stop immediately after a ruling. The police in western nations would be expected to investigate and the courts prosecute those inciting genocide or providing a platform for incitement.
States would be expected to deny Israel weapons and impose economic sanctions on Israel – as well as on any states that collude in the genocide.
Israeli officials would risk arrest for travelling to western countries.
In practice, of course, none of that is likely to happen. Israel is far too important to the West – as a projection of its power into the oil-rich Middle East – to be sacrificed.
Any effort to enforce a genocide ruling through the UN Security Council will be blocked by the Biden administration.
Meanwhile, the UK, along with Canada, Germany, Denmark, France and the Netherlands, have already demonstrated how unabashed they are about their own double standards.
Weeks ago they submitted formal arguments to the International Court of Justice that Myanmar was committing genocide against the Rohingya ethnic group. Their central argument was that the Rohingya were being subjected “to a subsistence diet, systematic expulsion from homes, and the induction of essential medical services below minimum requirement”.
But none of these western states is backing South Africa’s genocide submission to the same court – even though conditions in Gaza engineered by Israel are even worse.
The truth is that a genocide ruling by the court will open up a can of worms for the West, and its readiness to accept that the provisions of international law apply to it too.
Israel has been at the forefront of efforts to unravel international law in Gaza for more than a decade. Now it is ostentatiously flaunting its perpetration of the crime of genocide, as if daring the world to stop it.
Perversely, it is reversing the very international safeguards put in place to stop a repeat of the Nazi Holocaust.
Will the West defy Israel or the court? The post-war consensus that serves as the foundation for international law – already shaken by the failure to address the West’s war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan – is on the verge of complete collapse.
And no one will be happier with that outcome than the state of Israel.
• First published in Middle East Eye
The post The West will Stand in the Dock Alongside Israel at the Genocide Court first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
The International Court of Justice. Photo credit: ICJ
On January 11th, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague is holding its first hearing in South Africa’s case against Israel under the Genocide Convention. The first provisional measure South Africa has asked of the court is to order an immediate end to this carnage, which has already killed more than 23,000 people, most of them women and children. Israel is trying to bomb Gaza into oblivion and scatter the terrorized survivors across the Earth, meeting the Convention’s definition of genocide to the letter.
Since countries engaged in genocide do not publicly declare their real goal, the greatest legal hurdle for any genocide prosecution is to prove the intention of genocide. But in the extraordinary case of Israel, whose cult of biblically ordained entitlement is backed to the hilt by unconditional U.S. complicity, its leaders have been uniquely brazen about their goal of destroying Gaza as a haven of Palestinian life, culture and resistance.
South Africa’s 84-page application to the ICJ includes ten pages (starting on page 59) of statements by Israeli civilian and military officials that document their genocidal intentions in Gaza. They include statements by Prime Minister Netanyahu, President Herzog, Defense Minister Gallant, five other cabinet ministers, senior military officers and members of parliament. Reading these statements, it is hard to see how a fair and impartial court could fail to recognize the genocidal intent behind the death and devastation Israeli forces and American weapons are wreaking in Gaza.
The Israeli magazine +972 talked to seven current and former Israeli intelligence officials involved in previous assaults on Gaza. They explained the systematic nature of Israel’s targeting practices and how the range of civilian infrastructure that Israel is targeting has been vastly expanded in the current onslaught. In particular, it has expanded the bombing of civilian infrastructure, or what it euphemistically defines as “power targets,” which have comprised half of its targets from the outset of this war.
Israel’s “power targets” in Gaza include public buildings like hospitals, schools, banks, government offices, and high-rise apartment blocks. The public pretext for destroying Gaza’s civilian infrastructure is that civilians will blame Hamas for its destruction, and that this will undermine its civilian base of support. This kind of brutal logic has been proved wrong in U.S.-backed conflicts all over the world. In Gaza, it is no more than a grotesque fantasy. The Palestinians understand perfectly well who is bombing them – and who is supplying the bombs.
Intelligence officials told +972 that Israel maintains extensive occupancy figures for every building in Gaza, and has precise estimates of how many civilians will be killed in each building it bombs. While Israeli and U.S. officials publicly disparage Palestinian casualty figures, intelligence sources told +972 that the Palestinian death counts are remarkably consistent with Israel’s own estimates of how many civilians it is killing. To make matters worse, Israel has started using artificial intelligence to generate targets with minimal human scrutiny, and is doing so faster than its forces can bomb them.
Israeli officials claim that each of the high-rise apartment buildings it bombs contains some kind of Hamas presence, but an intelligence official explained, “Hamas is everywhere in Gaza; there is no building that does not have something of Hamas in it, so if you want to find a way to turn a high-rise into a target, you will be able to do so.” As Yuval Abraham of +972 summarized, “The sources understood, some explicitly and some implicitly, that damage to civilians is the real purpose of these attacks.”
Two days after South Africa submitted its Genocide Convention application to the ICJ, Israeli Finance Minister Smotrich declared on New Year’s Eve that Israel should substantially empty the Gaza Strip of Palestinians and bring in Israeli settlers. “If we act in a strategically correct way and encourage emigration,” Smotrich said, “if there are 100,000 or 200,000 Arabs in Gaza, and not two million, the whole discourse on “the day after” will be completely different.”
When reporters confronted U.S. State Department spokesman Matt Miller about Smotrich’s statement, and similar ones by National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, Miller replied that Prime Minister Netanyahu and other Israeli officials have reassured the United States that those statements don’t reflect Israeli government policy.
But Smotrich and Ben-Gvir’s statements followed a meeting of Likud Party leaders on Christmas Day where Netanyahu himself said that his plan was to continue the massacre until the people of Gaza have no choice but to leave or to die. “Regarding voluntary emigration, I have no problem with that,” he told former Israeli UN Ambassador Danny Danon. “Our problem is not allowing the exit, but a lack of countries that are ready to take Palestinians in. And we are working on it. This is the direction we are going in.”
We should have learned from America’s lost wars that mass murder and ethnic cleansing rarely lead to political victory or success. More often they only feed deep resentment and desires for justice or revenge that make peace more elusive and conflict endemic.
Although most of the martyrs in Gaza are women and children, Israel and the United States politically justify the massacre as a campaign to destroy Hamas by killing its senior leaders. Andrew Cockburn described in his book Kill Chain: the Rise of the High-Tech Assassins how, in 200 cases studied by U.S. military intelligence, the U.S. campaign to assassinate Iraqi resistance leaders in 2007 led in every single case to increased attacks on U.S. occupation forces. Every resistance leader they killed was replaced within 48 hours, invariably by new, more aggressive leaders determined to prove themselves by killing even more U.S. troops.
But that is just another unlearned lesson, as Israel and the United States kill Islamic Resistance leaders in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen and Iran, risking a regional war and leaving themselves more isolated than ever.
If the ICJ issues a provisional order for a ceasefire in Gaza, humanity must seize the moment to insist that Israel and the United States must finally end this genocide and accept that the rule of international law applies to all nations, including themselves.
The post A Chance to Hold Israel and the US to Account for Genocide first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on Jan. 11, 2024. It is shared here with permission under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.
South African representatives argued before the International Court of Justice on Thursday that Israel is engaged in a genocidal assault on the Gaza Strip, subjecting the enclave to “merciless” bombing with the clear intent to wipe out the Palestinian population.
“They have deplored anyone feeling sorry for the uninvolved Gazans, asserting repeatedly that there are no uninvolved, that there are no innocents in Gaza, that the killers of the women and the children should not be separated from the citizens of Gaza, and that the children of Gaza have brought this upon themselves,” South African attorney Tembeka Ngcukaitobi said during his presentation.
Thursday’s hearing also featured remarks from South African Justice Minister Ronald Lamola, South African Ambassador to the Netherlands Vusimuzi Madonsela, lawyer Adila Hassim, and international law professor John Dugard, each of whom laid out an aspect of South Africa’s case against the Israeli government.
Hassim argued that Israel’s “first genocidal act” is the “mass killing of Palestinians in Gaza,” pointing to the U.S.-armed military’s use of 2,000-pound bombs in southern Gaza—the region to which Israeli forces ordered Gazans to move earlier in the war.
“No one is spared. Not even newborns,” said Hassim, displaying photos of mass graves in the Gaza Strip. “U.N. chiefs have described it as a graveyard for children.”
“Israel has forced—forced—the displacement of about 85% of Palestinians in Gaza. There is nowhere safe for them to flee to.”
Hassim made the case that Israel is guilty of violating articles 2a, 2b, 2c, and 2d of the Genocide Convention, which defines genocide as harm inflicted “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group.”
“Israel has deliberately imposed conditions on Gaza that cannot sustain life and are calculated to bring about its physical destruction,” said Hassim. “Israel has forced—forced—the displacement of about 85% of Palestinians in Gaza. There is nowhere safe for them to flee to.”
