South Africa to the aid of Palestine: the overthrow of the world

By Edwy Plenel

Europe and its North American projection claim a universality of human rights that their actions have continued to contradict. Faced with their inaction in the face of the destruction of Palestine by the State of Israel, it is South Africa which, today, defends this universal.

South Africa's application before the United Nations International Court of Justice (ICJ) against the State of Israel, on the "genocidal nature" of its war against the Palestinians of Gaza, is not only an unprecedented legal event. It marks a geopolitical reversal: while all the peoples of the world note, through the Palestinian tragedy, the variable geometry use by Europe and the United States of America of the universalist values to which they claim, it is a country emblematic of the emancipatory causes of the Third World, anti-colonial and anti-racist, which is taking up the torch.

You just need to read the exceptional document produced by South African diplomacy and listen to the presentation (see below, especially since our audiovisual media hardly relayed it), Thursday January 11, of its arguments before the ICJ to take stock of the intellectual eclipse of a continent, ours, whose nation-states have for so long claimed to speak, codify and impose the good, the just and the true.

Because, in real time and under the gaze of the whole world, in the face of the martyrdom of Gaza, they said nothing – or very little: a few hypocritical calls for restraint – and did nothing – or worse: did quite the opposite by delivering massively and only recently, like the United States, arms and ammunition to Israel. Nothing said and nothing done when the population of one of the most densely populated territories on the planet is attacked by one of the most powerful armies in the world, that of the State which besieges it after having occupied it, in the most intensive bombing campaign in modern military history.

Worse than Aleppo in Syria, worse than Mariupol in Ukraine, to stick to two contemporary references which implicate Russia, but also proportionally worse, in intensity, than the Allied bombings on Nazi Germany.

Indiscriminate punishment

By the actions of its army as well as by the words of its leaders, it is indeed a people that the State of Israel targeted in its vengeful response to the attack of October 7, 2023 carried out by Hamas and its massacres Israeli civilians. Far from a proportionate response, it is an indiscriminate punishment which was implemented against a population because of its origin, its identity, its culture, its history.

It is the Palestinian people of Gaza, and, through them, the very idea of a viable Palestine, of a life and an existence under this name, with what it conveys of sociability and citizenship, who was designated as the culprit who needed to be punished, without any discernment. And this, explicitly on the first day, through the voice of the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu himself, calling for a holy war by referring to Amalek, this people that, in the Bible (I Samuel XV, 3), God commands extermination – “You shall not spare him, and you shall put to death men and women, children and infants, oxen and sheep, camels and donkeys”

What Palestine says to the world 

In barely three months of war, there have already been tens of thousands of dead, missing and wounded, mostly civilians, the majority children and women. An entire world has been destroyed forever, homes and hospitals, places of life and worship, schools and universities, administrations, stores, monuments, libraries, even cemeteries.

“No place is safe in Gaza,” United Nations Secretary General António Guterres did not hesitate to assert on December 6, 2023 in his solemn letter to the Security Council. Since then, humanitarian NGOs and UN agencies have continued to warn of polluted water, the risk of famine, immeasurable poverty and infinite despair, in short the irreversible destruction of part of occupied Palestine. .

Sinister reversal: the State whose initial legitimacy was based on awareness of the crime of genocide committed against the Jews by Nazism and its allies is today faced with the accusation of reproducing it against the Palestinians. In the 1948 Convention invoked by South Africa, the crime of genocide designates acts “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such”. Rafael Lemkin, the inventor of the word – from the Greek genos and the Latin cide – defined it as “a plot aimed at annihilating or weakening national, religious or racial groups”.

The legal debate will be conducted on the merits but, in the immediate future – and this is the challenge of the emergency procedure before the ICJ – it is a question of interrupting as quickly as possible a process of annihilation, of purification, expulsion, erasure and destruction of Palestinians in Gaza which has genocidal characteristics.

As the genocides committed in Rwanda in 1994 and in Bosnia in 1995 have tragically reminded us, this is in no way to put into perspective the uniqueness of the Shoah, this plan concerted by the Nazi regime for the industrial extermination of millions of beings. human beings, than to maintain universal vigilance over the repetition, in other contexts and in different forms, of this immeasurable crime of humanity against itself.

But history will remember that the powers which embody the West, this political reality born from the projection of Europe on the world, even though they glory in having proclaimed the universality and equality of rights , evaded this vigilance by abandoning Palestine to its sad fate. Through South African audacity, it is the people and nations who have suffered from this dominating appropriation of the universal by Western powers who are now its best defenders. Which, in short, remind Europe of the promise it has betrayed.

“If we want to respond to the expectations of our people, we must look elsewhere than in Europe”: these are almost the last words of The Wretched of the Earth (1961), this essay by Frantz Fanon which, since its publication, has goes around the planet, and they can be read as the prediction of the reversal which, today, is being accomplished. This call to “change sides” claimed an emancipatory escape in the quest for true humanism, where the concern for humanity is no longer eclipsed by the interests of dominating nations or by the identities of conquering peoples. In the wake of the Discourse on Colonialism (1955) by his Martinican compatriot Aimé Césaire, The Wretched of the Earth magnified a true universalism, without an owner nation, without identity boundaries.

“May I be permitted to discover and desire man, wherever he may be,” wrote Fanon at the conclusion of his first book, Black Skin, White Masks (1952), where he recalled this warning. from “[his] philosophy professor, of West Indian origin: “When you hear bad things about Jews, prick up your ears, people are talking about you””, with this comment: “An anti-Semite is necessarily negrophobic. » At the outset of one of the chapters, he placed these words of Aimé Césaire: “There is not in the world a poor lynched guy, a poor tortured man, in whom I would not be murdered and humiliated. »

Europe has refused all humility, all modesty, but also all solicitude, all tenderness.

