The Israeli response to South Africa's rendition at the International Court of Justice reveals the depth of crisis in the State of Israel regarding how it deals with its Palestinian reality. How Israel put the best foot forward and attitude towards Palestinian lives demonstrated the dramatic manifestation of the systemic problems of its social order. During the rendition, insurgent actors and (negative) ideologies exposed ingrained patterns according to which Israeli society functions in matters concerning Palestinians. Israel's overall demeanour and posture towards Palestinians confirmed that it is in a twilight zone of persistence beyond self legitimation. It is clear that Israel interacts with the world about Palestine against the background of a historically ingrained concept of self that might be the source of how it reads the growing isolation from other nations.
As
a people, it would seem Israelis have defined or structured a civilisation
based on the invisibility of those they believe have no claim or right to what
they have occupied through protracted wars of land dispossession. As Israel constituted itself as a nation-state, the state created laws upon which their
legal system would adjudicate power relations based on the invisibility, exclusion, or
otherwise of those the legal system defined out of humanity. With the growing legitimacy for
a Palestinian State to exist came a growing indifference by Israel to the
consequence of ceding occupied and annexed territories, including full
sovereignty, to a constituted and self-determined Palestine.
It
will always be the arrangements that the Israeli society has agreed to govern
itself with, which will determine how it relates to Palestinians and the world.
Such arrangements will shape the value system the Israeli state will display to
the world on any matter. National interests and passions, negotiables,
compromises, and non-negotiables will flow from these values. The correctness of
foundational values, when juxtaposed against a universal consensus on justice,
human dignity, and human rights, position any nation as either rogue, out
of variance, compliant, or outlier. Indicators of where a nation is on the justice-to-injustice
continuum are often seen in how its cognitive elites rationalise actions,
interactions, and transactions of that society's conglomerates of violence,
influence, and power towards other nations or societies.
Since
injustice can never be justice, no justification for injustices being meted against another
will make it just. War, self-defence, or national security interests can never
be the reason to condone injustice. This is notwithstanding the difficulty of
being indiscriminate in responding to severe provocation. In these terrains of
conflict-laden interactions. Those with power are expected to exercise maximum
restraint as they negotiate their interests in any the conflict. This is where the
normative context of a society gets tested or stretched by the prerogative and
arbitrary nature of those the authority to act is vested in them.
In
a democracy where the forces of history, religion, fundamentalism, orthodoxy,
and antiquity converge around the institutional power of the state to execute,
the organisation of political power determines the degree to which public power
is normative or prerogative. Worst, the normative that might be obtained can
result from dominant prerogativeness when rules were made. History records that
administrative and judicial bureaucracies can operate according to legal rules
yet not legitimate or consistent with the universal consensus of what is in the interest of justice or simply just. The world has seen how apartheid, despite its inhumane nature, was legal as a system because the then state enacted into law. This is why apartheid was instructive to the administrative and
judicial bureaucracy to implement and enforce it crime against humanity laws.
The legality of apartheid was based on a racial
segregation system the then cognitive elite within the establishment
rationalised its correctness. It was not until apartheid was subjected to the
test of international statutes and compliance to the universal principles of justice that a review or reform was deemed necessary by its elites and establishment. The contested genocidal or otherwise of Israel's
response to the fateful and inhuman Hamas-led act on 7 October is in a similar test with regard to its consistency with the universal consensus on human dignity, justice, and proportionality. This means the
undergirding prejudicial lenses with which the apartheid state saw black people had
to go for extensive review, a condition the case at The Hague has thrust the
State of Israel and its people into.
The State of Israel, in how it argued, announced to the world that it has a normative system which defines its democracy and legal system. It is the extent to which that normative system accommodates or defines Palestinians as beneficiaries of the freedoms, human rights, and human dignity returns it guarantees Israelis that makes Israel inconsistent with the universal expectations. How Israel has defined its right of title to Palestinian Territories is etched in orthodoxies which modern conceptions of equality, property rights, and freedom have differently universalised. It is these orthodoxies and beliefs, including those of Palestinians, that have made the context of interaction and transaction between Israelis and Palestinians on the one hand, and both of them with the world on the other, which makes them stuck in a quicksand of operating free of standard legal restraints and thus find themselves exercising power arbitrarily. As a consequence, they are superseding even the normative restraint working for themselves.
To South Africa, this condition of Israelis and Palestinians is an anomaly only a commitment by the warring parties can resolve, barring the complexity of geopolitical interests behind each of them. Until the true incentives of pursuing or thwarting peace are burst into the open, they will find a convergence point. The two-state policy or agreement in Oslo has brought the two sides closer to the extent that the interests seem to have not been in the purview of both parties or one of them. South Africa, and I argue, went for the legal route to establish the genocidal character of Israel and thus consolidated a platform upon which a discussion on why then the need to be genocidal. The consequent answers will loop back to the rights of both to sovereign statehood.
The military might of Israel and that of its guarantors, arguably the NATO
Complex of Nations, creates in the vortex of conflict a dimension of power
relations. There is, therefore, a power imbalance that structures how both
parties approach their conflict. After all is said and done, the courage of
South Africa has elevated the plight of Palestinians into a global justice
matter befitting of adjudication at the International Court of Justice.
International jurisprudence will not only be developed, reviewed, and recalibrated, it will also be on trial. The implications will be vast. CUT!!!
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