South Africa’s presenters sought to demonstrate genocidal intent in part by directly quoting high-ranking Israeli officials, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Ngcukaitobi pointed to Netanyahu’s repeated invocation of biblical passages to paint Gazans as modern-day Amalekites.
The attorney also played footage of Israeli soldiers chanting that they will “wipe off the seed of Amalek” and that there are “no uninvolved civilians” in Gaza.
“Israel’s political leaders, military commanders, and persons holding official positions have systematically and in explicit terms declared their genocidal intent,” said Ngcukaitobi. “These statements are then repeated by soldiers on the ground in Gaza as they engage in the destruction of Palestinians and the physical infrastructure of Gaza.”
South Africa’s legal team decided against sharing highly graphic videos and photos during its presentations, saying it did not want to turn the court’s proceedings “into a theatre for spectacle.”
“South Africa’s application in this court today is built on a foundation of clear legal rights, not images,” the legal team said Thursday.
South Africa is asking the ICJ to adopt “provisional measures” to halt Israel’s mass killing and displacement of Gazans, many of whom are starving and being stalked by disease.
Israel is set to offer its counter to South Africa’s case on Friday, which will mark the first time Israel has defended itself in person at the United Nations’ highest court.
In the days ahead of the ICJ’s public hearings, Israeli officials pressured governments around the world to publicly denounce South Africa’s case. The United States, Israel’s top ally and leading arms supplier, has dismissed South Africa’s arguments as “meritless.”
But a growing number of national governments are backing South Africa, including Brazil, Malaysia, Bolivia, and Pakistan. South Africa’s ICJ effort has also drawn massive support from grassroots organizations across the globe.
“Israel’s killing, injuring, traumatizing, and displacing large numbers of Palestinians and denying water, food, medicine, and fuel to an occupied population meet the criteria for the crime of genocide,” reads an open letter signed by more than 1,000 unions, popular movements, and other groups. “If a majority of the world’s nations call for a cease-fire, yet fail to press for prosecution of Israel—what is to stop Israel from ethnically cleansing all Palestinians?”
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
South African representatives argued before the International Court of Justice on Thursday that Israel is engaged in a genocidal assault on the Gaza Strip, subjecting the enclave to “merciless” bombing with the clear intent to wipe out the Palestinian population. “They have deplored anyone feeling sorry for the uninvolved Gazans, asserting repeatedly that there are no uninvolved, that there are no…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Member of the Knesset Ofer Cassif is being targeted for removal from the legislative body Monday a day after the Israeli lawmaker said he would back South Africa’s genocide case at the International Court of Justice. In his Sunday statement, Cassif declared, “My constitutional duty is to Israeli society and all its residents, not to a government whose members and its coalition are calling for…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
If the International Court of Justice rules that Israel has committed, and is committing, genocide, will it save Gaza? On January 11-12 the ICJ (AKA the World Court) will hear the petition brought to it by South Africa. Specialists in International law Francis Boyle and (independently) Daniel Machover firmly believe that this is how the ICJ will rule, and that it will invoke the requirement that all 152 countries belonging to the genocide convention – including Israel and the US – must comply by desisting (in the case of Israel) and stopping all contact and services that enable Israel to commit the crime (in the case of the US and all other parties to the convention).
Such a judgment would require Israel to comply with the cessation of very specific terms regarding the offending actions and policies, and with positive remedial actions and reparations to the damage already done, such as provision of food, medicine, shelter, fuel and other requirements of survival that Israel has taken from the population of Gaza. The judgment is also binding on all nations that enable the genocidal actions, such as (and especially) the US. Furthermore, all leaders and individuals who participated in genocidal actions and policies, as well as those who aid and abet, are prosecutable under the Genocide Convention.
A lot of hope is being placed in the ruling of the ICJ. But even if the decision is, as expected, a powerful one, the only enforcement mechanism is the agreement of the parties to the convention that they will take all necessary actions to end the culpable actions and prosecute the perpetrators.
Will Israel comply with the court’s decision? Will the US? Neither nation has much respect for international law, so we may assume that neither country will do anything but denounce the ICJ and South Africa as antisemitic and offer angry excuses for refusing to comply with the convention to which they both agreed. Nevertheless, the ruling may be effective in ending the genocide, in other ways, as follows:
1. The South African complaint contains massive amounts of evidence, the most damning of which have not been widely reported by the western mainstream press, which is sympathetic and/or beholden to Israel. The publicity surrounding the court case will help to expose these facts and bring them to the attention of a wider audience.
2. Legislators and policy makers that have thus far followed the dictates of the powerful Israel Lobby may detect weakness in Israel’s position, and simultaneously their own vulnerability before their constituents if they do not back the ICJ ruling, challenging the “special relationship” between Israel, the US and other NATO countries.
3. There will be great public agitation to hold Israel accountable. Demonstrations will become larger and more widespread. Calls and letters to legislators and other public officials will increase in number and frequency.
4. Tainted by the ICJ decision, the Biden administration and the Democratic Party will feel increasingly threatened by loss of seats and power in the 2024 elections. Already, seventeen staffers of Biden’s reelection committee have published a letter, calling on him to use US power to create a ceasefire now in Gaza or face disastrous consequences in the November elections.
5. In the face of an ICJ conviction of Israel, nations that have until now not taken a strong position will feel empowered to respect their obligations under the convention, and engage more fully in a concerted effort to pressure Israel through sanctions and diplomatic measures. China, Russia, India and the Arab monarchies, in particular, may find it untenable to maintain normal relations, and will participate in a growing consensus to compel Israel to end the genocide.
I did not include in the above points any consequences from within Israel itself, whether at the political or popular level. This is because I do not expect that an ICJ conviction per se will cause a change. The Israeli government, armed forces and even the population have become so radicalized and bloodthirsty that only practical measures such as suspension of arms deliveries, economic aid and loss of markets for Israeli products and services (mainly military in character) are capable of effecting a halt to Israeli determination to continue the genocide to its conclusion.
But the results that I describe above are by no means certain. They are only the best case that we can realistically hope for. They depend upon principled actions in great numbers around the globe, and we don’t even know if that will be enough, only that it will not happen without such action.
Furthermore, the most that the ICJ ruling is likely to produce in the short run is an indefinite (but not necessarily permanent) ceasefire and humanitarian aid to the Gaza population. There is increasing discussion in Israel, the US and the UN about what Gaza will look like after the fighting ends. As usual, the voices of the people in Gaza and the rest of Palestine will be disregarded. Israel wants the population to disappear, but its fallback position is to eliminate Hamas, install a compliant puppet government and return to a sealed concentration camp that will impoverish and crush the hopes of the people.
The US and Europe will undoubtedly accept this “solution”, after halfheartedly arguing for better economic opportunity and more freedom. But it is totally unrealistic, because the Palestinians themselves will never accept the status quo ante. Neither is it feasible to eliminate Hamas, because its goals and methods will remain with unlimited replacements for the leaders, fighters and adherents. You can’t kill an idea. Any solution that denies them the freedom enjoyed by all countries, to travel to and trade directly with other nations and to provide for their own defense, among other normal rights of nations, will most definitely be rejected. They expect and will demand these rights, and reparations as well, for the crimes committed against them.
Some have suggested a comprehensive Palestinian-Israeli agreement that finally creates two states, which has eluded negotiators for many decades. But there is no reason to suppose this will be any more achievable now than with the Oslo Agreement. The Israelis will readily agree to such negotiations, with the interim solution being a return to the Palestinian concentration camp, with continuing encroachment by Israeli settlements. israel loves endless negotiations that go nowhere, but the Palestinians are not fools. They will never accept it, even if the puppet Palestinian Authority does.
Even if the fanciful possibility of a two-state solution is achieved, with a Palestinian state alongside an Israeli one, the problem will not end. How and why did the genocide come about in the first place? The answer is simple: it’s because genocide is at the core of the Zionist objective: a Jewish state. Such a state must be founded on genocide, because it is impossible to create or maintain it without removing or eliminating most or all of the non-Jews. Since the founding of the Zionist movement in the 19th century, this has been a foundational principle, set forth in its formative documents.
That principle is not going to go away with the creation of two states. In the ideology of Zionism, two states would be a temporary accommodation on the road to its mission. If there are two states, the Jewish one will continue to repress and expel its 20% Palestinian minority in order to prevent it from becoming too large, which many Israelis think it already is. It will still have plans to retake Sinai, south Lebanon, the East Bank, and of course the West Bank and Gaza, and to use forms of genocide in all of the territory that it controls.
