WORLD / JANUARY 11, 2024

South Africa’s ICJ Case Against Israel

Is a Call to Break Free From the
Imperial West
South Africa is not only challenging Israel—it is trying to break the spell of US hegemony.

TONY KARON

Palestinians carrying flags and banners gather at the Nelson Mandela Square to demonstrate in support of the genocide case filed
by South Africa against Israel at the International Court of Justice, on January 10, 2024, in Ramallah, the West Bank.
(Issam Rimawi / Anadolu via Getty Images)

Unfortunately for long-suffering Palestinians, the “necessity” of organized violence to slaughter many
thousands of civilians is in the eye of the beholder. And Israel is betting that its war on Gaza falls within
the parameters of what is deemed acceptable in the corridors of power in the imperial West, where terms
like “collateral damage” sanitize today’s version of the colonial-era massacres of brown-skinned people in
“pacification” campaigns. “Necessary” brutality is a centuries-old principle in the pursuit and maintenance
of Western power, whether in the form of European colonizers, American settlers decimating Native
populations, the US military bludgeoning the Vietnamese, Afghanis, or Iraqis to bend to Washington’s will,
or then–Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice telling Lebanon to grin and bear the mass death and PRIVACY
destruction wrought by Israel’s 2006 invasion as the “birth pangs of a new Middle East.”
Indeed, no less an ideologue of Western power than “Clash of Civilizations” theorist Samuel P. Huntington
admitted as much: “The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to
which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying
organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.”

Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky, founder of the Revisionist Zionist movement that has been the hegemonic force
in Israeli politics for most of the past five decades, seemed well aware of the point Huntington made a half
century later. Jabotinsky’s influential 1923 pamphlet, “ The Iron Wall,” was an unsentimental call to arms to
those who sought to build and maintain a Jewish ethno-state in Palestine: “We are seeking to colonize a
country against the wishes of its population, in other words, by force. Everything else that is undesirable
grows out of this root with axiomatic inevitability.”

The violence that Israel is unleashing is the same kind of violence that made the West the dominant force
in the international system. And it is Israel’s grounding in a Western colonial order that’s used to justify the
savagery it rains down on Gaza. Violence that is unfortunate but necessary to defend the frontiers of
“civilization” from “barbarism” is a long-standing principle of Western powers. And it is by that principle
that Israel demands support for its campaign in Gaza. The New York Times reported that in diplomatic
conversations and public statements, Israel officials “have cited past Western military actions in urban
areas dating from World War II to the post-9/11 wars against terrorism…to help justify a campaign against
Hamas that is claiming thousands of Palestinian lives.”

But the charge of genocide South Africa has brought at the International Court of Justice in hope of halting
Israel’s campaign is a reminder of Huntington’s observation that non-Westerners never forgot how the
West was made, nor are they willing to accept its prerogatives. Many in the Global South see in Israel’s
violence an echo of their own historical brutalization and humiliation at the hands of Western power.

South Africa is not only stepping up to confront Israel; it is effectively challenging the United States,
Israel’s key enabler, which aggressively blocks any attempts to hold Israel accountable to international law.
By filing suit at the ICJ, South Africa is telling the world that the US and its allies cannot be trusted to halt
Israel’s genocidal campaign.

South Africa’s apartheid regime had been Israel’s ideological soulmate and closest ally; post-apartheid
South Africa now honors the moral obligation laid out by the late President Nelson Mandela, to not rest
until Palestine is free. And its action also implies an inheritance of the moral responsibility to lead global
civil society to act against apartheid that derives from its own experience of struggle abetted by
international solidarity.

Millions marching on the world’s streets tell us that much of civil society stands with the Palestinians. Yet
most of governments that aren’t directly supportive of Israel’s criminality have nonetheless failed to act.
And it’s not hard to see why. Israel bombs and starves civilians, deliberately destroying their means of
survival. And it acts with a well-grounded confidence that the American munitions it drops on the mothers
and children of Gaza will keep flowing while Washington provides political cover. South Africa has acted to
try to break the US-mandated passivity, offering an example of independent action by the Global South to
halt Western-approved war crimes.

When Mandela, released from prison in 1990, was challenged in the US on his relationship with
Palestinian Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat, he politely but firmly made clear to the US PRIVACY
establishment that “your enemies are not our enemies,” a principle of nonalignment that his heirs now
pursue.

Of course, there have always been limits on the ability of Third World governments to stand up to the US
and Europe, chief among them the centrality of Western-run global financial markets to the ability of those
governments to govern. The grotesquely unequal global economy created by the West’s colonial pillaging
was maintained, after political decolonization, in the form codified private-property relations that
essentially gave the US and Europe veto power over the political independence of the former colonies.
Even today we see this leverage with Egypt under pressure to accommodate tens of thousands of
Palestinian refugees ethnically cleansed from Gaza, in exchange for writing off $160 billion of its national
debt.

Despite its subordinate position in the global financial system, South Africa has begun to resist the
geopolitical demands of the United States, most notably refusing, in concert with most of the Global South,
to take the NATO side in the Ukraine war. That may reflect a decline in US power relative to others and the
growing economic independence of the middle powers. But South Africa’s ICJ action breaks new ground as
a geopolitical challenge to the US. Because when you charge Israel with genocide, you can’t avoid the
reality, unstated though it may be, that you’re effectively indicting the United States as an accomplice.

A corollary to Huntington’s point about non-Western memory comes in a pattern where moments of
successful organized violence by non-Western peoples against ostensibly invincible Western powers
sometimes inspires resistance across the Global South. Pankaj Mishra has illuminated this pattern in the
impact of Japan’s defeat of imperial Russia in 1905 on intellectuals ranging from Sun Yat-sen to Jawaharlal
Nehru to Mustafa Kemal Ataturk to W.E.B. Du Bois: “They all drew the same lesson from Japan’s victory:
White men, conquerors of the world, were no longer invincible.”

