{"id":251992,"date":"2024-01-08T12:00:10","date_gmt":"2024-01-08T12:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=251992"},"modified":"2024-01-06T08:37:50","modified_gmt":"2024-01-06T08:37:50","slug":"moral-and-strategic-consequences-of-s-africas-case-against-israel-at-the-worlds-court","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2024\/01\/moral-and-strategic-consequences-of-s-africas-case-against-israel-at-the-worlds-court\/","title":{"rendered":"Moral and Strategic Consequences of S. Africa\u2019s Case against Israel at the World\u2019s Court"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Damage in Gaza Strip Jan 2024 – ScheerPost<\/p><\/div>\n

The post-apartheid Republic of South Africa filing a genocide case against Israel is a significant act pregnant with positive moral consequences while handing the Palestinian liberation struggle an unprecedented strategic weapon. <\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

5 Jan 2024<\/em> – Three months into the relentless bombardment of Gaza, the Republic of S. Africa, a signatory state (or \u201cstate party\u201d, in legalese) of the (binding) Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (or Genocide Convention), has filed its \u201capplication<\/a>\u201d (or legal case) against Israel, a fellow signatory, with the United Nations\u2019 principal judicial organ The International Court of Justice in The Hague.<\/p>\n

S. Africa provided the directly relevant and detailed contextual information about Israel\u2019s policies and deeds with respect to Palestinian residents of Gaza, over nearly a quarter of a century from 2000 to 2023.<\/p>\n

It is worth noting that S. Africa\u2019s application of the Genocide Convention came amidst \u201cthe Merit Phase\u201d (that is, the two parties in dispute present the Court its evidence and counter-evidence) of the precedent-setting genocide case, namely Gambia vs. Myanmar<\/a>. The Gambia vs. Myanmar is precedent setting because the signatory African state Gambia which initiated the legal dispute did not, and does not, suffer the impact of Myanmar\u2019s crimes against Rohingya as a victim, residential population of the Southeast Asian country while Myanmar\u2019s failure to prevent and punish the genocide on its own territories is in and of itself tantamount to violating Myanmar\u2019s own treaty obligations towards both other signatory states of the Genocide Convention and the entire family of nations.<\/p>\n

On the strength of the apparent or prima facie <\/em>evidence, the ICJ\u2019s judges granted, in an extraordinary show of unanimity, Gambia\u2019s request for \u201cprovisional (or immediate and short-term) measures<\/a>\u201d ordering Myanmar to stop any and further state acts harmful to the remaining victim population of predominantly Muslim Rohingya which the court officially deemed \u201ca protected group\u201d under the Convention.<\/p>\n

The physical destruction of Gaza 70% of which have been turned into rubble is reminiscent of what really was the carpet-bombing of major German cities (for instance, Berlin, Hamburg, Frankfurt, and Dresden) by the British and American Air Forces.<\/p>\n

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IDF forces during ground operations in the Gaza Strip. 1 November 2023. Wikipedia Commons<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

By way of a historical comparison, the British war-planners were initially for the more \u201caccurate\u201d arial attacks against German cities and ordered more discriminatory bombings of military targets. But, when the precision proved elusive in the face of Nazi air defences the British Air Force leadership shifted its gear and went all out for the carpet bombing of all targeted cities.<\/p>\n

In sharp contrast, from the get-go, Israeli senior officials have made it clear that they had absolutely no moral or humanly qualm about the wholesale physical destruction of entire neighbourhoods complete with hospitals, schools, refugee camps, and other sites in Gaza whose population was overwhelmingly civilians \u2013 and women and children at that. \u201cAccuracy\u201d in military operations against the Hamas is not <\/em>a factor in Israel\u2019s official planning. The number of civilian deaths including thousands of children, babies, pregnant women, the elderly speak louder than Israel\u2019s well-rehearsed media mantra of \u201creducing civilian death tolls\u201d.<\/p>\n

In commenting on the genocides in Israel and Myanmar, a word about my professional and personal background may be in order because I am not a legally trained professional. And I do not concern myself with law, as such, here.<\/p>\n

I am a long-time human rights activist with over 35 years of involvement in international human rights activism. Academically, for 6 years (1992-98), I was a doctoral student of the pioneering expert on (Nazi) SS and its leader Himmler, the late Robert L. Koehl<\/a>, at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. My historian mentor interrogated, in his capacity as a US Army Military Intelligence officer, surrendered junior SS officers in the American section of the defeated Nazi Germany. Upon resuming his studies at Harvard after the war, Koehl wrote his PhD thesis in 1953 on the SS and its Himmler, based on both the archival materials from two of the chambers of the Nuremberg Trials, and personal interactions with former SS officers under his custody.<\/p>\n

Both Koehl and I shared a lifelong interest in viewing the mass crimes of murderous organizations through the eyes of the perpetrators. He was a German American, born in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and grew up bilingual, German and English, and I, an ethnically dominant Bama from the nationalist heartlands of Myanmar, with 3-generations of family ties with the instrument of Myanmar genocide, the country\u2019s armed forces.<\/p>\n

My primary activism has always been focused on ending the military dictatorship in my native country of Burma \u2013 now Myanmar. But I devoted the last 10 years of my activism and research to the study of genocides, when I discovered, through numerous United Nations and NGO reports on Myanmar, that the military there was not simply committing egregious human rights crimes against dissidents and other defiant ethnic minorities but, in fact, committing \u201ca textbook case of genocide\u201d against a tiny minority population of Rohingya in Western Myanmar.<\/p>\n

My wife and researcher colleague Dr Natalie Brinham and I conducted the first-ever study (of 3 years) of Myanmar\u2019s persecution of Rohingya<\/a> using genocide as our conceptual framework.<\/p>\n

WATCH: Genocide: Why We Let it Happen | Full Panel Discussion | Oxford Union<\/a>
\nGenocide leaves the darkest stain on the conscience of humanity, yet today we are again witnessing international passivity in the face of the genocide in Myanmar.<\/em> <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n