Legal scholar Daniel Machover, who predicts and sees the need for an ICJ ruling of genocide against Israel, nevertheless fails to see this source of the problem. He insists on preserving the existence of a racist Zionist state that will ultimately destroy the two-state solution that he foresees. So do many other shortsighted scholars, analysts and politicians.
But don’t worry. The two-state “solution” will never see the light of day. Palestinians will insist on the same rights and privileges as all persons in all countries, as embodied in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. and they will continue to resist until they get them. The only workable alternative to annihilation of one side by the other is most likely the South African model of a single state with equal rights for all, in which case the destructive, self-destructive, racist and supremacist ideology of Zionism will vanish into the dustbin of history.
The post The World Court: A Glimmer of Hope and a Cloud of Doubt first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
The Israeli government has mounted a pressure campaign urging governments around the world to publicly denounce South Africa’s genocide case at the International Court of Justice, which is set to convene hearings on the detailed charges on Thursday. According to a cable obtained by Axios, the Israeli Foreign Ministry is calling on the country’s embassies to pressure host country diplomats and…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
COMMENTARY: By John Minto
Two years ago New Zealand joined 22 other countries in supporting the Ukrainian case against Russia at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) for its invasion of Ukraine.
We sent a legal team to The Hague where the ICJ is based and our representatives spoke directly to the court on New Zealand’s behalf. We used international law to argue the Russian invasion was illegal and warranted sanction by the ICJ.
Successive New Zealand governments for as long as I can remember have said we believe in an “international rules-based order” of which the ICJ and the ICC are an important part.
This makes sense because we are a small country without the economic or military clout to take unilateral action to protect our interests. Like other small countries we rely on international rules to provide a measure of protection when bigger countries, like Russia in this case, break the rules.
We have used such rules ourselves by making applications to the World Trade Organisation (WTO) when our trade interests have been threatened. Without such rules the biggest bully will win every time.
Last week South Africa filed papers at the ICJ alleging Israel’s actions in Gaza over the past 12 weeks amount to genocide.
South Africa said it “is gravely concerned with the plight of civilians caught in the present Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip due to the indiscriminate use of force and forcible removal of inhabitants”.
It described its case saying “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 ethnical group”.
Their court papers go on to claim that, “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”.
This case is important because Israel, the Palestinian Authority (PA), and South Africa are all signatories of the Genocide Convention and are bound to abide by any decision made by the court.
The most important part of South Africa’s case is its application for an interim injunction to stop Israel’s indiscriminate killing immediately. If this interim injunction is successful it could put in place an immediate ceasefire to end the war and Israel’s indiscriminate killing of Palestinians.
It would allow unfettered humanitarian aid to enter Gaza where the need for food, water, fuel, medicine and vaccinations is desperate.
This is the outcome the majority of people in New Zealand, and across the world, want to see. New Zealand should back up the South African case which is most likely to get a first hearing on January 11.
Those who have been paying attention will not be surprised at claims of genocide.
Genocide always begins with words and there is a wealth of reporting on the dehumanising language being used by Israel’s political and military leaders to set the scene for what has followed.
For example, Israel’s President Isaac Herzog said “it is an entire nation out there that is responsible”, and two days after the attack Israeli Minister of Defence Yoav Gallant spelt out genocidal intentions saying:
“We are imposing a complete siege on Gaza. No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything is closed. We are fighting human animals, and we will act accordingly.”
Israelis more generally have taken up this talk across social media with calls for Gaza to be “flattened,” “erased” or “destroyed”. More tragic is a social media post showing Israeli children singing “we will annihilate everyone” in Gaza.
Israel’s Defence Minister’s statement matches the UN Convention closely to the point where Israeli scholar of the Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Raz Segal, has described Israel’s rhetoric and actions as “a textbook case of genocide”.
It is clear Israel’s political and military leaders have a case to answer before the International Court of Justice, just as Russia does for its invasion of Ukraine.
South Africa has filed a case at the International Court of Justice in the Hague, accusing Israel of committing genocide in Gaza. International law expert Francis Boyle, who has argued successfully at the ICJ, says he believes “South Africa will win an order against Israel.” pic.twitter.com/4Ebz02vxVc
— Democracy Now! (@democracynow) January 2, 2024
As well as backing South Africa’s case at the International Court of Justice we should also call for a swift, well-resourced International Criminal Court investigation into war crimes committed in the October 7 attack on Israel and the Israeli response.
This investigation should include examining the crimes of genocide and apartheid.
Palestinians deserve our support as much as the people of Ukraine.
John Minto is the national chair of the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) and a contributor to Asia Pacific Report. This article was first published by The Post and is republished with the author’s permission.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
COMMENTARY: By John Minto
Two years ago New Zealand joined 22 other countries in supporting the Ukrainian case against Russia at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) for its invasion of Ukraine.
We sent a legal team to The Hague where the ICJ is based and our representatives spoke directly to the court on New Zealand’s behalf. We used international law to argue the Russian invasion was illegal and warranted sanction by the ICJ.
Successive New Zealand governments for as long as I can remember have said we believe in an “international rules-based order” of which the ICJ and the ICC are an important part.
This makes sense because we are a small country without the economic or military clout to take unilateral action to protect our interests. Like other small countries we rely on international rules to provide a measure of protection when bigger countries, like Russia in this case, break the rules.
We have used such rules ourselves by making applications to the World Trade Organisation (WTO) when our trade interests have been threatened. Without such rules the biggest bully will win every time.
Last week South Africa filed papers at the ICJ alleging Israel’s actions in Gaza over the past 12 weeks amount to genocide.
South Africa said it “is gravely concerned with the plight of civilians caught in the present Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip due to the indiscriminate use of force and forcible removal of inhabitants”.
It described its case saying “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 ethnical group”.
Their court papers go on to claim that, “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”.
This case is important because Israel, the Palestinian Authority (PA), and South Africa are all signatories of the Genocide Convention and are bound to abide by any decision made by the court.
The most important part of South Africa’s case is its application for an interim injunction to stop Israel’s indiscriminate killing immediately. If this interim injunction is successful it could put in place an immediate ceasefire to end the war and Israel’s indiscriminate killing of Palestinians.
It would allow unfettered humanitarian aid to enter Gaza where the need for food, water, fuel, medicine and vaccinations is desperate.
This is the outcome the majority of people in New Zealand, and across the world, want to see. New Zealand should back up the South African case which is most likely to get a first hearing on January 11.
Those who have been paying attention will not be surprised at claims of genocide.
Genocide always begins with words and there is a wealth of reporting on the dehumanising language being used by Israel’s political and military leaders to set the scene for what has followed.
For example, Israel’s President Isaac Herzog said “it is an entire nation out there that is responsible”, and two days after the attack Israeli Minister of Defence Yoav Gallant spelt out genocidal intentions saying:
“We are imposing a complete siege on Gaza. No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything is closed. We are fighting human animals, and we will act accordingly.”
Israelis more generally have taken up this talk across social media with calls for Gaza to be “flattened,” “erased” or “destroyed”. More tragic is a social media post showing Israeli children singing “we will annihilate everyone” in Gaza.
Israel’s Defence Minister’s statement matches the UN Convention closely to the point where Israeli scholar of the Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Raz Segal, has described Israel’s rhetoric and actions as “a textbook case of genocide”.
It is clear Israel’s political and military leaders have a case to answer before the International Court of Justice, just as Russia does for its invasion of Ukraine.
South Africa has filed a case at the International Court of Justice in the Hague, accusing Israel of committing genocide in Gaza. International law expert Francis Boyle, who has argued successfully at the ICJ, says he believes “South Africa will win an order against Israel.” pic.twitter.com/4Ebz02vxVc
— Democracy Now! (@democracynow) January 2, 2024
As well as backing South Africa’s case at the International Court of Justice we should also call for a swift, well-resourced International Criminal Court investigation into war crimes committed in the October 7 attack on Israel and the Israeli response.
This investigation should include examining the crimes of genocide and apartheid.
Palestinians deserve our support as much as the people of Ukraine.
John Minto is the national chair of the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) and a contributor to Asia Pacific Report. This article was first published by The Post and is republished with the author’s permission.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
Peace activists across the country have embarked on a campaign to mobilize global support for South Africa’s charge of genocide against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ). The campaign, spearheaded by CODEPINK, World Beyond War, and RootsAction, aims to rally nations to submit a “Declaration of Intervention” supporting South Africa’s case at the ICJ. The focus is on holding Israel accountable for alleged genocide in Gaza and putting an end to the tragic suffering of an imprisoned population. Delegations from major cities engaged with U.N. missions, embassies, and consulates worldwide, urging countries to invoke the Genocide Convention at the United Nations’ judicial arm.
