South Africa strips the people of Gaza of their striped pyjamas. The International Court of Justice is the only obstacle.

What has been difficult for the dominated global South to express its discontent regarding the plight of the Palestinian people has, at last, found a voice through South Africa’s courage to take on its arch-enemy, apartheid. Gaza striped pyjamas were gradually becoming an accepted fashion to the extent that it is not worn by anyone in the Middle East. It is because of the pursuit of her declared national interest to protect and promote its constitutional order and, more acutely, the mission to heal the divisions and injustices of the past and contribute to the establishment of a global society based on democratic values, social justice, and fundamental human right that South Africa punched a historically weighty Israel.

In a world where the capacity of all members of the UN Security Council to stand on the side of justice is overrated, the wrath of colonialism and apartheid South Africa experienced has beaten the gentleness of diplomacy she might still have at the provocation of apartheid been practised anywhere in the world. Having masterminded worldwide isolation of the apartheid regime of the pre-1994 era, its settlement became a living testimony that the human race is the only race and no person is less worthy of human rights.

The worldwide wait and anticipation of the South Africa v Israel case on the Gaza genocide and related assumed the status of a Justice v Injustice tournament. Similar in anticipation, in South Africa, of the court case is the global wait to see Nelson Mandela walk out of prison, thus giving his proverbial back to apartheid. It would be the same Nelson Mandela who obligated South Africans to work for the freedom of Palestine to complete the liberation of South Africa. The defeat of apartheid has now become the towering global indicator of the depth of the triumph of the human spirit.

 

The essence of being South African and consistent with its constitutional order will be on display in the apex court of the world as the merits of the genocide case are being investigated and finally pronounced upon. The International Court of Justice will be presiding over the mother of all injustices in the world, apartheid undergirded by systematic land dispossession. While the outcome of this injustice, genocide, euphemistically called smallpox in historical renditions where it occurred outside the purview of global governance, will be foregrounded, it is apartheid which is on trial. In the trial, the world will also realise that apartheid was never put on trial itself or any of its outcomes wherever it occurred. What happened in South Africa was settling it and, at best, subjecting it to a confessionary truth and reconciliation commission process. 

 

Whatever the outcome of the case, Israel is put in a position where it will be defending the correctness of the inhuman killing of more than twenty thousand unarmed civilians, most of whom are women and children, in the occupied territories of Palestine. It will be defending, under oath, its bombing to rubble the Palestinian settlements, including public infrastructure such as hospitals, hospices, facilities for the disabled, places of worship, and historical sites associated with the science and cultural development of humanity. 

 

Israel will be defending its right to violate UN resolutions and many other treaties and agreements in the quest to settle the centuries-old land dispossession dispute with the Palestinians. They will be fighting for their right to seize the whole of Gaza and other territories they have unlawfully occupied in Palestine. It will defend its right not to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza and other territories. Israel will be arguing in a chamber of global justice for its right not to silence the guns, stop the bombing, and halt its claim of additional Palestinian land, such as the Golan Heights and other occupied and annexed territories. 

 

Its arguments, including those of its supporters, will indicate to the world the depth of commitment to correct the injustices of imperialism, colonialism, apartheid, and racism. The extent to which the international criminal justice system is ready to confront the residues of wars of dispossession and the barbaric principle of rewarding unjust wars with the so-called spoils of war will be on trial. The extent to which non-white lives matter and readiness to remove the proverbial suffocating knee on the neck of the global south will be on trial. 

 

In its arguments, Israel must be able to say it is correct for Israeli Palestinians to be denied what the South African constitutional order guarantees to all who live in it: property rights and cardinal freedoms. Israel must argue the correctness of Palestinians being subjected to a government that is not based on the will of the people. As we have seen, South Africa argued from a basis that espouses recognising past injustice. In the same vein, South Africa might, if not careful, find itself having defended the right of Hamas to kill in the interest of the justice it is pursuing. It might risk sending a message that the kidnapping of civilians is a better way to provoke global attention to your plight.

It is a legal battle whose ramifications will assist the world, as the South African anti-apartheid struggle did, in defining what interests humanity above the political interests of the global elites and national interests of dominant nations. It is a trial whose impact will interrogate the efficacy of the international governance institutions and systems, including their biases. Regardless of judgement or court decision, what will triumph will be human dignity, human rights, non-racialism, and the supremacy of justice. It will be the ‘lost voices of the people of Palestine that will continue to be heard’; the time to strip the people of Gaza of the striped pyjamas has come; they are humans, after all.