South Africa Has Regained Some Of Its Lost Moral Authority With ICJ Genocide Case Against Israel - Prof Saths Cooper

BY PROFESSOR SATHS COOPER

On Thursday, I joined many of you in watching the tour de force by the outstanding legal team representing South Africa’s case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague to stop the genocide in Gaza.

The clearly evidenced manner in which respected lawyers – Dr Adila Hassim SC, Tembeka Ngcukaitobi SC, Prof John Dugard SC, Prof Max Du Plessis SC, Ms Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh KC, and Prof Vaughan Lowe KC – presented the case to protect life and prevent further genocide, was compelling.

Similar to our rugby World Cup win in October last year, Thursday’s ICJ hearing truly made us proud to be South African, as we start a year that can be fraught with more decline and decay, or be alive with the enormous possibilities that a country standing together, finding one another across artificial barriers imposed by our imprisoned history, engaging vigorously on issues that impact us to find viable ways forward, ignoring the bleating of inane self-serving, inward-vested, self-important persons from scores of political parties and millionaires who wield extraordinary power; all promising us heaven, knowing that they will deliver us unto hell if we allow them to; can offer.

Most of us know that terrible geopolitics and tiresome and failing narratives – where oppression and dehumanisation assume a mindless, alluringly misguided and abnormal value – can once again so easily prevail post-the ICJ case.

This will allow the perpetuation of crimes against humanity, and demonstrate that international forums work for the entitled and privileged few, against the rest of us.

A negative outcome at the ICJ will likely accelerate the need for the outdated and incapacitated United Nations, which comprises 193 sovereign states, being held hostage by the ineffective Security Council – a product of World War II that ended on September 2, 1945 – to be reformed.

The five states (the US, UK, Russia, France, and China), who hold arrogated permanent veto status in the UN Security Council, manufacture, disseminate and glorify weapons and other products of mass and individual destruction, increase their numerous war bases across the globe, and control ill-gotten wealth from the time of slavery, colonisation and their sequelae.

They are largely responsible for creating more poverty, marginalisation, illness and death of the majority on our fragile planet, made unsafe and steadily degraded by their actions.

They wield enormous and undue influence over those who appear to be in power in the rest of our fragile planet.

Whatever the outcome at the ICJ, South Africa regained some of its lost moral authority after the demise – at least on paper – of apartheid that followed Nazism as a crime against humanity.

Open-minded people everywhere, who abhor war and its devastations, will ensure that our vulnerable and threatened world cannot continue in the third decade of the 21st century to remain apathetic, and so closely controlled, while giving the appearance of being liberating.

Continuing to find refuge in the marks of our origin, our limited socialisation and reliance on blatant peddlers of untruths who proliferate on social and mainstream media will further limit our ability to effectively mediate our complex world.

This will only crush us further, and reduce our agency, which we cannot afford to delegate to anybody else.

We are who we make ourselves to be, despite our origins and circumstances, refusing to be restricted to anybody else’s biased image. We were born and should always be free, in mind, body and spirit, and should constantly strive for inner and outer peace.

Anything else will render us ineffectual and powerless, causing us to lose hope in our innate ability to strive against adversity and be part of transforming our world into a peaceful and thriving one that we so desperately desire.

We have that power. Let’s not lose it as we celebrate the 30th anniversary of our hard-won democracy.

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Nelson Mandela’s Support For Palestinians Endures With South Africa’s Genocide Case Against Israel

Late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, left, embraces the late former South Africa President Nelson Mandela, right, at a meeting in Johannesburg Thursday May 3, 2001. (AP Photo/Denis Farrell, File)

BY GERALD IMRAY

CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA (AP) — Barely two weeks after he was released from prison in 1990, Nelson Mandela flew to Zambia to meet with African leaders who had supported his fight against South Africa’s apartheid system of forced racial segregation.

One figure stood out among the men in dark suits eagerly waiting to greet Mandela on the airport tarmac: Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, wearing his black and white checkered keffiyeh headdress, had traveled to see the newly freed Mandela.

He grabbed Mandela in a bear hug and kissed him on each cheek. Mandela smiled broadly. It was confirmation of the solidarity between two men who considered their peoples’ struggles for freedom to be the same.