A similar frisson of inspiration was felt across the Global South when Vietnamese revolutionaries defeated
the French colonial army at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. And again when they defeated the Americans who had
replaced France. Or when bearded Cuban revolutionaries ejected a US-backed dictator and fought off
efforts to restore the ancien régime. The South African generation who led the 1976 Soweto uprising
against the apartheid government were emboldened by the spectacle, months earlier, of Pretoria’s
supposedly invincible army being forced to retreat from Angola by Cuban and MPLA forces. Hezbollah’s
1999 victory in the 15-year guerilla war to force Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon had a similar
inspirational effect on Palestinians and their neighbors. And so on.

Many will note that while Israel has pulverized much of Gaza and continues to kill hundreds of civilians
every day, it’s failing to destroy Hamas’s fighting capability. “Skepticism grows over Israel’s ability to
dismantle Hamas,” warned The New York Times. And far from marginalizing Hamas, Israel’s actions have
made the movement more popular than ever among Palestinians and across the Arab region, while
weakening leaders aligned with Israel and the United States.

Palestinian organizer Fadi Quran recently argued that Israel’s offensive is actually diminishing its
“deterrent” image: “We’ve seen a massive shift in the average perspective on the Israeli military in the
MENA region. It used to be viewed as an intimidating advanced force to be reckoned with, with a level of
supremacy that could not be broken,” he wrote. “Now it is perceived as extremely weak and fragile.
Specifically, the current perspective is that it would be easily defeated if it didn’t have unlimited American
backing.”
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2 The Idea of the Nation-State Is Synonymous With Genocide

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4 South Africa’s ICJ Case Against Israel Is a Call to Break Free From the Imperial
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TONY KARON

Israel’s reliance on aerial bombing and shelling of urban population centers, Quran argues, is “being
perceived as the most cowardly tactic of a military that’s afraid of fighting ‘face to face’ with a militia that
is a TENTH its size, has 1 percent of its resources, and has been under siege for 17 years. Israel’s ground
incursions happen through fortified tanks after massive aerial and artillery bombardment and yet still fail
to effectively hold territory.”

Israel’s tactics of collective punishment and the extent and nature of the violence Western powers are
willing to countenance against a captive, colonized people in Gaza are also a reminder to formerly
colonized people and their descendants of how the West was made.

Israel expects understanding in Western capitals because of the traditions of “necessary violence” of
Western imperial dominance, almost implying it is antisemitic to deny Israel the right to behave in the early
21st century in ways that European powers and the US did in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Here it’s worth recalling an observation by the late British historian Tony Judt on the consequences of
Israel being late to the settler-colonial game:

The problem with Israel, in short, is not—as is sometimes suggested—that it is a European ‘enclave’ in
the Arab world; but rather that it arrived too late. It has imported a characteristically late-nineteenth-
century separatist project into a world that has moved on, a world of individual rights, open frontiers,
and international law. The very idea of a “Jewish state”—a state in which Jews and the Jewish religion
have exclusive privileges from which non-Jewish citizens are forever excluded—is rooted in another time
and place. Israel, in short, is an anachronism.

Adds Financial Times columnist Adam Tooze:

The Israelis are the last group of (mainly) Europeans to engage in the wholesale arrogation of non-
European land, justified in their mission by theology, claims to civilizational superiority and nationalism.
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 Of course, land grabs go on, all over the world, all the time. But, in the present day, the Israeli project is
uniquely coherent and uniquely unapologetic as an instance of “classic” settler-colonial ideology.

So Israel is waging a classic colonial war of pacification of a native population resisting colonization—at a
moment when much of the global citizenry is producing the receipts of centuries of Western violence and
enslavement, demanding justice and a reordering of global power relations. Standing up for Palestine has
become shorthand for that global struggle to change how the world is ruled.

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KAY GABRIEL

Gaza has laid bare the basic hypocrisy of Biden’s “rules-based international order”—a system of hypocrisy
that legitimizes and enables violence against the colonized Palestinians and Israel’s systemic violations of
international law. Israel’s military campaign—and its apartheid system—may be tolerated by Western
powers, but they are intolerable to the citizenry of the Global South.

In its moment of unipolar post–Cold War dominance, Washington demanded monopoly control over the
international community’s Israel-Palestinian file. The result was a “peace process” in which Israel
relentlessly expanded and deepened its apartheid occupation, while US officials shut down any discussion
of restraining Israel by intoning vacuous mantras of a “two-state solution” that might be imperiled if Israel
were made to comply with international law. That moment is over.

South Africa is sending a message, via its ICJ case, that accepting US leadership over global events means
accepting the slaughter of tens of thousands of Palestinians and ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands
more.

The US playbook aggressively resists initiatives like South Africa’s ICJ complaint, just as it routinely vetoes
any UN Security Council effort to restrain Israel’s systemic violations of international law. South Africa’s
legal action breaks the spell of US hegemony that paralyzes so much of the world community from taking
action to hold the genocidaires accountable. It’s a clarion call to the Global South to defy the limits on
international engagement set by Washington. If countries in the Global South want the bloodbath and the
ethnic cleansing to be stopped, they can’t rely on Israel’s US accomplice to deliver that.

The setting for this geopolitical challenge may be the cataclysmic urgency of stopping Israel’s crimes, but
whether or not it succeeds, the ICJ case may mark a new chapter in the shift away from US hegemony and
a world run according to rules that legitimize war crimes by the US or its allies.

Tony Karon
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Tony Karon is the editorial lead of Al Jazeera’s AJ+, a former senior editor at Time magazine, and was an
activist in the anti-apartheid liberation movement in his native South Africa.

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