The campaign started two weeks ago with an open call for people to join in a petition and letter-writing campaign urging countries to invoke the genocide convention and charge Israel with genocide in the International Court of Justice. Since then, over 30,000 people signed the petition, accompanied by an impressive 118,290 letters sent to various countries urging support of the cause.
The nationwide delegations of “grassroots diplomats” took on this campaign because officially appointed U.S. diplomats continue to insist on supporting Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, rejecting the sentiments of a majority of people in the U.S. and around the world who want a ceasefire and an end to the slaughter.
White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby calls South Africa’s 84-page suit accusing Israel of genocide “meritless, counterproductive, and completely without any basis in fact whatsoever.” Notably, the United States supported Ukraine invoking the Genocide Convention last year in the International Court of Justice with far less evidence.
In the first week of January, delegations of grassroots diplomats embarked on a petition and letter delivery campaign across the United States, urging missions, consulates, and embassies to support South Africa’s legal action against Israel in the International Court of Justice (ICJ) under the U.N. Convention on Genocide. While the visits and deliveries varied from city to city, the overall reception by staff and representatives in each U.N. Mission, Embassy, and Consulate was encouraging and supportive, with some delegations able to meet directly with country representatives.
The NYC delegation visited around 30 U.N. missions, engaging in significant diplomatic efforts. They had a positive meeting with Colombia’s U.N. Ambassador, Arlene Tickner, exploring the potential for a Declaration of Intervention to support South Africa’s legal action. Another meeting took place with the Deputy Permanent Representative of Pakistan to the U.N. At the Bolivia Mission, the delegation received a warm reception, providing a letter and petition. A productive meeting occurred with the Bangladesh U.N. Consul, who expressed interest in connecting with legal experts. The NYC team met African Union diplomats who offered support and suggested additional efforts for South Africa. A meeting at the South Africa Mission involved discussions with the counselor and Deputy Permanent Representative. The delegation expressed their gratitude and support to the South African government. The South African representative acknowledged and appreciated the delegation’s work in their peace work.
The D.C. team engaged in diplomatic efforts, meeting with the Deputy Minister at the Colombian Embassy to encourage the Colombian government’s continued stance against Israeli actions and to join South Africa’s case. They visited and submitted their petition to the Ghanaian, Chilean, and Ethiopian Embassies, urging support for South Africa’s case against Israel. The team also had discussions with the Bolivian Embassy. Currently, they are arranging a meeting with the Turkish ambassador to further their diplomatic initiatives.
Three delegations from Miami divided their efforts to visit ten consulates, including those of Belize, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Denmark, France, Honduras, Ireland, Spain, and Turkey. The delegations had the opportunity to meet with consular generals from Bolivia, Honduras, and Turkey, all notably welcoming and receptive. In addition, the Miami team reached out to the Turkish ambassador in Washington, D.C., further extending their diplomatic efforts. The Türkiye Consulate in Miami emphasized the visit on their social media platform, underscoring the significance of the engagement.
The Tampa team focused on a single visit to the Greek Consulate, accompanied by a representative from CAIR Florida, based in Tampa. CAIR is a nationwide federation of legally independent chapters dedicated to safeguarding the civil liberties of Americans. The Greek Consulate warmly received the delegation, expressing appreciation for a gift of olive oil. Furthermore, they assured the team they would forward the petition and letter to the Embassy of Greece in Washington, D.C., indicating a positive reception and willingness to address the delegation’s concerns.
Orlando engaged with five consulates representing Mexico, Italy, Brazil, Haiti, and Colombia. The meeting at the Haitian Consulate was mainly positive, with a productive discussion with an Assistant Consul urging support for South Africa’s case against Israel. Similarly, the delegation met with the Vice Consular of Colombia, delivered a petition, and urged their support for South Africa’s case against Israel, indicating a proactive approach in advancing their diplomatic efforts.
In Houston, the delegation reported successful engagements during their visits. They met with the Consulate of Belize staff and spoke with Consulate General Francisco Leal of Chile. The Honduran consulate staff extended kindness during their visit. The delegations also visited the Pakistan consulate as part of their diplomatic efforts.
The San Francisco delegation visited three consulates – Chile, Brazil, and Colombia. They engaged with the staff at the Chilean and Brazilian consulates, delivering the petition and letter at the Colombian Consulate, situated in the same building as the Israeli Consulate. Security at the building instructed the delegation to wait outside for a representative. However, the doors were subsequently locked, preventing entry. In response, the delegation affixed the petition and letter to the building’s door to convey their message.
The delegation in Los Angeles visited nine foreign consulates in the city, including Belize, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Turkey, Chile, Colombia, and Kuwait. The delegation expressed gratitude to the staff at the South African Consulate for South Africa’s filing in the ICJ that charges Israel with genocide. As a goodwill gesture, the activists brought flowers, a simple yet well-received token of peace and unity. They also had an encouraging meeting with Bolivian Consulate Gabriella Silva, who supported the delegation’s effort.
Delegations from Detroit, Chicago, Boston, and San Antonio also made visits to their local Consulates. Prior to deliveries, Turkey, Malaysia, and Slovakia publicly came out in support of South Africa’s filing. Since then, Jordan announced that they will file a “Declaration of Intervention” supporting South Africa’s case.
This grassroots diplomatic effort represents a unified plea for justice, demanding global solidarity against Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. The tireless advocacy seeks to bridge nations in support of South Africa’s pursuit of justice in the International Court of Justice.
Deliveries will continue into the first of next week with the hopes of engaging with as many missions, consulates, and embassies as possible before the start of the ICJ hearing on Jan. 11.
The oral argument of South Africa will take place on Thursday 11th January 2024 and Israel’s oral argument on Friday 12th January 2024. The hearings will be streamed live and on demand on the ICJ’s Website and on the UN Web TV.
The oral argument of South Africa will take place on Thursday 11th January 2024 and Israel’s oral argument on Friday 12th January 2024. The hearings will be streamed live and on demand on the ICJ’s Website and on the UN Web TV.
The post Coalition of “Grassroots Diplomats” Take the Lead on International Solidarity with South Africa in the Absence of Diplomacy and Accountability from U.S. Officials first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
South Africa has filed a case at the main judicial body for the United Nations, the International Court of Justice in The Hague, accusing Israel of committing genocide in Gaza. “I believe South Africa will win an order against Israel to cease and desist from committing all acts of genocide against the Palestinians,” says Francis Boyle, an international human rights lawyer who won two requests at…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
“No one knows apartheid like those who fought it before,” said one Palestinian rights advocate on Friday in response to the news that South Africa has taken a “historic” new step to hold Israel accountable for its relentless bombardment and violent yearslong occupation of Gaza — calling on the International Court of Justice to declare that Israel has breached its obligations under the Genocide…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
On the morning of November 10, a small group of South African activists shut down the main entrance to Paramount Group, the African continent’s largest arms trader, located in Gauteng, about 20 minutes north of Johannesburg. Chants of “free, free, Palestine” and “shut down Paramount, no arms to apartheid” rang out in front of the sprawling factory in a quiet suburb in Midrand…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
By Rodney Duthie of The Fiji Times
Flying Fijians head coach Simon Raiwalui says facing England in the Rugby World Cup quarter-finals will be different from when they met last month in Twickenham.
The match in London saw Fiji topple the tier one nation 30-22 for the first time, two weeks away from the World Cup and was described as one of the lowest moments in English rugby history.
The two sides will face-off at Stade de Marseille in a week’s time at 3am.
“They [England] play rugby to win. They’re very talented. They’ll put a lot of pressure on us at set-piece time as well,” Raiwalui said.
“Tactically, they’ll look to take advantage of some of the things we’ve been doing, so they’re a very good team. It’s going to be a big challenge.”
He said he expected England to change their game a little bit.
“It’s a totally different match [to when Fiji beat England in August], playing a different team. There will be aspects of how they play that are similar but they will bring new stuff as well.
“It’s about us being efficient and doing the things we do well and giving ourselves the best chance to compete.
“We’ve played the team, the boys are comfortable. It’s not the first time, so I think it will be a good match.”
Pacific RWC results
Fiji just scraped into the quarter-finals losing to Portugal 24-23 in their final and deciding pool match in Toulouse on Monday morning.
Other quarter-finals will see Wales battle Argentina in Marseille on Sunday morning, before Ireland and New Zealand clash in Saint Denis the same day.
The fourth semi-final will be between France and South Africa in Saint Denis on Monday morning.
Samoa are out of the World Cup after Sunday’s 18-17 defeat to England and Tonga also had an early exit after ‘Ikale Tahi scored seven tries for a bonus point 45-24 win in Lille to record their only cup win.
Republished with permission.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
By Rodney Duthie of The Fiji Times
Flying Fijians head coach Simon Raiwalui says facing England in the Rugby World Cup quarter-finals will be different from when they met last month in Twickenham.
