Why South Africa has brought the case against Israel

A spectre has long haunted Israel: the spectre of South Africa. Specifically, Israeli leaders have feared that a world recognising their oppression of Palestinians as an apartheid system might be moved to impose on Israel the same international isolation that helped end South Africa’s system of white minority rule. However, few Israeli leaders would have expected that impetus to come in the form of a South African lawsuit in The Hague alleging genocide.

Recent UN general assembly votes show that most of the international community is appalled by Israel’s brutalisation of Gaza, yet appears unable to act. It’s as if Israel is shielded by an unspoken but commonly accepted US prerogative to set the terms of any international interventions in the Middle East. Indeed, what makes the South African action all the more remarkable is the reality that when you indict Israel for genocide, you’re effectively accusing its armourer and diplomatic enabler – the US – of being an accomplice to the crime of all crimes.

So, why has South Africa taken this bold step?

The late president Nelson Mandela had assumed, on behalf of his people, a moral burden when he declared in 1997 that “our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians”. The African National Congress (ANC) had counted the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) as a close ally that had actively assisted in its work to free itself from the indignity and oppression of apartheid. With South Africa freed, by its own struggle and with international support, by the early 1990s, Mandela believed it was time to secure the rights of the Palestinians and of others fighting for self-determination.

The relationship began in the 1960s when the ANC was part of the non-aligned movement and the more radical Tricontinental conference which committed itself to aid liberation movements still fighting for independence. It operated in a network of revolutionary movements in developing countries, some now in power, others still fighting for liberation. Its allies ranged from newly freed Angola and Mozambique to Cuba, Algeria, Ethiopia, Vietnam and beyond. But the Palestinians, stateless luminaries within that firmament of rebellion, always held a special place in the hearts of those who fought for liberation in South Africa. The reason is simply that both struggles faced violent settler-colonial regimes in close alliance with one another.

Even as a teenage Zionist of the left in South Africa – before the illusions of that identity collapsed under the weight of their absurdity and I found my way into the ANC – my anti-apartheid inclinations made me especially uncomfortable that Israel was the apartheid regime’s closest ally. Many of us were appalled in 1976 when Israel hosted South African prime minister John Vorster, an avowed Nazi imprisoned during the second world war for his work in a paramilitary sabotage organisation linked to Hitler’s abwehr, his military-intelligence service. Even more so, later, when it turned out that Israel was negotiating arms deals with South Africa, which violated the UN arms embargo, and even cooperated on nuclear-weapons development.

My alarm deepened two years later when an acquaintance told me how he’d scored a plum posting during his South African military service. His fluency in Hebrew and Afrikaans, thanks to his Jewish day school education, landed him a staff position as a translator for the Israeli officers quietly seconded to the South African Defence Force.

As early as 1978, I’d been told by ardent Zionists who’d emigrated from South Africa to a Habonim kibbutz that the permanent occupation of the West Bank and Gaza meant an apartheid system in which Israel ruled millions of Palestinians denied the rights of citizenship.

It wasn’t hard, then, to see the link between parallel struggles against apartheid, and hope for a decolonisation that would, as Aimé Césaire promised, redeem the humanity of both the coloniser and the colonised in a new community of belonging. The ANC was fighting to replace apartheid with a new state that guaranteed security, dignity, freedom and equality to all who live in it. And we supported the fight to replace Israeli apartheid with a new

But the third world politics of non-alignment in which we had come of age was largely extinguished by the collapse of the Berlin Wall starting in 1989, and the onset of neoliberal US unipolarity. This was the era during which the US claimed exclusive, uncontested ownership of the international community’s Israel-Palestine file, batting away any attempt to seek Israeli compliance with international law as “unhelpful” to a chimeric “two-state solution”. Thus the origins of three decades of massively expanded apartheid occupation, and of the brazen impunity that undergirds Israel’s current war crime spree.

Israel can count on unconditional US backing for its systemic criminality. And it feels comfortable following the example of its US mentor which flagrantly defied international law in its “war on terror” and Iraq invasion.

Perhaps, then, South Africa’s solidarity at this point, US objections notwithstanding, also reflects the decline of Washington’s ability to enforce its unipolar hegemony. The genocide case against Israel in the international court of justice is thus a clarion call to the rest of the world that a values-based solidarity is once again an option. And that a different world order is possible.

• Tony Karon is the AJ+ managing editor