South Africans continue to support the Palestinian cause, and the country has taken the rare step of bringing a genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice because of its war in Gaza.


South Africa is not a diplomatic heavyweight and is geographically far from the conflict. But its ruling African National Congress, which Mandela led from an anti-apartheid liberation movement to a political party in government, has retained its strong pro-Palestinian stance even after Mandela died in 2013.





“We have stood with the Palestinians and we will continue to stand with our Palestinian brothers and sisters,” Mandela’s grandson, Mandla Mandela, said at a pro-Palestinian rally in Cape Town in October, days after the Hamas attack in southern Israel spurred the war on Gaza. Mandla Mandela, an ANC lawmaker, wore a black and white Palestinian keffiyeh around his neck as he spoke to a large crowd.
A SHARED STRUGGLE

Nelson Mandela regularly raised the plight of the Palestinians. Three years after apartheid and white minority rule was dismantled in South Africa and Mandela was elected president in historic all-race elections in 1994, he thanked the international community for its help. He added: “But we know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.”

Mandela and South African leaders after him compared the restrictions Israel placed on Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank with the treatment of Black South Africans during apartheid, framing the two issues as fundamentally about people oppressed in their homeland. Israel provided weapons systems to South Africa’s apartheid government and maintained secret military ties with it up until the mid-1980s, even after publicly denouncing apartheid.

The ANC has consistently criticized Israel as an “apartheid state,” even before the current war. International rights groups have also accused Israel of the crime of apartheid against Palestinians and that “resonates strongly with South Africa,” said Thamsanqa Malusi, a South African human rights lawyer.

Israel adamantly rejects that characterization, saying its Arab minority enjoys full civil rights. It views Gaza, from which it withdrew soldiers and settlers in 2005, as a hostile entity ruled by the Islamic militant group Hamas, and it considers the West Bank to be disputed territory subject to peace negotiations — which collapsed more than a decade ago.

Malusi said many in the South African government experienced the oppression of apartheid and that could help explain its decision to lodge the case against Israel at the U.N.'s top court.

While Mandela, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning statesman, also reached out to Israel in an attempt to foster a peaceful solution, anti-Israeli rhetoric in South Africa has strengthened over the years, sometimes seeping into everyday life. For example, the ANC’s youth wing pressured South African grocery store chains to drop Israeli products and threatened to forcibly shut them down if they didn’t.
RESPONSE TO THE WAR


Israel’s assault on Gaza sparked renewed solidarity with the Palestinian cause in South Africa. Thousands have marched in support of Gaza in Cape Town and Johannesburg, and buildings in the Cape Town neighborhood of Bo Kaap were adorned with pro-Palestinian graffiti in the weeks after the war broke out.

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa — the current leader of the ANC — has criticized both Israel and Hamas for what he calls atrocities committed by both sides in the conflict. But he also appeared in public wearing a keffiyeh and holding a Palestinian flag, even as he offered condolences to Israel over the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks, leaving little doubt where South Africa’s sympathies lie.
HAMAS CONNECTIONS


ANC officials, including Mandla Mandela, hosted three Hamas officials in South Africa last month, including the group’s top representative in Iran. They attended a ceremony marking the 10th anniversary of Nelson Mandela’s death before a statue of the former South African President at the seat of government in a nod to his historic connection with the Palestinian cause.

On Wednesday, the eve of the court proceedings, Palestinians in the West Bank city of Ramallah crowded around another statue of Mandela, waving Palestinian and South African flags and holding signs that read: “Thank You South Africa.”

The Hamas visit to South Africa was not welcomed by all, though.

South Africa’s main opposition party has said it considers Hamas a terrorist organization, as do the United States and European Union, and support for Palestinians in South Africa has complicated racial connotations. Black and mixed-race South Africans, brutally oppressed under apartheid, have been at the forefront of the support for Palestinians. Support is not as pronounced among South Africa’s white minority.
ACCUSATIONS OF HYPOCRISY

South Africa’s ANC-led government says it is taking a moral stance in its genocide case against Israel, first seeking an order for Israel to stop the assaults in Gaza that have killed more than 23,300 Palestinians, two-thirds of them women and children, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.