The match in London saw Fiji topple the tier one nation 30-22 for the first time, two weeks away from the World Cup and was described as one of the lowest moments in English rugby history.
The two sides will face-off at Stade de Marseille in a week’s time at 3am.
“They [England] play rugby to win. They’re very talented. They’ll put a lot of pressure on us at set-piece time as well,” Raiwalui said.
“Tactically, they’ll look to take advantage of some of the things we’ve been doing, so they’re a very good team. It’s going to be a big challenge.”
He said he expected England to change their game a little bit.
“It’s a totally different match [to when Fiji beat England in August], playing a different team. There will be aspects of how they play that are similar but they will bring new stuff as well.
“It’s about us being efficient and doing the things we do well and giving ourselves the best chance to compete.
“We’ve played the team, the boys are comfortable. It’s not the first time, so I think it will be a good match.”
Pacific RWC results
Fiji just scraped into the quarter-finals losing to Portugal 24-23 in their final and deciding pool match in Toulouse on Monday morning.
Other quarter-finals will see Wales battle Argentina in Marseille on Sunday morning, before Ireland and New Zealand clash in Saint Denis the same day.
The fourth semi-final will be between France and South Africa in Saint Denis on Monday morning.
Samoa are out of the World Cup after Sunday’s 18-17 defeat to England and Tonga also had an early exit after ‘Ikale Tahi scored seven tries for a bonus point 45-24 win in Lille to record their only cup win.
Republished with permission.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
Operation Dudula changes tactics from evictions and violence, with plans to fight elections on platform of expelling foreigners
An anti-migrant vigilante organisation in South Africa has registered as a political party and plans to contest seats in next year’s general elections.
Operation Dudula, whose name means “to force out” in Zulu, wants all foreign nationals who are in the country unofficially to be deported.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
Mourners gather outside 80 Albert Street amid criticisms of government response and lack of support for victims and families
South African authorities were on Friday still searching for clues behind the cause of the most deadly fire in the country’s history, with at least 74 people confirmed to have died and dozens more being treated in hospital.
About 400 people are thought to have lived in informal settlements in the building at 80 Albert Street in central Johannesburg, which relied on illegal electricity connections for power and had no emergency exits. It is owned by the City of Johannesburg.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
Abdel Hadi el-Gazzar (Egypt), The Popular Chorus or Food or Comrades on the Theatre of Life, 1948 (post-dated 1951).
On the last day of the BRICS summit in Johannesburg, South Africa, the five founding states (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) welcomed six new members: Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The BRICS partnership now encompasses 47.3 percent of the world’s population, with a combined global Gross Domestic Product (by purchasing power parity, or PPP,) of 36.4 percent. In comparison, though the G7 states (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States) account for merely 10 percent of the world’s population, their share of the global GDP (by PPP) is 30.4 percent. In 2021, the nations that today form the expanded BRICS group were responsible for 38.3 percent of global industrial output while their G7 counterparts accounted for 30.5 percent. All available indicators, including harvest production and the total volume of metal production, show the immense power of this new grouping. Celso Amorim, advisor to the Brazilian government and one of the architects of BRICS during his former tenure as foreign minister, said of the new development that ‘[t]he world can no longer be dictated by the G7’.
Certainly, the BRICS nations, for all their internal hierarchies and challenges, now represent a larger share of the global GDP than the G7, which continues to behave as the world’s executive body. Over forty countries expressed an interest in joining BRICS, although only twenty-three applied for membership before the South Africa meeting (including seven of the thirteen countries in the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC). Indonesia, the world’s seventh largest country in terms of GDP (by PPP), withdrew its application to BRICS at the last moment but said it would consider joining later. Indonesia’s President Joko Widodo’s comments reflect the mood of the summit: ‘We must reject trade discrimination. Industrial downstreaming must not be hindered. We must all continue to voice equal and inclusive cooperation’.
Tadesse Mesfin (Ethiopia), Pillars of Life: Waiting, 2018
BRICS does not operate independently of new regional formations that aim to build platforms outside the grip of the West, such as the Community of Latin America and Caribbean States (CELAC) and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO). Instead, BRICS membership has the potential to enhance regionalism for those already within these regional fora. Both sets of interregional bodies are leaning into a historical tide supported by important data, analysed by Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research using a range of widely available and reliable global databases. The facts are clear: the Global North’s percentage of world GDP fell from 57.3 percent in 1993 to 40.6 percent in 2022, with the US’s percentage shrinking from 19.7 percent to only 15.6 percent of global GDP (by PPP) in the same period – despite its monopoly privilege. In 2022, the Global South, without China, had a GDP (by PPP) greater than that of the Global North.
The West, perhaps because of its rapid relative economic decline, is struggling to maintain its hegemony by driving a New Cold War against emergent states such as China. Perhaps the single best evidence of the racial, political, military, and economic plans of the Western powers can be summed up by a recent declaration of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and the European Union (EU): ‘NATO and the EU play complementary, coherent and mutually reinforcing roles in supporting international peace and security. We will further mobilise the combined set of instruments at our disposal, be they political, economic, or military, to pursue our common objectives to the benefit of our one billion citizens’.
Alia Ahmad (Saudi Arabia), Hameel – Morning Rain, 2022
Why did BRICS welcome such a disparate group of countries, including two monarchies, into its fold? When asked to reflect on the character of the new full member states, Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said, ‘What matters is not the person who governs but the importance of the country. We can’t deny the geopolitical importance of Iran and other countries that will join BRICS’. This is the measure of how the founding countries made the decision to expand their alliance. At the heart of BRICS’s growth are at least three issues: control over energy supplies and pathways, control over global financial and development systems, and control over institutions for peace and security.
Houshang Pezeshknia (Iran), Khark, 1958
A larger BRICS has now created a formidable energy group. Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE are also members of OPEC, which, with Russia, a key member of OPEC+, now accounts for 26.3 million barrels of oil per day, just below thirty percent of global daily oil production. Egypt, which is not an OPEC member, is nonetheless one of the largest African oil producers, with an output of 567,650 barrels per day. China’s role in brokering a deal between Iran and Saudi Arabia in April enabled the entry of both of these oil-producing countries into BRICS. The issue here is not just the production of oil, but the establishment of new global energy pathways.
The Chinese-led Belt and Road Initiative has already created a web of oil and natural gas platforms around the Global South, integrated into the expansion of Khalifa Port and natural gas facilities at Fujairah and Ruwais in the UAE, alongside the development of Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030. There is every expectation that the expanded BRICS will begin to coordinate its energy infrastructure outside of OPEC+, including the volumes of oil and natural gas that are drawn out of the earth. Tensions between Russia and Saudi Arabia over oil volumes have simmered this year as Russia exceeded its quota to compensate for Western sanctions placed on it due to the war in Ukraine. Now these two countries will have another forum, outside of OPEC+ and with China at the table, to build a common agenda on energy. Saudi Arabia plans to sell oil to China in renminbi (RMB), undermining the structure of the petrodollar system (China’s two other main oil providers, Iraq and Russia, already receive payment in RMB).
Juan Del Prete (Argentina), The Embrace, 1937–1944
Both the discussions at the BRICS summit and its final communiqué focused on the need to strengthen a financial and development architecture for the world that is not governed by the triumvirate of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Wall Street, and the US dollar. However, BRICS does not seek to circumvent established global trade and development institutions such as the World Trade Organisation (WTO), the World Bank, and the IMF. For instance, BRICS reaffirmed the importance of the ‘rules-based multilateral trading system with the World Trade Organisation at its core’ and called for ‘a robust Global Financial Safety Net with a quota-based and adequately resourced [IMF] at its centre’. Its proposals do not fundamentally break with the IMF or WTO; rather, they offer a dual pathway forward: first, for BRICS to exert more control and direction over these organisations, of which they are members but have been suborned to a Western agenda, and second, for BRICS states to realise their aspirations to build their own parallel institutions (such as the New Development Bank, or NDB). Saudi Arabia’s massive investment fund is worth close to $1 trillion, which could partially resource the NDB.
BRICS’s agenda to improve ‘the stability, reliability, and fairness of the global financial architecture’ is mostly being carried forward by the ‘use of local currencies, alternative financial arrangements, and alternative payment systems’. The concept of ‘local currencies’ refers to the growing practice of states using their own currencies for cross-border trade rather than relying upon the dollar. Though approximately 150 currencies in the world are considered to be legal tender, cross-border payments almost always rely on the dollar (which, as of 2021, accounts for 40 percent of flows over the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications, or SWIFT, network).
