Ivo Vegter: South Africa is blaming the victim of genocide

Ivo Vegter argues that in accusing Israel of genocide, South Africa’s government aligns with genocidal zealots, displaying a biased stance on the Hamas attack. President Cyril Ramaphosa’s support for Palestine reflects a simplistic oppressor/oppressed narrative. While acknowledging a two-state solution, the government fails to address Hamas’ genocidal intent. The ICJ application against Israel ignores complexities, relying on anti-Israel propaganda. South Africa’s blind condemnation lacks consideration for Israel’s dilemmas, making the government complicit in overlooking Hamas’ brutality and harming justice. The potential ICJ ruling may unfairly restrain Israel, endangering its citizens and legitimising barbaric acts by Palestinian militant groups.

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South Africa blames the victim of genocide
By Ivo Vegter*

By formally accusing Israel of genocide, South Africa’s government has taken the side of genocidal zealots.

It was clear from the outset that South Africa’s official position towards the violent invasion of Israel by Hamas on 7 October 2023, and the cold-blooded rape, torture, abduction and murder of innocent men, women and children, would be crudely one-sided support of the Palestinian cause.

From its very first statement, it glossed over any details of the Hamas attack, expressing merely ‘grave concern’, euphemistically calling it an ‘escalation’ and ‘conflagration’, and failing to even name Hamas.

President Cyril Ramaphosa and his entire cabinet donned scarves patterned after the traditional Arab headdress, or keffiyeh. This was an expression of ‘solidarity’ based on the simplistic Marxist-Leninist view of the world as oppressor and oppressed classes of people engaged in perpetual struggle.

Israel is, according to this theory, the oppressor, and Palestinians are the oppressed, which justifies virtually any act of resistance on the part of the Palestinians, and condemns virtually any act of self-defence on the part of Israel.

In line with this dogma, and despite the fact that Hamas is globally recognised as a terrorist organisation, South Africa duly blamed its barbarous attacks upon the victim: ‘The new conflagration has arisen from the continued illegal occupation of Palestine land, continued settlement expansion, desecration of the Al Aqsa Mosque and Christian holy sites, and ongoing oppression of the Palestinian people.’

Eventually, under pressure, the government would admit that yes, South Africa also abhors the violence committed by Hamas, but that it ‘condemns in the strongest possible terms Israel’s violation’ of various supposed international laws.

One or two states?
The government never bothered to explain exactly what it expected Israel to do, beyond some wishful waffling about ‘a lasting and durable peace that produces a viable, contiguous Palestinian State, existing side-by-side in peace with Israel, within the 1967 internationally recognised borders, with East Jerusalem as its capital’.

Throughout the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Israel has repeatedly offered one or other two-state solutions for peace, while the Palestinians have repeatedly and violently rejected them, preferring to prolong their conflict with Israel.

Peaceful side-by-side co-existence is impossible, not because Israel won’t accept it, but because time and time again, Palestinian groups have responded to peace overtures by waging renewed war against Israel.

Peace talks
Proposing peace talks is in any case not an appropriate response to a brutal act of aggression and an open act of war. That would force the victim of aggression to accept the status quo and negotiate from a position of weakness.

How can peace talks be held when Hamas still holds numerous Israeli hostages, and still maintains its military arsenal aimed at Israeli civilians?

How can peace talks be held with an organisation that has violated ceasefire after ceasefire, and has proven itself to be nothing more than a group of radical, violent and genocidal religious extremists?

By recognising a two-state solution, the South African government at least recognises the right of Israel to exist. Unfortunately, Hamas in particular, and half of Palestinians in general, do not.

When they say, ‘from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’, they are invoking a single-state solution in which Israel is annihilated. Israel’s Jewish citizens, in such a scenario, would once again become stateless victims of genocide, as they are murdered and displaced.

Senior Hamas spokespeople have publicly stated that there will be endless repetitions of the 7 October attacks. They will not stop until Israel has been destroyed and the Jews driven out of what they consider to be ‘stolen’ land.

Israel cannot have peace talks with a group that is resolutely committed to war.

Genocide claim
So, how is a country that has a right to exist supposed to respond to the incessant and inhuman attacks on its territory and its people?

If this had happened to any other country, the answer would be simple: it would be justified to launch a defensive war sufficient to render the attacker incapable of further aggression.

But this is Israel, so the South African government has no proposals about what a justified response would look like. Instead, it now claims that Israel’s defensive war against Hamas constitutes genocide against the Palestinian people.

It has filed an 84-page application at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), accusing Israel of breaching the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide of 1948.

Possibly on the advice of its legal counsel, it this time wisely started with a caveat: ‘South Africa unequivocally condemns all violations of international law by all parties, including the direct targeting of Israeli civilians and other nationals and hostage-taking by Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups.’

That is something it forgot to say in the early weeks after the attack, because to put it bluntly, it didn’t care about dead Jews; it cared only about its Marxist-Leninist oppressor/oppressed narrative.

This supposed unequivocal condemnation of the actions of Palestinian armed groups, however, is not why the South African government approached the ICJ. It isn’t concerned with the clear genocidal intent towards Israel openly expressed, and often acted upon, by Palestinian groups. Instead, it accuses Israel of committing genocide.

Its application is a cleverly crafted document, padded with lengthy quotations from anti-Israeli propaganda screeds. It relies both on the vagueness of the 1948 convention, and on ignoring the dilemmas Israel faces in pursuing the armed groups (there are now at least a dozen, in addition to Hamas) who choose to make war against it.

