The genocidal arrogance of the Zionist project has been possible because of the sustained military, economic and ideological support emanating from Washington, London and Berlin. The recent outpouring of massive, pro-Palestinian protests on the streets of both the Global North and South has begun to raise the political and electoral costs for those supporting the genocide. Now more than ever, whether in forums like the ICJ and ICC, or in sustained protest, or in re-invigorating the BDS, the tide of anti-Zionist action needs to be sustained and consolidated.
By Jeremy Cronin.
The International Court of Justice’s finding that Israel’s horrendous onslaught on the people of Gaza constitutes a plausible case of genocide is a landmark moment. The ruling thwarted Israel’s attempt to block what will now become a substantive judicial enquiry into Israel’s perpetration of this crime of crimes. The ICJ’s ruling is a significant contribution to puncturing the global impunity with which Zionist Israel has acted over decades.
Despite the best efforts of political elites in Washington and London, despite powerful Zionist lobby groups, despite the likes of the BBC and New York Times, there is a loss of control over the dominant Western narrative on Israel. Even before the ICJ ruling, an Economist/YouGov poll found that more than one-third of Americans believed Israel was committing genocide with a further 29 percent undecided.
In early February 800 serving officials in the US, EU and 11 European countries warned “there is a plausible risk our governments’ policies are contributing to grave violations of international law, war crimes and even ethnic cleansing or genocide”. They note that not only are their governments failing to prevent these grave violations, they are actively complicit in them through the continued arming and funding of Israel. Everywhere, cracks are opening in the edifice of empire.
In the front-line of puncturing the pro-Zionist narrative are the courageous journalists reporting from inside Gaza (at the time of writing over 122 had been killed since October 7), as well as numerous Gazan citizens reaching millions globally in real time through social media, filming on their cell-phones the sheer horror of the genocide being inflicted upon them.
Unsurprisingly, the Israeli government has brazenly defied the preliminary measures ordered by the ICJ to refrain from acts that could be genocidal and to urgently address the humanitarian crisis in the enclave. It is important to remember these preliminary orders are not just binding on Israel. They are binding on all signatory governments to the 1948 Genocide Convention including the US, UK, Germany and Canada.
The ICJ has ordered Israel to report back to the court (and to South Africa) within one month. Exposing the Israeli government to ongoing public accountability to the people of the world through the ICJ should become a continued catalyst for all-round mobilisation and solidarity.
South Africa, like several other countries, is also actively engaging the International Criminal Court (which investigates individuals, rather than governments, for war crimes). The ICC has a poor record of bias. South Africa’s foreign minister, Naledi Pandor, recently expressed frustration with the tardiness with which the ICC is proceeding on Israeli. The ICC prosecutor simply “couldn’t answer” when she asked him why he was able to quickly issue an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin, but none yet for Netanyahu.
It is not just at the international level that pro-Palestinian lawfare is being waged. In California progressive NGOs filed a civil case in a federal court accusing Biden, secretary of state Blinken and defence secretary Lloyd Austin of complicity in Israel’s genocide. Listening to evidence from Palestinians including via video link directly from Gaza and Ramallah, the judge explicitly agreed with the ICJ there was a plausible case of genocide against Israel. He implored the defendants, Biden, Blinken and Austin “to examine the results of their unflagging support of the military siege against Palestinians”, while regretting that, owing to a technicality in domestic US law, he did not have the power to stop the US supply of weapons to Israel. Similar genocide complicity cases against national politicians and civil servants in the UK, Canada, Italy, Australia and possibly Germany could well be more successful and should be pursued.
Understanding Zionist Israel’s key strategic vulnerability (its existential dependence on external support) underlines the importance of these deepening cleavages opening up in the heart of its Western backers.
Zionist Israel’s genocidal destruction of Gaza post-October 7 has burst the bubble on a certain world-weary fatigue that had set in regarding the fate of the Palestinian struggle. Just weeks before October 7, in a largely empty UN General Assembly chamber, Netanyahu infamously held up a map of the “New Middle East” that simply eliminated Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem. I don’t recall any public statement from the South African government on the matter at the time.
The post-apartheid government in South Africa and the ruling ANC and its alliance partners have a long and sincerely held sense of deep solidarity with the Palestinian struggle. As activists in the underground structures of the 1980s, we were greatly inspired by the urban based Intifada strategies developed by the Palestinians in struggle. Here was a form of struggle better suited to our largely urban social reality than the more characteristic, largely rural-based national liberation struggles of the second half of the 20th century whether in China, Cuba, Vietnam, or closer to home in Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Angola. I still have copies of underground SACP 1980s pamphlets urging local communities to take up “our own Intifada”.