Other currencies play a limited role, with the Chinese RMB comprising 2.5 percent of cross-border payments. However, the emergence of new global messaging platforms – such as China’s Cross-Border Payment Interbank System, India’s Unified Payments Interface, and Russia’s Financial Messaging System (SPFS) – as well as regional digital currency systems promise to increase the use of alternative currencies. For instance, cryptocurrency assets briefly provided a potential avenue for new trading systems before their asset valuations declined, and the expanded BRICS recently approved the establishment of a working group to study a BRICS reference currency.
Following the expansion of BRICS, the NDB said that it will also expand its members and that, as its General Strategy, 2022–2026 notes, thirty percent of all of its financing will be in local currencies. As part of its framework for a new development system, its president, Dilma Rousseff, said that the NDB will not follow the IMF policy of imposing conditions on borrowing countries. ‘We repudiate any kind of conditionality’, Rousseff said. ‘Often a loan is given upon the condition that certain policies are carried out. We don’t do that. We respect the policies of each country’.
Amir H. Fallah (Iran), I Want To Live, To Cry, To Survive, To Love, To Die, 2023
In their communiqué, the BRICS nations write about the importance of ‘comprehensive reform of the UN, including its Security Council’. Currently, the UN Security Council has fifteen members, five of which are permanent (China, France, Russia, the UK, and the US). There are no permanent members from Africa, Latin America, or the most populous country in the world, India. To repair these inequities, BRICS offers its support to ‘the legitimate aspirations of emerging and developing countries from Africa, Asia, and Latin America, including Brazil, India, and South Africa to play a greater role in international affairs’. The West’s refusal to allow these countries a permanent seat at the UN Security Council has only strengthened their commitment to the BRICS process and to enhance their role in the G20.
The entry of Ethiopia and Iran into BRICS shows how these large Global South states are reacting to the West’s sanctions policy against dozens of countries, including two founding BRICS members (China and Russia). The Group of Friends in Defence of the UN Charter – Venezuela’s initiative from 2019 – brings together twenty UN member states that are facing the brunt of illegal US sanctions, from Algeria to Zimbabwe. Many of these states attended the BRICS summit as invitees and are eager to join the expanded BRICS as full members.
We are not living in a period of revolutions. Socialists always seek to advance democratic and progressive trends. As is often the case in history, the actions of a dying empire create common ground for its victims to look for new alternatives, no matter how embryonic and contradictory they are. The diversity of support for the expansion of BRICS is an indication of the growing loss of political hegemony of imperialism.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Mao Xuhui (China), ’92 Paternalism, 1992
In 2003, high officials from Brazil, India, and South Africa met in Mexico to discuss their mutual interests in the trade of pharmaceutical drugs. India was and is one of the world’s largest producers of various drugs, including those used to treat HIV-AIDS; Brazil and South Africa were both in need of affordable drugs for patients infected with HIV as well as a host of other treatable ailments. But these three countries were barred from easily trading with each other because of strict intellectual property laws established by the World Trade Organisation. Just a few months prior to their meeting, the three countries formed a grouping, known as IBSA, to discuss and clarify intellectual property and trade issues, but also to confront countries of the Global North for their asymmetrical demand that the poorer nations end their agricultural subsidies. The notion of South-South cooperation framed these discussions.
Interest in South-South cooperation dates back to the 1940s, when the United Nations Economic and Social Council established its first technical aid programme to assist trade between the new post-colonial states in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Six decades later, just as IBSA was formed, this spirit was commemorated by the United Nations Day for South-South Cooperation on 19 December 2004. At this time, the UN also created the Special Unit for South-South Cooperation (ten years later, in 2013, this institution was renamed as the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation), which built upon the 1988 agreement on the Global System of Trade Preferences Among Developing Countries. As of 2023, this pact includes 42 member states from Africa, Asia, and Latin America, that are collectively home to four billion people and have a combined market of $16 trillion (roughly 20% of global merchandise imports). It is important to register that this longstanding agenda to increase trade between Southern countries forms the pre-history of the BRICS, set up in 2009 and presently made up of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa.
Madhvi Parekh and Karishma Swali (India), Kali I, 2021–22
The entire BRICS project is centred around the question of whether countries at the nether end of the neo-colonial system can break out of that system through mutual trade and cooperation, or whether the larger countries (including those in the BRICS) will inevitably enjoy asymmetries of power and scale against smaller countries and therefore reproduce inequalities rather than transcend them. Our latest dossier, on Marxist dependency theory, calls into question any capitalist project in the South that believes it can somehow break free from the neo-colonial system by importing debt and exporting cheap commodities. Despite the limitations of the BRICS project, it is clear that the increase in South-South trade and the development of Southern institutions (for development financing, for instance) challenges the neo-colonial system even if it does not immediately transcend it. At Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, we have been closely following the developments and contradictions of the BRICS project from its inception and continue to do so.
Later this month, the fifteenth BRICS summit will take place in Johannesburg, South Africa, from 22–24 August. This meeting comes as two of the group’s members, Russia and China, are facing a New Cold War with the United States and its allies, while the other members face immense pressure to be drawn into this conflict. Below, you will find briefing no. 9, published in collaboration with No Cold War, which offers a brief but necessary primer of the upcoming BRICS summit. You can read the briefing below.
The upcoming fifteenth BRICS Summit (22–24 August) in Johannesburg, South Africa, has the potential to make history. The heads of state of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa will gather for their first face-to-face meeting since the 2019 summit in Brasilia, Brazil. The meeting will take place eighteen months since the beginning of military conflict in Ukraine, which has not only raised tensions between the US-led Western powers and Russia to a level unseen since the Cold War but also sharpened differences between the Global North and South.
There are growing cracks in the unipolar international order imposed by Washington and Brussels on the rest of the world through the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), the international financial system, the control of information flows (in both traditional and social media networks), and the indiscriminate use of unilateral sanctions against an increasing number of countries. As United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres recently put it, ‘the post-Cold War period is over. A transition is under way to a new global order’.
In this global context, three of the most important debates to monitor at the Johannesburg summit are: (1) the possible expansion of BRICS membership, (2) the expansion of the membership of its New Development Bank (NDB), and (3) the NDB’s role in creating alternatives to the use of the US dollar. According to Anil Sooklal, South Africa’s ambassador to BRICS, twenty-two countries have formally applied to join the group (including Saudi Arabia, Argentina, Algeria, Mexico, and Indonesia) and a further two dozen have expressed interest. Even with numerous challenges to overcome, the BRICS are now seen as a major driving force of the world economy and of economic developments across the Global South in particular.
Lygia Clark (Brazil), O Violoncelista (‘The Violoncellist’), 1951
The BRICS Today
In the middle of the last decade, the BRICS experienced a number of problems. With the election of Prime Minister Narendra Modi in India (2014) and the coup against President Dilma Rousseff in Brazil (2016), two of the group’s member countries became headed by right-wing governments more favourable to Washington. Both India and Brazil retreated in their participation in the group. The de facto absence of Brazil, which from the outset had been one of the key driving forces behind the BRICS, represented a significant loss for the consolidation of the group. These developments undermined and hampered the progress of the NDB and the Contingent Reserve Arrangement (CRA), established in 2015 – which represented the greatest institutional achievement of the BRICS to date. Although the NDB has made some progress it has fallen short of its original objectives. To date, the bank has approved some $32.8 billion in financing (in fact, less than that has been issued), while the CRA – which has $100 billion in funds to assist countries that have a shortage of US dollars in their international reserves and are facing short-term balance of payments or liquidity pressures – has never been activated.
However, developments in recent years have reinvigorated the BRICS project. The decisions of Moscow and Beijing to respond to escalations of aggression in the New Cold War by Washington and Brussels; the return of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to the presidency of Brazil in 2022 and the consequent appointment of Dilma Rousseff to the presidency of the NDB; and the relative estrangement, to varying degrees, of India and South Africa from the Western powers have resulted in a ‘perfect storm’ that seems to have rebuilt a sense of political unity in the BRICS (despite unresolved tensions between India and China). Added to this is the growing weight of the BRICS in the global economy and strengthened economic interaction between its members. In 2020, the global share of the BRICS’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in purchasing power parity terms – 31.5 percent – overtook that of the Group of Seven (G7) – 30.7 percent – and this gap is expected to grow. Bilateral trade among BRICS countries has also grown robustly: Brazil and China are breaking records every year, reaching $150 billion in 2022; Russian exports to India tripled from April to December 2022, year-on-year, expanding to $32.8 billion; while trade between China and Russia jumped from $147 billion in 2021 to $190 billion in 2022, an increase of nearly 30 percent.
Ayanda Mabulu (South Africa), Power, 2020
What’s at Stake in Johannesburg?
Faced with this dynamic international situation and growing requests for expansion, the BRICS face a number of important questions:
In addition to providing concrete responses to interested applicants, expansion has the potential to increase the political and economic weight of the BRICS and, eventually, strengthen other regional platforms that its members belong to. But expansion also requires having to decide on the specific form that membership should take and may increase the complexity of consensus building, with a risk of slowing the progress of decision making and initiatives. How should these matters be dealt with?
