VSIt is not entirely a coincidence that one of the most brilliant counsel of the team of lawyers who is pleading South Africa’s appeal against Israel, accused of genocide before the International Court of Justice (ICJ), is an Irish lawyer. White wig from the 17th centurye century on her long hair, Blinne Ni Ghralaigh gave a formidable clinical presentation, Thursday, January 11 in The Hague, Netherlands, of what she described as “first genocide broadcast live” about the Palestinians in Gaza. The young jurist, some of her admirers argue, enjoys a double qualification: a recognized expert in the defense of human rights in international law, she comes from a country which is a former colony.
This double qualification and the fact that it is mentioned illustrate the very particular dimension of the complaint filed against Israel before the highest court of the United Nations. Based on the massive nature and human toll of the Israeli military response to the massacres committed by Hamas on October 7, the South African appeal goes beyond the simple legal procedure. It is the complaint of the Global South against Western criteria of moral superiority. It is the questioning of an international order installed by the most powerful ally of the accused, the United States. It is also the contestation of a memory dominated by the Shoah, to which that of colonization is openly opposed.
Israel accused of genocide before the ICJ, ” it’s the world upside down “was indignant Benyamin Netanyahu, prime minister of a country born from the greatest genocide of the 20the century, the one which saw six million Jews exterminated by the Nazi regime. He doesn’t think he’s saying that well. The world, in fact, is turning upside down, and what is happening these days before the seventeen judges of the ICJ in The Hague is the symbol of this shift.
“Seventy-five years of apartheid”
Whatever the final verdict of the Court on the genocidal nature of the Israeli offensive in Gaza, whatever its decision on the request for suspension of military operations presented by Pretoria, the simple fact that, in the current context, this accusation against Israel was brought by a country itself a symbol of colonial repression and racial segregation is historic.
“The Palestinians have endured seventy-five years of apartheid, fifty-six years of occupation and thirteen years of blockade”, South African Justice Minister Ronald Lamola told the court. The figure of Nelson Mandela, icon of resistance to apartheid and moral clarity, inevitably looms over these audiences. To defend itself, Israel chose another symbol, a Holocaust survivor, an 87-year-old judge, Aharon Barak.
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