Vagueness
The vagueness of the convention is readily apparent from Article II, which reads:

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

The words ‘intent’ and ‘in part’, and the plural of ‘members’ in clause (a) can be made to do extremely heavy lifting, as they do in South Africa’s application to the court. Any civilian casualties resulting from the war on Hamas could be interpreted as support for the charge of genocide.

Credulity
The application makes much of ‘intentionally directing attacks against the civilian population, civilian objects and buildings dedicated to religion, education, art, science, historic monuments, hospitals, and places where the sick and wounded are collected; torture; the starvation of civilians as a method of warfare…’

Citing only a 14-year-old ‘fact-finding’ report, and despite the reams of documented evidence that prove it, the application rejects outright the defence that Palestinian militant groups operate from within or beneath civilian institutions that would, in the ordinary course of war, be protected.

It rejects the fact that Hamas and other groups use Palestinian civilians, including children, as human shields. In fact, it perversely claims that Israel uses Palestinians as human shields.

It rejects the fact that Hamas intercepts aid shipments of food and fuel for distribution to its own fighters and cronies, while leaving Palestinian civilians to starve, instead blaming Israel for closing the very borders that were breached to enable the 7 October atrocities.

It uncritically accepts all the statements and statistics emanating from Gaza, even though they are under the sole control of Hamas and have on several occasions proven to be unreliable or false. Its credulity in the face of a well-oiled and well-practised propaganda machine designed to evoke pity among gullible foreigners knows no bounds.

It refers to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) only once, as venues where Palestinian civilians have been killed, without mentioning that its staffers and teachers celebrated the 7 October attacks, and that it is so riddled with Hamas activists and operatives as to make it indistinguishable from a hostile Palestinian group itself.

Blind condemnation
South Africa’s application to the ICJ blindly condemns the blockade on Gaza that Israel imposed in the wake of its 2005 withdrawal from the territory. It does not address the reasons for this blockade: a sharp increase in rockets fired at Israeli civilian targets from within Gaza, bombs placed in export goods, and the redirection of aid or other imports to the manufacture of rockets and other weapons.

If Hamas and other militant groups in Gaza had laid down their weapons, there would have been peace, and there would have been no blockade. They didn’t.

Hamas even made war against other Palestinians, in the form of Fatah, which nominally governs the West Bank.

South Africa’s application does not explain why, if genocide was Israel’s intent, it completely withdrew from Gaza in 2005, instead of using its vast military superiority to simply push the Palestinians into the sea. Or why it didn’t do so as soon as Hamas was elected in 2006 and sharply increased the number of rockets it lobbed at Israel.

A project of genocide could have been completed decades ago, if that is what the Israelis had in mind. But that never was the objective.

Instead, it kept coming back to the negotiating table, kept offering Palestinians a road to sovereignty, and kept going as far as it could – while protecting itself from Palestinian violence – to build a rapprochement with the Palestinian people.

Dilemmas
South Africa’s application to the ICJ does not recognise the dilemma in which Israel found itself, in that Israel’s own offers of a peaceful two-state solution, and its own disengagement from Gaza, and its own evacuation of Israeli settlers in Gaza, were met only with more and more violence against Israeli citizens.

It rejects the claim that Israel is not deliberately targeting civilians, but then cleverly tries to blame Israel for the evacuation of 1.9 million Gazans from their homes. Therefore, whether Israel evacuates civilians or not, as they go after Hamas fighters and infrastructure, they get to be blamed for supposedly genocidal actions.

They’re literally damned if they do, and damned if they don’t.

And since, technically, any number of civilian deaths can be made to fit the Genocide Convention criteria, no effort on the part of Israel will be enough.

The ICJ application blames Israel for destroying civilian buildings, without recognising that Hamas and other militant groups operate from inside and among these very buildings.

That urban warfare is ugly should not be news to anyone. That it automatically amounts to genocide, however, is a leap.

In making that leap – for purely political reasons of ‘solidarity’ – South Africa ignores the actual genocidal intent of the 7 October attack, and blames the victim for the violence with which it is defending itself.

Brutality
Let us not forget the utter brutality of the Hamas attack. We have seen evidence and heard testimony of widespread violence against women and children.

Women, many of them teenagers, were repeatedly raped. They had their legs spread so far their pelvises broke. They were stabbed in the genital area and had their breasts cut off. Children were hunted down and blinded for fun, or shot in front of their mothers. Many were burnt alive.

Nobody was safe. Nobody was spared. That is, surely, the very essence of genocide.

South Africa denies having taken the side of these monsters, but in charging Israel with genocide, this is exactly what they have done.

Gross affront
It is plausible that the ICJ will rule against Israel. The vagueness of the Genocide Convention, and the well-established bias against Israel among transnational organisations, almost guarantees it.

If it does, the South African government will have made itself guilty of a gross affront to morality and justice. It will have given Palestinian militant groups carte blanche to continue their barbaric rape and murder of Israelis, while binding Israel’s hands behind its back.

It will, to poach an image from Zapiro, be holding Lady Israel down while Hamas rapes her.

It exposes the South African government’s official position on peace between Palestine and Israel to be nothing more than hypocritical platitudes, and a sordid cover for the fact that it has substituted justice for a brand of Marxist-Leninist solidarity that is entirely blind to the monstrous crimes of its allies.

[Photo: Screenshot of SABC News report of 2 months ago]