How can the NDB’s financing capacity be increased, as well as its coordination with other development banks of the Global South and other multilateral banks? And, above all, how can the NDB, in partnership with the BRICS’ network of think tanks, promote the formulation of a new development policy for the Global South?
Since the BRICS member countries have solid international reserves (with South Africa having a little less), it’s unlikely that they will need to use the CRA. Instead, this fund could provide countries in need with an alternative to the political blackmail of the International Monetary Fund, which requires developing countries to enact devastating austerity measures in exchange for loans.
BRICS is reported to be discussing the creation of a reserve currency that would enable trade and investment without the use of the US dollar. If this were established, it could be one more step in efforts to create alternatives to the dollar, but questions remain. How could the stability of such a reserve currency be ensured? How could it be articulated with newly created trade mechanisms which do not use the dollar, such as bilateral China-Russia, China-Brazil, Russia-India, and other arrangements?
How can cooperation and technology transfer support the re-industrialisation of countries like Brazil and South Africa, especially in strategic sectors such as biotech, information technology, artificial intelligence, and renewable energies, while also fighting poverty and inequality, and achieving other basic demands of the peoples of the South?
Leaders representing 71 countries of the Global South have been invited to attend the meeting in Johannesburg. Xi, Putin, Lula, Modi, Ramaphosa, and Dilma have a lot of work to do, to answer these questions and make progress on the urgent matters in global development.
Peter Gorban (USSR), Field Camp. The Izvestiya., 1960
Our institute continues to track these developments, neither with the belief that the BRICS project offers global salvation, nor with the cynicism that dismisses it as nothing new. History is moved, not by purity, but by the world’s contradictions.
As these major countries of the South meet in Johannesburg, they will confront the vast inequities in South Africa. These fissures are the grist for the poems of Vonani Bila, whose voice rises out of Shirley Village (Limpopo) and reminds us of the long walk ahead, through the BRICS project and beyond:
When the sun recedes
into the Soutpansberg,
Giyani Block puts on a
black adder coat;
a mirror of death and despair.Doctors and nurses stand on their feet.
They shall not rest when the workers’ strike
ignites its furious flame.
They’re on tiptoe, looking up,
wrestling the faceless, tailless monster.
Colonial-era laws are still used to oppress LGBTQ+ Africans, writes Efemia Chela, but the struggle to organise grassroots mutual aid and for legal rights continues.
Arnold Böcklin (Switzerland), Isle of the Dead, 1880.
What constitutes a crisis worthy of global attention? When a regional bank in the United States falls victim to the inversion of the yield curve (i.e., when short-term bond interest rates become higher than long-term rates), the Earth nearly stops spinning. The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) – one of the most important financiers of technology start-ups in the United States – on 10 March presaged wider chaos in the Western financial world. In the days after the SVB debacle, Signature Bank, one of the few banks to accept cryptocurrency deposits, faced bankruptcy, and then Credit Suisse, an established European bank set up in 1856, fell due its longstanding poor management of risk (on 19 March, UBS agreed to buy Credit Suisse in an emergency deal seeking to halt the crisis). Governments held emergency Zoom conferences, financial titans called the heads of central banks and of states, and newspapers warned of system failure if safety nets were not quickly sown underneath the entire financial architecture. Within hours, Western governments and central banks secured billions of dollars to bail out the financial system. This crisis could not be allowed to escalate.
Other serious developments in the world might be called a crisis, but they do not elicit the kind of urgent response undertaken by Western governments to shore up their banking system. Three years ago, Oxfam released a report that found that the ‘world’s 22 richest men have more wealth than all the women in Africa’. That fact, which is more shocking than the failure of a bank, has moved no agenda despite the evidence that this disparity is caused largely by the predatory, deregulated lending practices of the Western banking system (as we will show in our April dossier, Life or Debt: The Stranglehold of Neocolonialism and Africa’s Search for Alternatives).
Silence greeted the publication of a key report this past January on the regression of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) being met on the African continent. The 2022 Africa Sustainable Development Report, produced by the African Union, the UN Economic Commission for Africa, the African Development Bank, and the UN Development Programme, showed that, because of the failure to finance development, African countries will not come anywhere near abolishing extreme poverty. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, 445 million people on the continent – 34% of the population – lived in extreme poverty, with 30 million more people being added to that number in 2020. The report estimates that, by 2030, the number of people in extreme poverty on the continent will reach 492 million. Not one alarm bell was rung for this ongoing disaster, much less the rapid apparition of billions of dollars to bail out the African people.
Alexander Skunder Boghossian (Ethiopia), The End of the Beginning, 1972–1973.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) found that women in Africa are more likely to be struck hard by the pandemic. The data, the IMF reported, is camouflaged by the prevalence of self-employment amongst women, whose economic difficulties do not always appear in national statistics. Across Africa, hundreds of thousands of people have taken to the streets over the past year to question their governments about the cost-of-living crisis, which has evaporated most people’s incomes. As incomes fall, and as social services collapse, women take up more and more of their households’ workload – tending to children, to elders, to those who are sick and hungry, and so on. The African Feminist Post-COVID-19 Economic Recovery Statement, written by a pan-African feminist platform, offered the following assessment of the situation:
the absence of social safety nets needed by women due to their greater fiscal precarity in the face of economic shocks has exposed the failures of a development trajectory currently prioritising productivity for growth over the wellbeing of African people. Indeed, COVID-19 has made evident what feminists have long emphasised: that the profits made in economies and markets are subsidised by women’s unpaid care and domestic work – an essential service that even the current pandemic has failed to acknowledge and address in policy.
Nike Davies-Okundaye (Nigeria), Beauty Is Everywhere, 2013.
On 8 March, International Working Women’s Day, protests across Africa focused attention on the general decline in living standards and on the specific impact this has had on women’s lives. That evocative statement from Oxfam – the world’s 22 richest men have more wealth than all the women in Africa – and the realisation that these women’s living conditions appear to be deteriorating have not provoked a crisis response in the world. There have been no urgent phone calls between the world’s capitals, no emergency Zoom meetings between central banks, no concern for people who are slipping deeper and deeper into poverty as their countries forge a path of austerity in light of a more and more permanent debt crisis. Most of the protests on 8 March focused their attention on the inflation of food and fuel prices and on the precarious conditions that this is creating for women. From the Landless Workers’ Movement’s public action against slave-like labour practices in Brazil to the demonstration against gender-based violence by the National Networks of Farmers’ Groups in Tanzania, women organised by rural and urban trade unions, by political parties, and by a range of social movements took to the streets to say, with Josie Mpama, ‘make way for women who will lead’.
At Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, we have been tracking how the pandemic has hardened the structures of neocolonialism and patriarchy, culminating in CoronaShock and Patriarchy (November 2020), which also presented a list of the people’s feminist demands to confront the global health, political, social, and economic crisis. Earlier that year, in March 2020, we released the first study in our feminisms series, Women of Struggle, Women in Struggle, in which we pointed out how economic contraction and austerity cause more women to be unemployed, put more pressure on women to care for their families and communities, and lead to increased femicide. In response to these horrendous conditions, we also wrote about the rise of protests by women across the world. At that time, we decided that one of our contributions to these struggles would be to excavate the histories of women within our movements who have been largely forgotten. Over the past three years, we have published short biographies of three women – Kanak Mukherjee (India, 1921–2005), Nela Martínez Espinosa (Ecuador, 1912–2004), and now Josie Mpama (South Africa, 1903-1979). Each year, we will publish a biography of a woman who, like Kanak, Nela, and Josie, fought for a socialism that would transcend patriarchy and class exploitation.
Protests against lodger’s permits in Potchefstroom in the late 1920s often confronted authorities at the town hall, pictured in the distance.
In the early 1920s, Josie Mpama, born into South Africa’s Black working class, joined the informal workforce, washing clothes, cleaning homes, and cooking. When the racist regime tried to enforce policies and laws to restrict the movement of Africans, she entered the world of politics and fought the oppression that came with decrees such as the lodger’s permits in Potchefstroom (in the country’s northwest). The Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA), established in 1921, provided shape to the myriad protests against segregationist laws, teaching the workers to use their ‘labour and the power to organise and withhold it’, as their flyers declared. ‘These are your weapons; learn to use them, thereby bringing the tyrant to his knees’.