But the case has given rise to accusations of hypocrisy: The ANC has itself ignored international court orders.

The ANC government refused to arrest then-Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir when he visited South Africa in 2015 while the subject of a warrant on allegations of genocide by the separate International Criminal Court. South Africa has also retained strong ties with Russia and President Vladimir Putin since the invasion of Ukraine, overlooking an ICC indictment against Putin for alleged war crimes in relation to the abduction of children from Ukraine.

Israel vehemently disputes the genocide claims, saying it is fighting a war of self-defense after Hamas militants launched its Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel, killing about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking roughly 250 hostage. Israel says its actions comply with international law and that it does its best to prevent harm to civilians, blaming Hamas for embedding in residential areas.
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AP Africa news: https://apnews.com/hub/africa

Russia: Arafat's Death Not Caused By Radiation

Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat pauses during an emergency cabinet session at his compound in the West Bank town of Ramallah. A Russian probe into the death of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat has found no trace of radioactive poisoning, the chief of the government agency that conducted the study said Thursday, Dec. 26, 2013.

MOSCOW, RUSSIA (ASSOCIATED PRESS) — A Russian probe into the death of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat has found no trace of radioactive poisoning — a finding that comes after a French probe found traces of the radioactive isotope polonium and a Swiss investigation said the timeframe of his illness and death was consistent with that of polonium poisoning.

Vladimir Uiba, the head of the Federal Medical and Biological Agency, said Thursday that Arafat died of natural causes and the agency had no plans to conduct further tests. Teams of scientists from France, Switzerland and Russia were asked to determine whether polonium, a rare and extremely lethal substance, played a role in Arafat's death in a French military hospital in 2004.

French experts found traces of polonium but said it was "of natural environmental origin," according to Arafat's widow, Suha Arafat. Swiss scientists, meanwhile, said they found elevated traces of polonium-210 and lead, and that the timeframe of Arafat's illness and death was consistent with poisoning from ingesting polonium.

Uiba spoke at a news conference on Thursday. In October, he was quoted by the Interfax news agency as saying that Arafat "could not have been poisoned by polonium" and that "traces of such a substance were not found."

It was not immediately clear how the three investigations could have come up with different conclusions. Palestinians have long suspected Israel of poisoning Arafat, which Israel denies. Russia, meanwhile, has had strong ties with Palestinian authorities since Soviet times when Moscow supported their struggle.

Dr. Abdullah Bashir, the head of the Palestinian medical committee investigating Arafat's death, said they were studying the Russian and Swiss reports. "When we finish we are going to announce the results," Bashir said in a telephone interview from Amman, Jordan. He wouldn't say when that might be.
Arafat's widow filed a legal complaint in France seeking an investigation into whether he was murdered after a 2012 report which said traces of polonium were found on his clothes. As part of that probe, French investigators had Arafat's remains exhumed and ordered a series of tests on them.
Polonium occurs naturally in very low concentrations in the Earth's crust and also is produced artificially in nuclear reactors. There are also tiny, generally undetectable amounts of polonium in humans.

Palestinian Ambassador to Russia, Fayed Mustafa, was quoted by state RIA Novosti news agency Thursday as saying that the Palestinian authorities respect the Russian experts' conclusions but consider it necessary to continue research into Arafat's death.

Uiba said, however, that his agency hasn't received any Palestinian request for additional studies. Arafat died Nov. 11, 2004, a month after falling ill at his West Bank headquarters. At the time, French doctors said he died of a stroke and had a blood-clotting problem, but records were inconclusive about what caused that condition.

Polonium can be a byproduct of the chemical processing of uranium, but usually it's made artificially in a nuclear reactor or a particle accelerator. Dozens of countries including Russia, Israel and the U.S. have the nuclear capability to produce polonium.

One of the most famous and recent cases of polonium-210 poisoning was that of ex-KGB officer Alexander Litvinenko who died in London in 2006 after drinking tea laced with the radioactive isotope. Britain has accused two Russians of the 2006 killing, but Moscow has refused to extradite them.

Mohammed Daraghmeh contributed to this report from Ramallah, West Bank.