The timing, as with so much in Israel’s wars in Gaza and Lebanon, was most appropriate.
The Israeli Knesset on October 28 signalled its intent to cripple and banish United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) by passing laws criminalising its operations by 92 votes to 10.
At the same time, the South African government’s Department of International Relations and Cooperation announced it was filing a memorial, or addition, to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) pertaining to its ongoing case against Israel.
The South African government filed an application with the ICJ on December 28 alleging “violations by Israel regarding the [United Nations] Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide … in relation to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.”
Acts and omissions by Israel, argued the South African government, were alleged to be of a “genocidal” nature, “committed with the requisite specific intent … to destroy the Palestinians in Gaza as part of the broader Palestinian national, racial and ethnical group”.
By May 10, South Africa had filed four requests seeking additional provisional measures with modifications to the original provisional measures laid down by the ICJ.
The momentum, and frequency of the actions, even gave certain commentators room to wonder: Was Israel’s own due process rights regarding judicial equality and the right to be heard compromised?
Israel had promised to submit written observations to the ICJ by May 15. But on May 12 the court suddenly announced it would be holding an oral hearing instead.
These debates have been taking place as Gaza has been pulverised, and Palestinians there and in the West Bank killed and displaced.
With increasing regularity, there is chilling evidence that Israeli units have a programmatic approach to destroying any viable infrastructure and means of living on the Gaza Strip.
Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem expressed horror on October 22 at the sheer scale “of the crimes Israel is currently committing in the northern Gaza Strip in its campaign to empty it of however many residents are left […] impossible to describe, not just because hundreds of thousands of people enduring starvation, disease without access to medical care and incessant bombardments and gunfire defies comprehension, but because Israel has cut them off from the world”.
In a chilling overview of the Israeli Defense Forces’ (IDF) 749 Combat Engineering Battalion, written by Younis Tirawi and Sami Vanderlip for Drop Site News, they record the systematic elimination of cultural, structural and intellectual life in the Gaza Strip.
As members of the battalion’s official D9 company stated: “Our job is to flatten Gaza.”
In an operation that destroyed the Al-Azhar University, First Sergeant David Zoldan, operational officer of Company A of the battalion, delighted with fellow soldiers on seeing the explosion: “Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined, did you see?”
Statements of this sort are frequent and easily found up the chain of command. They are also uttered with ease at the highest levels of government.
Israeli security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir told a “settlement” conference held in a restricted military zone on October 21, that Gaza’s inhabitants would be given the chance to “leave from here to other countries”.
His reasoning for this ethnic cleansing has remained biblically consistent: “The land of Israel is ours.”
The South African government’s memorial is 750 pages, with 4000 pages of supporting exhibits and annexes. (Its December application had run into 84 pages.)
“The problem we have is that we have too much evidence,” remarked Ambassador Vusimuzi Madonsela, South Africa’s representative to The Hague, to Al Jazeera.
Zane Dangor, director-general of the Department of International Relations and Cooperation, was more practical.
Israel might well inflate its dossier of bloody misdeeds, but some line had to be drawn in the submissions. “The legal team will always say we need more time, there’s more facts coming. But we have to say you have to stop now. You [have] got to focus on what you have.”
While the formal contents of the memorial remain confidential, the clues are obvious. It contains, for instance, evidence that Israel “has violated the genocide convention by promoting the destruction of Palestinians living in Gaza, physically killing them with an assortment of destructive weapons, depriving them access to humanitarian assistance, causing conditions of life which are aimed at their physical destruction and ignoring and defying several provisional measures of the International Court of Justice, and using starvation as a weapon of war to further Israel’s aims to depopulate Gaza through mass death and forced displacement of Palestinians.”
Despite that comprehensive assortment of alleged crimes, legal observers wonder how far this latest effort will go in linking the decisions of Israeli officialdom with genocidal intent.
That Israel is committing war crimes and violating humanitarian law is impossible to dispute. The threshold in proving genocide, as international jurisprudence has repeatedly shown over the years, is a high one indeed.
The dolus specialis — that specific intent to destroy in whole or in part the protected group — is essential to prove.
Cathleen Powell from the University of Cape Town has her reservations. “If they can find genocidal statements from state officials and show that that directly led to a particular programme that led to the destruction on the ground, then that’s probably a very strong case.” But she said that making that link would be “very difficult”.
Dangor has no doubts: “Genocidal acts without intent can be crimes against humanity. But here, the intent is just front and centre.”
Suffice to say that Israeli lawmakers and officials, aided by the exploits of the IDF, are making proving such intent an easier prospect with each passing day.
[Binoy Kampmark lectures at RMIT University. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com.]