There were many factors that contributed to the eventual negotiated transition to democracy in South Africa, including international sanctions, boycotts and widespread international anti-apartheid mobilisation. But it was the rolling, mass-based South African factory-floor and township-based Intifada sustained through the 1980s that was the key in eventually bringing about a negotiated transition. South African solidarity with the Palestinian struggle in the present should, therefore, also be grounded in a sense of indebtedness and admiration.
But as the years have stretched on and the seeming implacable Zionist entrenchment of more walls, more illegal settlements, more killings, more prisoners, in short, as a genocidal process of ethnic-cleansing that dates back to 1948, if not before – so a South African sense of solidarity with Palestine, however sincere, risked becoming ritualistic. The post-apartheid government, as should be expected, has always voted consistently on UN resolutions on Palestine. ANC national conferences always pass resolutions on Palestinian solidarity.
But attempts, for instance, by the Boycott Divest Sanction (BDS) movement (deliberately modelled on the anti-apartheid experience, by the way) to get full cooperation from the South African government, or even from the ANC, have met with an uneven and at times lukewarm response in the recent past. Part of the problem has been the way in which the post-apartheid government, with a revisionist reading of our negotiated transition, has been inclined to present itself as a global consultant on and exporter of essentially elite-pacted, negotiated settlements to all and sundry. And this inclination has, in part, been responsible for a certain hesitancy hitherto to take a firmer stance against Zionist Israel. Strong measures to isolate and sanction Israel were often resisted on the grounds we were positioning ourselves as credible intermediaries between Israel and the Palestinians.
As South Africa’s preparedness to take the global lead on charging Israel with genocide at the ICJ underlines, that illusory positioning has been blown away by the sheer scale of what is happening in Gaza. But the genocide of the past months simply concentrates dramatically in time and space the grinding, systematic genocide of the Palestinian people underway since 1948. Nothing short of a comprehensive, just and equitable peace settlement that fully recognises the rights of the Palestinian people will end the spiral of violence and insecurity, including for Israelis.
We should have no illusions about the difficulties that face progressive forces in Palestine and beyond in seeking such an outcome. Nor should we lose sight of the special responsibilities that all of us not living in Gaza, or in the West Bank, or occupied East Jerusalem now bear.
The parallels between apartheid-era South Africa’s racial oppression and Zionist Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people are obvious, but for all its horrors South African apartheid never achieved the same genocidal, ethnic cleansing scale we are witnessing in the historic Palestinian lands. A critical difference lies in the much greater dependence of South African capital on black labour. The summary withdrawal of 110,000 work permits for Palestinian labourers post-October 7 has seen the Israeli construction sector temporarily slump. But that contraction is being hurriedly addressed through the importation of Indian labourers with the connivance of Modi’s government.
The maximum weapon of the liberation struggle in South Africa was the mass stayaway from work, and consumer boycotts of white owned shops, in other words, active withdrawal into the numerous, racially segregated peri-urban dormitory townships that were the core feature of apartheid South Africa. There were many brutal massacres inflicted by the regime on these peri-urban ghettoes, but for its own survival the apartheid regime could never carry out a Gaza-style ground-levelling destruction of a Soweto, for instance.
Israel is, effectively, an astro-turfed US-European project implanted upon the Middle East. To a much greater extent than De Klerk’s South Africa, apartheid Israel can only be kept afloat through the support of external actors. The genocidal arrogance of the Zionist project has been possible because of the sustained military, economic and ideological support emanating from Washington, London and Berlin. The recent outpouring of massive, pro-Palestinian protests on the streets of both the Global North and South has begun to drive a wedge, to raise the political and electoral costs for those supporting the genocide. There is a long way to go. Now more than ever, whether in forums like the ICJ and ICC, or in sustained protest, or in re-invigorating the BDS, the tide of anti-Zionist action needs to be sustained and consolidated. The heroic Palestinian people deserve nothing less.
Jeremy Cronin a veteran South African Communist Party Central Committee and Politburo member, former SACP deputy general secretary, a former government deputy minister and former political prisoner. He is also a poet.
This article originally appeared in Liberation Journal
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