South Africa's petition to the United Nations' International Court of Justice (ICJ) against the state of Israel over “genocidal conduct” in its war against the Palestinians of Gaza is not just an unprecedented legal event. It also marks a geopolitical turnaround: while the peoples of the world see, through the lens of Palestinian tragedy, the flexible way that Europe and the United States apply the universal values they claim to support, it is now a country that symbolises the liberation causes of the anti-colonial and anti-racist Third World that has stepped forward to carry the torch for those values.
One only has to read the exceptional document produced by the South African diplomatic service and to listen to its arguments being set out (see below, the French broadcast media have barely shown it) on Thursday January 11th in front of the ICJ to understand the intellectual eclipse of a continent – ours – whose nation states have for so long claimed to speak, codify and impose what is right, just and true.
Because in real time, and under the gaze of the entire world, they have said nothing in the face of Gaza's persecution – or very little: a few hypocritical appeals for restraint. And they have done nothing to help or, worse, they have acted in the opposite direction by delivering massive amounts of weapons and ammunition to Israel, in the case of the United States very recently. Nothing said and nothing done when the people of one of the most densely-populated areas on the planet are being attacked by one of the most most powerful armies in the world, the army of a state that is besieging it after having occupied it, in a bombing campaign that is the most intensive in modern military history.
It is worse than Aleppo in Syria, worse than Mariupol in Ukraine, to use two contemporary references which each involve Russia, but also worse proportionately in intensity than the Allied bombings of Nazi Germany.
Indiscriminate punishment
Through the actions of its army and through the words of its leaders, the state of Israel has targeted an entire people in its vengeful response to the Hamas attack on October 7th 2023 and the massacre of Israeli civilians. Far from being a proportionate response, it has carried out indiscriminate punishment against a population based on its origins, identity, culture and history.
It is the Palestinian population of Gaza and, through it, the very idea of a viable Palestine and of a life and existence under that name, with all the sociality and citizenship that this entails, that was singled out as being guilty and needing to be punished, with no distinctions made. This was made explicitly clear on day one by the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself, who called for a holy war by making a reference to Amalek. These were the people whose destruction god orders in the Bible (1 Samuel 15:3): “Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.”
And in scarcely three months of war, we already have tens of thousands of dead, disappeared and wounded people, mainly civilians, a majority of them children and women. An entire world has been destroyed forever, homes and hospitals, residential areas and places of worship, schools and universities, administrative offices, shops, monuments, libraries and even cemeteries.
“Nowhere is safe in Gaza,” stated the secretary general of the United Nations António Guterres in his formal letter to the Security Council. Since then humanitarian workers from NGOs and UN agencies have kept on raising the alarm about polluted water, the risk of famine, the unmeasurable misery and the infinite despair, in short an irreversible destruction of a part of occupied Palestine.
In a sinister reversal, the state whose initial legitimacy was based on awareness of the crime of genocide committed against the Jews by Nazism and its allies is today faced with the accusation that it is committing genocide on the Palestinians. In the 1948 Genocide Convention invoked by South Africa, the crime of genocide designates acts “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such”. Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin, the inventor of the word – from the Greek genos and the Latin cide – defined it as a “conspiracy to exterminate national, religious or racial groups”.
Enlargement : Illustration 2
The legal debate will be pursued in depth but in the short-term – and this is what is at stake in the urgent proceedings before the ICJ – it is about stopping as quickly as possible a process of annihilation, cleansing, expulsion, eradication and destruction of the Palestinians of Gaza which has genocidal characteristics.
As the genocides in Rwanda in 1994 and in Bosnia in 1995 tragically reminded us, it in no way downplays the uniqueness of the Shoa, the concerted plan by the Nazi regime for an industrial-scale extermination of millions of human beings, for us to be eternally vigilant about a repetition, in other contexts and in different forms, of this immeasurable crime by humanity against itself.
But history will recall that it was the powers who represent the West, this political reality born out of Europe's projection onto the world, who shirked this vigilance by abandoning Palestine to its sad fate, even as they pride themselves in having proclaimed the universality and equality of rights. Through South African boldness it is now the peoples and the nations that have suffered from this overbearing appropriation of the universal by the Western powers which makes them the best defenders of these values. And which, in short, reminds Europe of the promise which it has betrayed
“If we wish to live up to our peoples’ expectations, we must seek the response elsewhere than in Europe.” These are almost the final words of 'Les Damnés de la terre' ('The Wretched of the Earth'), the 1961 essay by political philosopher Frantz Fanon from Martinique, a work read all around the world since its publication. The words can be read as a prediction of the turnaround that is today coming about. This appeal to “change sides” called for a liberating escape in a quest for true humanism, where humanity's problems would no longer be eclipsed by the interests of dominant nations or by the nationalism of conquering populations. Following in the wake of 'Discours sur le colonialisme' (1955) by his compatriot Aimé Césaire, 'Les Damnés de la terre' extolled a genuine universalism, one without proprietorial nations or nationalistic frontiers.
“That it be possible for me to discover and to love man, wherever he may be,” Fanon had written in the conclusion of his first book 'Peau noire, masques blancs' ('Black Skin, White Masks') in 1952, in which he recalled this warning from his “philosophy teacher of Antilles origins”. His teacher said: “Whenever you hear anyone abuse the Jews, pay attention, because he is talking about you.” And Fanon himself comments: “An anti-Semite is inevitably anti-Black”. An epigraph to one of his chapters has these words by Aimé Césaire: “In the whole world no poor devil is lynched, no wretch is tortured, in whom I too am not degraded and murdered.”
Europe has declined all humility and all modesty; but she has also set her face against all solicitude and all tenderness.