International law is the legal translation of this essential humanism. A humanism which Fanon, a decade later, that of the French colonial wars, from Vietnam to Algeria, angrily noted that Europe had denied.

“Let us leave,” he wrote in The Wretched of the Earth, “this Europe which never stops talking about man while massacring him wherever it meets him, at every corner of its own streets, at every corners of the world. […] Europe has refused all humility, all modesty, but also all solicitude, all tenderness. She only showed herself to be parsimonious with man, petty, carnivorous and homicidal only with man. So, brothers, how can we not understand that we have better things to do than follow this Europe. »

In this indictment in which he pits Europe against itself, Fanon brandishes its betrayed promise in order to better claim an overcoming which, finally, accomplishes it. This Europe which proclaimed natural equality, then decreed the universality of rights, trampled and ransacked both through colonialism and imperialism, denying them to the peoples and humanities that it oppressed and exploited.

Deadly poison

And it is this devastating imposture that the long injustice done to Palestine by the occupation and colonization of its territories since 1967, the segregation and discrimination of its people which result from it, have perpetuated even in our present, spreading within even from Israeli society a deadly poison for democratic ideals as evidenced by the rise of far-right Jewish forces, as racist as anti-Semites are.

The current resonance of this book-manifesto proves that the internationalist and humanist hope of decolonization is not a bygone old thing, but still an active promise. Published a few days before the death of its author, who had espoused the Algerian independence cause, The Wretched of the Earth was published at the end of 1961, the same year in which Nelson Mandela, renouncing the non-violent strategy of the South African ANC facing the apartheid regime, went to train in armed struggle with the Algerian FLN in its clandestine bases in Morocco, a few months before his arrest on August 5, 1962.

But the resonance goes even further: apartheid, a regime of racial segregation, was instituted in 1948, the year in which, at the same time, the creation of the State of Israel was endorsed by the United Nations, proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and approved the Genocide Convention.

The fundamental principles, values and rights invoked by South Africa in the face of the actions of the State of Israel in Gaza do not only apply to Palestine.

Re-reading Frantz Fanon is therefore taking stock of what is at stake for our future around what Palestine has been saying to the world since its right to exist as a sovereign state has been denied to it, whereas with Yasser Arafat at its head, it ended up granting this right to the State of Israel, despite the expulsion – the Nakba – of which part of its people were victims in 1948. Who, today, will save the universality and, above all, the universalizability – in the sense of sharing and solidarity – of rights, justice and equality, thus escaping their predatory appropriation by States, peoples and nations who claim to be legitimate owners of a universal to the point of authorizing themselves to contradict and flout it as soon as their selfishness, particularly economic, is in danger?

South Africa provides the answer before the Court of The Hague: origin does not protect anything, there is no universal of which a given nation, civilization, culture, etc., has the monopoly or privilege, there is only the universalizable that is at stake in each concrete ordeal where the fate of a particular humanity – attacked, persecuted, violated, discriminated against, erased, exterminated, etc. – endangers that of all humanity. Rigorously legal in the field of international law, this request before the ICJ raises the politically decisive question of the borderless universality of the supranational values claimed, at least on paper, by the nation states of our continent and the European Union. which brings them together.

The fundamental principles, values and rights invoked by South Africa in the face of the actions of the State of Israel in Gaza do not only apply to Palestine. They apply, at the same time, to Ukraine, the victim of a war of aggression by Russian imperialism, with its procession of war crimes and crimes against humanity – and this reminder applies to the South African leaders who, to date have not condemned Moscow. But they also apply to the people of Syria, yesterday and still martyrs to the dictatorial regime which oppresses them with the support of Iran and Russia. The same applies to the Uighurs, the predominantly Muslim Turkic-speaking people persecuted by China in Xinjiang. Just as they apply to all people who suffer the yoke of state powers whose apparent support for the Palestinian cause serves as a diversion from the iniquitous fate they impose on them, from Iran to Turkey, without forgetting absolutism. monarchies who reign on the Arabian Peninsula.

There is only internationalist humanism. This is what Nelson Mandela meant when he expressed his gratitude to the Palestinian people for their help in the fight against apartheid: “We know very well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians,” he confided. Conversely, the indifference of most European leaders towards the fate of Palestine endangers the idea that Europe has of itself, its values and its principles.

What will it be able to say tomorrow in the face of violations of international law which alarm or threaten it, like Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine, after not having been able to come to the rescue? of Palestine? How will it dare to lecture other powers, authoritarian and imperialist, who reject any supranational right that could thwart their ambitions when it has not been able to defend it against the State of Israel, or even when it has simply renounced through the voice of some of its officials assuming “unconditional” support for this State, whatever its actions?

Just over a year ago, on October 13, 2022, Josep Borrell, Vice-President of the European Commission and High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs, delivered the opening speech of the new Diplomatic Academy European in Bruges.

“Europe”, he then explained not without pride, “is a garden” where “everything works”, “the best combination of political freedom, economic prosperity and social cohesion that humanity has been able to build ". Conversely, he worried, “most of the rest of the world is a jungle, and the jungle could take over the garden.” “[European] gardeners must go into the jungle,” he recommended. Europeans need to be much more engaged with the rest of the world. Otherwise, the rest of the world will invade us, in different ways and by different means. »

In the light of ravaged Gaza and bruised Palestine, where is the garden, where is the jungle? And where have these official European “gardeners” gone who, in recent months, have deserted concern for the world and humanity? Far from being foreign to us, the jungle proliferates through the blindness of conquest and power, exploitation and domination. As for the garden, however clean it may appear, it can be the breeding ground for the worst barbarities, those which, in the name of identities, origins, civilizations believing themselves superior to others, lead to the crime of genocide.

Source: Media Part