The decision by South Africa to stick its neck out in what will go in history as its second anti-apartheid frontier is important beyond the Nelson Mandela directive that "our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians." The ICJ case will subject South Africa, and the ANC in particular, to a storm of heightened (foreign) investment strikes, sophisticated regime change funding of political adversaries, and a cocktail of interdependent decisions by the global Israeli lobby to supercharge the neutralisation of South Africa as an emerging existential threat to the moral legitimacy of the Israeli occupation of Palestine.
Despite
the presentation of the RSA decision as a profound solidarity with the
Palestinian endeavour, the action will go in history as one of the
international actions it took to advance its recently revised definition of
national interests. The new international relations strategic path will
henceforth be affected by the founding values of the constitutional order, the
context of the democratic order, and the general posture of the predominant
political order.
While
these will be challenged by the threat of South Africa's moral authority to
claim global integrity in such matters when it is fighting ethicalness battles
on the home front, reported corruption and state capture, its gallant execution
of a worldwide anti-apartheid isolation of the apartheid regime qualifies it to
lead. In real terms, South Africa's legal success against apartheid is
monumental in the global struggle to liquidate racism and all its adjuncts and
acutely systemic race-inspired dispossession of land.
The
Israeli occupation of Palestine cannot co-exist with what defines South Africa
as a nation and state in the same way the holocaust of the nineteenth century
would not. South Africa's constitutional values are a background of permanence
to its international policy posture. Her concept of freedom for all of humanity
exerts a powerful sway over how it relates to other nations. With apartheid
being declared a crime against humanity and genocide being known to have been a
currency of most occupations and land dispossession successes, South Africa is
thus constitutionally obliged to act in a way that legitimises the foundations
of its existence as a democracy.
Indeed,
this posture might not be consistently applied. It is the acuteness of
apartheid in Palestine-occupied territories and how being Palestinian has been
dehumanised which makes the Gaza genocide a case worth all the risks associated
with accusing the state of Israel of genocide. Faced with the prospect of being
redefined as an ally of the Judeo-Christian public diplomacy complex, South
Africa was defined by what its constitutional order defines as a
democracy.
Pursuing
human dignity, social justice, non-racialism, non-sexism, human rights,
comprehensive freedom, and the right to self-determination defines the essence
of being South African. Where these are suffocated, South Africa will always
act for their restoration. As an anti-apartheid lung of the world, apartheid is
an impurity South Africans cannot tolerate.
After having exhausted all diplomatic avenues to stop the carnage and killings in Palestine, South Africa, and accurate to the type of democracy it is, and more specifically its belief in the independence of the judiciary, sought the adjudication of the global judiciary to pronounce. After a few botched UN resolutions, South Africa took the State of Israel to the ICJ, a practice the South African State has had experience with when its executive authority is found to be inconsistent with what its Constitution provides. This instrument of separating the judicial, executive, and legislative authority in South Africa and somewhat in the global multilateral governance system will be tested at the ICJ by a country that lives its practice.
It
will be a global statute on genocide and its ventilation in an International
Court that will adjudicate the impasse about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.
The world will have precedence to follow in its definition of genocide. Those
countries that are signatories to the statute will be drawn into the policing
of genocide in terms of how it might be adjudicated anew. The impact will not
only be on the Middle East but also aspects of the Ukraine conflict, the Western
Sahara, and the plight of the Uyghurs in China. Suppose South Africa had not
repaid the world for helping in the legal liquidation of apartheid. In that
case, the Israeli case might have been a priceless and intergenerational return
on investment to the world. CUT!!!
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