In 1928, Josie joined the CPSA, finding support both for her organising work and for her desire for political education. In the 1930s, she moved to Johannesburg and opened a night school for ideological training as well as for basic mathematics and English. Later, Josie became one of the first Black working-class women to enter the senior leadership of the CPSA and eventually travelled to Moscow using the pseudonym Red Scarf to attend the Communist University of the Toilers of the East. Under Josie’s leadership as the head of the party’s women’s department, more and more women joined the CPSA, largely because it took up issues that spoke to them and encouraged women to struggle alongside men and fight for more radical conceptions of gender roles.
The Federation of South African Women held its inaugural conference on 17 April 1954 at the Trades Hall in Johannesburg, where Josie chaired the session ‘Women’s Struggle for Peace’.
So much of this history is forgotten. In contemporary South Africa, there is a focus on the importance of the Freedom Charter (adopted on 26 June 1955). But there is less acknowledgement that the year before, the Federation of South African Women (FEDSAW) passed a Women’s Charter (April 1954), which – as we say in the study – ‘would eventually become the basis for certain constitutional rights in post-apartheid South Africa’. The Women’s Charter was passed by 146 delegates who represented 230,000 women. One of those delegates was Josie, who attended the conference on behalf of the Transvaal All-Women’s Union and became the president of FEDSAW’s Transvaal branch. The Women’s Charter called for equal pay for equal work (yet to be attained today) and for the right of women to form trade unions. Josie’s leadership in FEDSAW caught the eye of the South African apartheid regime, which banned her from politics in 1955. ‘Josie or no Josie’, she wrote to her FEDSAW comrades, ‘the struggle will go on and ours will be the day of victory’.
On 9 August 1956, 20,000 women marched to South Africa’s capital of Pretoria and demanded the abolition of the apartheid pass laws. That date – 9 August – is now celebrated as Women’s Day in South Africa. As the women marched, they chanted: wathint’ abafazi, wathint’ imbokodo, uzokufa (‘you strike the women, you strike the rock, you will be crushed’).
The post You Strike the Women, You Strike the Rock, You Will Be Crushed first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
It’s World Wildlife Day on 3 March. This year, the event coincides with the 50th anniversary of the global wildlife trading body. World Wildlife Day is an annual celebration of the wild animals and plants that people share the planet with and depend on. With this year’s celebration also marking the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora’s (CITES) anniversary, it should also be a time of particular reflection – and change.
A recent report about trade in our near kin, non-human primates, illustrates well why this is the case.
The EMS Foundation is a South African nonprofit. It focuses on addressing the needs of vulnerable groups, including wild animals. In conjunction with another organisation, Ban Animal Trading, EMS released the latest instalment of a series titled “The Extinction Business” on 22 February.
The series takes a deep dive into the international wildlife trade, particularly in relation to South Africa. The latest part is titled “Our Kin Discarded” and is focused on South Africa’s trade in non-human primates.
The organisations looked into the trade that took place via a single port of exit between 2016 and 2022. Utilising CITES trade data, along with responses to freedom of information requests from central and provincial authorities, the report points to a significant trade in South Africa’s non-human primates.
During the seven year period, the country traded 10,226 non-human primates. Most of these were exports, with some imports and re-exports, meaning they were exported but had previously been imported. The trades included 3,857 live individuals. The rest were specimens, such as skulls, skins, and hunting trophies. These specimens represented – meaning amounted to – single individuals, the report said.
The trades involved several species, including samango monkeys, vervet monkeys, chacma baboons, southern lesser bushbabies, thick-tailed bushbabies, and Mozambique dwarf bushbabies.
The global wildlife trade is extensive. A 2019 paper indicated that around one-quarter of land-based vertebrates are subject to it. The fishing industry, meanwhile, trades trillions of wild lives every year. In this context, the figures for South Africa’s trade in non-human primates are not out of the ordinary. However, as the report’s authors pointed out:
Nonhuman primates are without question cognitively, behaviorally, emotionally, and socially some of the most complex animal species on earth. Their capture and removal from their natural habitats and social family structures is extremely cruel and inflicts suffering, distress which results in injuries and death.
Other elements of the report certainly give cause for pause too. In looking into the trade, EMS and Ban Animal Trading found multiple issues with how the system currently operates. These included opaque information, data discrepancies, and “largely absent verification measures”.
For instance, the report found species’ listed under “non-standard common names” in trade records, rather than their “proper Latin species name”. This means that “it is difficult to collate or review data at a species level”, the report said. Moreover, many of the individuals traded, and their destinations, were ‘untraceable’, according to the report.
CITES oversees the international trade in around 5,950 species of animals through a permitting system. It lists species in three appendices, effectively according to their risk of extinction. The trade requirements for each category differ respectively. Countries have management and scientific authorities to handle permitting and are supposed to submit records annually to CITES’ central authority, namely its secretariat.
The “Our Kin Discarded” report described CITES trade data produced through this system as “poor quality”. A 2021 complaint to CITES over the trade in elephants between Laos and China illustrated this issue well. The complaint highlighted that the data those countries submitted to the CITES secretariat contained discrepancies. Namely, the relevant elephant import and export numbers did not match. Moreover, the complaint alleged that neither country appeared to report some of the elephant trades.
Although discrepancies in CITES’ records are not hard to come by, they generally fly under the radar. The non-human primate report pointed to why this is the case. It argued that the system lacks trade analytics to catch irregularities and what it called “trade risk flags”.
The report also demonstrated that risk flags are badly needed. It highlighted that South Africa exported 1,389 live non-human primates to Bangladesh during the period. The purpose of the trade for all these individuals was commercial, i.e., to make money. But the report highlighted that Bangladesh “prohibits the commercial trade in (nonhuman) primates”. In other words, as the report explained, the non-human primates:
were exported “lawfully” from South Africa but never imported legally
Previous reports in “The Extinction Business” series have focused on other groups of species. The first report probed South Africa’s trade in reptiles. That report also pointed to insufficiencies in the CITES system. It argued that:
The legal trade in live wildlife is defined by loopholes and precludes accountability and transparency.
The reptile trade is an area that Canadian nonprofit Monitor Conservation Research Society also knows something about. Established in 2017, the organisation is dedicated to raising alarm bells about the impact of trade on lesser-known species. It is made up of a team with backgrounds in ecology, conservation, criminology, and political science. Monitor produces research to fill the vast information gaps on species that rarely get attention. Many of these species are subject to high levels of trade. Therefore, according to the nonprofit these species are at risk of being traded into extinction.
Echoing EMS’ concerns, Monitor’s executive director Chris Shepherd told the Canary that the global wildlife trade lacks accountability. This is particularly true in relation to importing countries, he said. Shepherd also noted there were no mechanisms in place to ensure that they are “held responsible for making sure imports are legal”.
The complaint over the elephant trades between Laos and China provided an illustration of this issue too. One of the concerns it raised was that Laos misused CITES classifications regarding the ‘source’ of the elephants. The country claimed that they were bred in captivity, rather than in the wild, which the complaint disputed. The captive-bred classification limited the protections from trade for the elephants in question. With Laos unable to prove the legitimacy of its classification, CITES suspended Laos’ trade in elephants on these grounds. But the importing country – China – faced no action.
Shepherd highlighted another fundamental issue too. CITES listings are supposed to regulate the trade in species so that it doesn’t threaten their survival in the wild. Naturally, in order not to threaten their status in the wild, there needs to be a clear baseline for what that status is.
Shepherd explained that there is a “booming” trade in reptiles for the pet, meat, medicine, and luxury goods industries. Some but not all of the species involved have CITES listings. Shepherd said that for most reptiles in the trade, no adequate baseline understanding of their wild status exists. For some species, almost nothing is known about them.
In other words, the requisite understanding that CITES needs to make informed decisions is often lacking.
Shepherd argued that:
CITES should be turned on its head and everything should be listed until you can prove trade can be done sustainably.
This echoes comments that biologist and co-founder of the German nonprofit Pro Wildlife Sandra Altherr made to the Canary in January. She called for “a reversal of the burden of proof” in the wildlife trade. Moreover, the organisations Nature Needs More and For the Love of Wildlife proposed debate on reforms like this at a CITES conference in 2019.
However, despite clear and consistent evidence of systemic issues with the international trade in wildlife, parties to the CITES convention – meaning countries – aren’t exactly rushing headlong towards the necessary change.
Amid a global biodiversity crisis that has direct exploitation as its second largest cause, it’s imperative that countries spring into action. As CITES’ secretary-general, Ivonne Higuero, said in comments to mark the body’s anniversary and World Wildlife Day:
In CITES’ 50th year, there has never been more of a need for effective wildlife conservation. We are seeing unprecedented drops in wild populations of both animals and plants.
CITES plays a key role in whether wildlife conservation is effective. The body holds the power to help turn the tide on the extinction crisis, but only if it puts that power towards potent and meaningful use.
Featured image via Jean / Flickr, cropped to 700×403, licensed under CC BY 2.0
This post was originally published on Canary.