<div><span style="font-size: 1rem;"><b><font color="#085294">South African international lawyers frequently appeared before the International Court of Justice in the 1960s. At the time, they were tasked with justifying their apartheid in Namibia. And they did. They argued that apartheid was good for everyone, that it prevented racial conflict and ‘decline’, that different people were at different stages of their development and so required different laws.</font></b></span><br></div><div><br></div><div>Their memorial to the court reads today like a banned subreddit containing “extensive references to the phenotypical characteristics of different tribes, the precise colour of their skin and the shape of women’s breasts” to justify what they called their policy of ‘separate development’.</div><div><br></div><div>How amazing that some decades later, black South African lawyers are arguing before the same court that a country that collaborated with their racist government should be held responsible for a genocide.</div><div><br></div><div>The applicant is South Africa</div><div>While some argue that it is a matter of shame that no Arab or Muslim state lodged the case, leaving the task to South Africa, I maintain that it is exactly this — that a non-Arab, non-Muslim nation and one which has overcome settler colonialism has brought this case — is what makes it so compelling.</div><div><br></div><div>Israel was a military ally of South Africa’s apartheid regime under some of the worst years of white rule. It even offered to sell nuclear weapons to the apartheid regime.</div><div><br></div><div>Once South Africa became democratic, its new government, the African National Congress and the Palestinian Liberation Organisation were so close their ties were referred to as fraternal. Yasser Arafat was one of the first leaders Mandela met after being released from prison in 1990 and he was one of the first foreign leaders to speak at South Africa’s newly democratic parliament.</div><div><br></div><div>The head of South Africa’s legal team, John Dugard, was UN Special Rapporteur for Palestine in the 2000s and notably said: “I’m a South African who lived through apartheid and I have no hesitation in saying that Israel’s crimes are infinitely worse than those committed by the apartheid regime of South Africa.”</div><div><br></div><div>There could be no better applicant for these proceedings than this former apartheid and colonised state and one against whom Israeli accusations of libel and anti-Semitism are less likely to stick.</div><div><br></div><div>The allegations are genocide</div><div>South Africa has alleged that Israel has committed a genocide against the Palestinian people. While most people understand genocide to mean mass killings of civilians, for international lawyers, it is a term of art.</div><div><br></div><div>Genocide requires the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, and religious group. It is possibly the most difficult international crime to prove because it requires the ‘special intent’ to destroy the group. Mass extermination without that special intent is a crime against humanity but it is not genocide. The term genocide was coined after the Second World War by Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin who wanted a category of crimes to denote the Holocaust where Jews were killed with the specific intent to annihilate them as a group. - Dawn</div><div><br></div><div>bnbd24/fas</div>