South Africa may have chosen to file a case against Israel for “Gaza genocide”, although this is difficult to prove, because that is the only way to force it to appear urgently before the International Court of Justice, in the hope that it will issue some meaningful interim orders against it.

This is what writer B. Michael sees in his column in Haaretz, where he explained that Israel saw this charge as its opportunity to focus on an attempt to refute it, and thus divert the discussion from all the other atrocities it is committing in the Gaza Strip.

This is exactly what happened, when Israeli lawyers broke all possible records regarding the plea of alleged innocence, as the Israeli writer says sarcastically.

He added, "We only shot at the terrorists... We warned the residents with leaflets. We indicated for them exactly where they should go. We destroyed the neighborhoods so that they could be cleared and rebuilt, as if the terrorists were dwarves hiding behind children, or effeminate people hiding behind women, or osteoporosis people hiding behind the elderly, the sick, doctors, journalists and people with disabilities.”

To illustrate the enormous level of lying and deception by the Israeli defense team, Michael says that if an Israeli lawyer had been connected to a lie detector during his speeches, the electricity grid in The Hague would have collapsed, and the city would have remained in darkness to this day.

One nation, one occupier

Fortunately for Israel as well - the writer is sarcastic - South Africa chose for an unclear reason to focus almost entirely on what is happening in Gaza instead of talking about what is happening in all the occupied territories, Gaza, the West Bank and Jerusalem, because the matter is related to one nation whose members are being trampled under the shoes of the same occupier.

One of the signs of malice and evil is that Israel denied for years the existence of the Palestinian people, and made persistent efforts to deny their existence in public consciousness and discourse, and issued laws to legalize the theft of all their property, until it made the theft of their lands a sacred act. In fact, their lives became a fair game, to the point that any child could carry a gun and can shoot a Palestinian whenever he wants. It is enough for him to say, “I felt threatened,” for him to enjoy immunity.

Michael: If South Africa had added the situation in the West Bank and East Jerusalem to its plea, its speech would have gained additional weight, and it would have made clear an important fact, which is that no one here will enjoy peace unless each of us gets his own land.

As for the freedom of the Palestinians and their freedom of movement and expression, such as their right to self-determination and self-defense, all of this has been trampled on, and is still being trampled on every day. Almost half of the people are in a cage, and the other half is rotting under a military dictatorship and living conditions that seem as if they were specially designed to burden their lives and push them into hiding out of sight.

If South Africa had argued in this way, its speech would have gained additional weight and would have made clear an important truth: that no one here will have peace unless each of us gets our own land. But the show is not over yet. On February 19, the court will meet again to discuss Israel, as the UN General Assembly has asked it for advice regarding “the legal consequences arising from Israel’s policies and practices in the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem.”

Source: Haaretz