Justice is not served when it is exploited for ideological reasons. That is the basis of the ANC government’s case against Israel, which the German government has condemned as “political instrumentalization” of the 1948 Genocide Convention (The Mercury, January 15).
What Ivo Vegter of the Daily Friend terms “hypocritical platitudes” accurately sums up the case made by the jurists representing the South African government, not Christian South Africans. From the outset, by siding with the jihadist, genocidal Hamas zealots, the ideology of the SA team was writ large. It glossed over the unspeakable barbarism of the atrocities Hamas perpetrated on October 7. It ignores Hamas’ ideology of a single-state Palestine “from the river to the sea,” with the obliteration of Israel as the obvious intention and consequence.
Yet it charges Israel with genocidal intent. How does that square with Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza in 2005? Where is the genocide in Israel’s evacuation of 1,9 million Gazans? How is it that Hamas’ unremitting firing of rockets and bombs on civilian Israeli settlements is not recognised by the legal eagles as reflecting genocidal intent?
Calls for a ceasefire and peace ignore the context and circumstances prevailing. In the first place, Hamas has routinely violated ceasefires, which, in any case, it exploits as opportunities to regroup its terror squads. Secondly, to accept what the SA team is demanding would mean that Israel has to acquiesce and accept the bloody slaughter Hamas has wrought as the status quo. And what would result next, knowing Hamas’ intentions?
The willful blindness of the SA legal team in interpreting civilian casualties in Gaza as a result of Israel’s defence response as “genocide” is deplorable because it is totally one-sided. How is it that the October 7 atrocities perpetrated by Hamas are not termed “genocidal?”
The ultimate travesty of the ANC/SA government’s case is that it labels the victim of the Hamas barbarism as being guilty of genocidal intent.
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