Last month, South Africa—known for its open alliance with Hamas—initiated a controversial legal strategy at The Hague, where it seeks to have Israel adjudicated as guilty of genocide. This follows the events of October 7, when Hamas committed mass murder, rape, and hostage-taking. Despite these atrocities, it is Israel, not Hamas, that found itself accused in the International Court of Justice (ICJ).
While South Africa’s legal team was in The Hague accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza, back home, a South African MP warned of a potential “bloodbath” in Cape Town amid a parliamentary debate on the Israel-Hamas conflict, as reported by the Middle East Media Research Institute.
On February 14, South African MP Ahmed Munzoor Shaik Emam of the National Freedom Party launched this genocidal tirade: “We have political parties in this house that are trying to justify the massacre and genocide that are taking place in Palestine, particularly right now in Rafah. But let me give a loud and clear message to the Democratic Alliance: If you think that the people of this country are going to allow you to take this beautiful country, the city of Cape Town of ours, and hand it over to the Zionists, the city of Cape Town will be a bloodbath, I can assure you [of] that.”
Blatant South African antisemitism
He added: “We will not allow you to take this and sell it, sell your principles, ethics, and values as you have just pawned the land in the Western Cape to the United States and others. We will not allow you to make this a Jewish state!”
Pretoria has returned again to the ICJ—undeterred by the ugly threats to South African Jews unleashed at home—this time to argue that Israel’s presence on the disputed lands of the West Bank constitutes illegal occupation.
The ICJ’s 15-judge panel is being urged to review Israel’s “occupation, settlement and annexation including measures aimed at altering the demographic composition, character, and status of the Holy City of Jerusalem, and from its adoption of related discriminatory legislation and measures.”
The judges can take upwards of half a year to issue an opinion, which also asks them to consider the legal status and consequences of Israel’s “occupation.”
Israel, for its part, didn’t bother sending a legal team this time; it sent a memo instead. In any event, it is questionable whether Israel would ever heed the ICJ’s nonbinding directives.
Riyad Mansour, the dapper Palestinian ambassador to the United Nations, on the other hand, rushed to court to wax eloquently: “We call on you to confirm that Israel’s presence in the occupied Palestinian territory is illegal,” he said in a speech before the court, where, according to Reuters, his voice cracked, and he shed tears.
“A finding from this distinguished court would contribute to bringing [occupation] to an immediate end, paving a way to a just and lasting peace,” he said. “A future in which no Palestinians and no Israelis are killed. A future in which two states live side by side in peace and security.”
It’s time for a reality check. Hamas was guilty of a whole array of war crimes (including kidnapping children) and crimes against humanity on Oct 7, 2023—a day of grisly mass murders and unspeakable torture that it celebrated in real time and now serially denies.
While this Palestinian diplomat talks of peace where no Arab or Jew will be killed, the Palestinian Authority led by President Mahmoud Abbas, now in the 17th year of his four-year term, passed a law wherein Hamas mass murders and their families are financially rewarded for every Jew killed or maimed.
All these machinations and tear-laden declarations have done nothing to hold terrorists accountable for their unrepentant atrocities. On the contrary, the UN and international NGOs have done nothing to save captive Americans and Israelis still held underground in Gaza by Hamas, instead focusing on demands for an open-ended cease-fire that would throw Hamas a lifeline.
One of the boilerplate accusations against Israel repeated in the latest legal assault has to do with allegedly changing the demographics of the Jewish people’s eternal capital, Jerusalem. The allegations about Jerusalem and its holy sites are outrageous.
The world has conveniently forgotten that Jews were barred from praying at Judaism’s holiest site, the Western Wall, for 19 years (1948-1967), that synagogues in the Old City were destroyed, and that the historic Mount of Olives cemetery was desecrated by the occupying Jordanians. All that changed when Israel took complete control of Jerusalem in 1967 and restored religious rights for all faiths ever since.
As for the so-called occupied territories, the 15-judge panel of the ICJ would do well to ask: What part of Israel does the Palestinian Authority not consider occupied?
Peace will not be achieved through the diktats of the United Nations or pronouncements from the World Court.
Peace will be only possible when the Palestinian Authority eliminates its pay-for-slay law and when Palestinian schoolchildren are taught to acknowledge and respect the citizens of the Jewish state.
The World Court gambit is but one of many fronts opened by the enemies of peace to weaken and ultimately destroy the democratic Jewish state of Israel. No deal, no way.
Rabbi Abraham Cooper is associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and director of Global Social Action and serves as the chair of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom. The views expressed in this opinion piece are his own.