International law is this essential humanism in legal form. A humanism which Fanon, a decade later, at a time of French colonial wars from Vietnam to Algeria, furiously noted that Europe had spurned.
In 'Les Damnés de la terre' he wrote: “Let us leave this Europe where they are never done talking of Man, yet murder men everywhere they find them, at the corner of every one of their own streets, in all the corners of the globe ... Europe has declined all humility and all modesty; but she has also set her face against all solicitude and all tenderness. She has only shown herself parsimonious and miserly where men are concerned; it is only men that she has killed and devoured. So, my brothers, how is it that we do not understand that we have better things to do than to follow that same Europe?”
In this indictment, where he portrays Europe set against itself, Fanon holds up the continent's betrayed promise in order to call for a turnaround which, finally, is coming to pass. This Europe which proclaimed natural equality and decreed the universality of rights, then trampled on and wrecked both through colonialism and imperialism, denying them to the people and the populations that they oppressed and exploited.
Deadly poison
And this devastating duplicity, with the long injustice done to Palestine by the occupation and colonisation of its lands since 1967 and the discrimination against and segregation of its people that flows from that, has lasted right to the present day, spreading into the very heart of Israeli society a poison that is fatal for democratic ideals, as witnessed by the rise of far-right Jewish forces which are as racist as anti-Semites.
The way this manifesto in book form resonates today proves that the internationalist and humanist hope for decolonisation is not a thing of the past but remains an active commitment. Published a few days before the death of its author, who had taken up the cause of Algerian independence, 'Les Damnés de la terre' appeared at the end of 1961. This was the same year that Nelson Mandela, renouncing the strategy of non-violence of South Africa's ANC against the apartheid regime, went to train in armed struggle with Algerian's FLN liberation front at its secret bases in Morocco, a few months before his arrest on August 5th 1962.
But its resonance goes even further: apartheid, a regime of racial segregation, was instituted in 1948, the year when the creation of the state of Israel was approved by the UN, when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was made and when the Genocide Convention was adopted.
To reread Frantz Fanon is thus to understand what is at stake for our future concerning what Palestine has stood for in the world ever since its right to exist as a sovereign state was denied. Though with Yasser Arafat at its head it ended up conceding this same right to the state of Israel, despite the expulsion – the Nakba – suffered by a section of its people in 1948. Who today is going to save the universality and above all the universalizability – in the sense of sharing and solidarity – of rights, justice and equality? And who will save them from predatory appropriation by states, peoples and nations who claim lawful ownership to the point where they allow themselves to contradict and flout them when their own selfish interests, in particular economic, are in peril?
South Africa has provided the response in the court at The Hague: the origins of these rights afford no protection, there is nothing universal over which a nation, civilisation or culture has a monopoly or privilege. Only the universalizability of these rights is at stake, in each concrete test where the fate of a particular people – attacked, persecuted, assaulted, discriminated against, removed, exterminated and so on – imperils the fate of humanity as a whole. Legally robust in international law, this petition before the ICJ raises the politically decisive issue of the frontierless universality of supranational values which, at least on paper, are proclaimed by the nation states of our continent and by the European Union which represents them.
The principles, values and fundamental rights that South Africa invokes in the face of Israel's acts in Gaza do not just apply to Palestine. They apply at the same time to Ukraine, the victim of a war of aggression from Russian imperialism with its long list of war crimes and crimes against humanity – and this reminder applies also to the South African leaders who to this day have not condemned Moscow. But it applies, too, to the people of Syria who have been and still are being persecuted by the dictatorial regime there which oppresses them with the support of Iran and Russia. It equally applies to the Uyghur people, the largely Muslim Turkic people persecuted by China in Xinjiang.
And they apply to all those peoples who are subject to the yoke of state governments whose apparent support for the Palestinian cause serves as a distraction from the unjust fate that they are themselves imposing, from Iran to Turkey, not forgetting the absolute monarchies which rule on the Arabian peninsula.
All humanism is internationalist. That's what Nelson Mandela meant when he spoke of his gratitude to the Palestinian people for their help in the fight against apartheid. “We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians,” he said. Conversely, the indifference of the majority of European leaders towards Palestine's fate puts at risk the idea that Europe has created of itself, of its values and its principles.
What could Europe say tomorrow if it were faced with breaches of international law which worry or threaten it, such as Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine, having not come to the aid of Palestine? How will it dare to hand out lessons to other authoritarian and imperialistic powers who reject all supranational law that might oppose their ambitions, when it has not supported that law themselves against Israel, or when they have in fact quite simply given up on it, with some of their leaders offering “unconditional” support for this state, whatever its actions?
Just over a year ago, on October 13th 2022, Josep Borrell, vice-president of the European Commission and High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs, gave a speech to open the new European Diplomatic Academy in Bruges. “Europe,” he said with some pride, “is a garden” where “everything works”. It was, he said, the “best combination of political freedom, economic prosperity and social cohesion that humankind has been able to build”. Conversely, he said “most of the rest of the world is a jungle, and the jungle could invade the garden”. He continued: “The [European] gardeners have to go to the jungle. Europeans have to be much more engaged with the rest of the world. Otherwise, the rest of the world will invade us, by different ways and means.”
In the light of a destroyed Gaza and a battered Palestine, where is the garden and where is the jungle? And where have these official European “gardeners” gone, having abandoned the world's and humanity's problems in recent months? Far from being something alien to us, the jungle spreads through the blindness of conquest and power, of exploitation and domination. As for the garden, however tidy it may look, it can be the breeding ground of the worst barbarities, those which, in the name of national identities, ancestry and civilisations that think they are superior to others, lead to the crime of genocide.
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- The original French version of this op-ed can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter