South Africa files case with International Court of Justice accusing Israel of genocide

by Vijaya Chandrasoma

This essay is not meant to be a commentary of the current strife continuing in increasing intensity of violence in Rafah in Southern Gaza and the soon-to-be-extinct nation of Palestine. It is a ridiculously oversimplified account of the anti-Semitism that has plagued the world for centuries. And the imminent establishment of the Jewish State of Israel.

As Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu said last week, “The war will continue until we have achieved complete victory. If we have to stand alone, we will stand alone. If we need to, we will fight with our fingernails. But we have much more than fingernails”.

Complete victory is not limited just to the release of hostages or the elimination of Hamas. Complete victory, in Netanyahu’s mind, and the minds of the radical-right Israeli coalition Zionist government, is the displacement, by genocide or any other means, of the entire race of Palestinians, Muslim and Christian, and the establishment of the single, sovereign Jewish State of Israel.

Anti-Semitism has existed in Europe and Russia for centuries, and has flourished in the USA since the Europeans “discovered” the Americas. Pogroms, a Russian word meaning “to wreak havoc, to demolish violently”, have been inflicted on Jewish populations living as legal citizens in European countries, especially Russia, for centuries. They increased in their intensity since the anti-Jewish riots that erupted in Odessa in 1821, and the southern and western provinces of the Russian Empire later that century.

Pogroms were usually perpetrated by anti-Semitic mobs with government and law enforcement encouragement. The attackers raped and murdered their Jewish neighbors, and looted their property with impunity, with the full knowledge that their crimes would go unpunished.

To use a word commonly used by Hitler and Mussolini, now brought back into fashion by Donald J. Trump, Jews were “vermin”, routinely and regularly exterminated, much as the infestation of cockroaches and rats that are routinely obliterated by modern civilized society. Genocide is a process, not an event, rather like pest control. When you dehumanize certain ethnic groups, likening them to rodents carrying disease capable of destroying humanity, killing them is not only necessary, it becomes an imperative. Of course, Trump has been more inclusive in his reference to additional and different varieties of vermin, like Muslims, Hispanics, Blacks, people from “shithole countries” – who knows what goes on in that lunatic piece of cruelty masquerading as a mind?

What is the cause for this age-old discrimination of one specific ethnicity, the Jews, persecution that has escaped the many other races that lived in Europe? The public persona of the Jews in the middle-ages in Europe was that they were sickly and prone to disease (Judenkrankheit, the Jewish malaise), and seen as an ethnic sub-class (untermenschen, or subhuman). However, Jews had achieved prominence in medical, legal and financial professions in Europe since the 12th century. Today, in the USA, they are “accused” of controlling the banking, legal and medical professions, even Hollywood. And they face hostility, as if the perceived inherent inferiority of white community has been, in some perverted way, caused by the Jews.

Pogroms reached their logical and brutal climax with the Holocaust in Germany in the 1930s, when Hitler and the Nazis committed genocide of six million Jews from 1935 to 1945. At the end of the war, when the Allies and the Americans were confronted with the horrors of German concentration camps, they were struck with a collective guilty conscience, and forced to accept and condemn the reality of Hitler’s barbarous methods of extermination.

What to do? European and American anti-Semitism did not suddenly disappear with the Holocaust. In fact, there were significant anti-Semitic, pro-Hitler movements in America in the 1920s and 1930s. Prominent Americans like Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh were friends with Adolf Hitler and led these anti-Semitic and isolationist movements in America. Anti-Semitism lingers in Europe and the USA to the present day, a deepening resentment against the prominence and success of Jews in public, professional and economic life.

The 2017 anti-Semitic riots in Charlottesville, Virginia, with its slogan “The Jews will not replace us” epitomizing the white-supremacist, neo-Nazi movement, had the support of a significant section of the white population, including the president of the nation. This white supremacist movement, which now encompasses in its hatred not only Jews, but Blacks and non-white immigrants, is the phenomenon that keeps an evil monster like Trump currently in line for a second term of the presidency.

Hatred of immigrants, fleeing personal threats to their lives and liberty from their home countries, “yearning to breathe free” – the very definition of asylum seekers – has increased in intensity after the Trump years. Perhaps after the election of the nation’s first Black president. These are the wretches, the huddled masses, brutally and frequently abused by Trump in his political rants as assassins, rapists, drug traffickers, denizens of mental asylums, the latest a comparison to the fictional movie cannibal Hannibal Lecter. And of course, dark-skinned people from “shithole countries” who poison the blood of the citizens of a country of immigrants with the most mixed blood – poisonous and pure – from every country in the world.

The inhumane barbarity of Hitler’s “Final Solution”, when six million Jews and five million human beings of “impure blood” were tortured and exterminated in gas ovens in concentration camps, was exposed to the world after WW II. And the world’s fingers were pointed not only at the Nazis, but at all those Europeans who had committed anti-Semitic violence in the past and Germans who did nothing while Hitler committed genocide, the smoke and stink of human flesh billowing from concentration camps right before their eyes.

Unlike numerous previous genocides, improved communications ensured that the Holocaust was too well known in the world as a crime against humanity to be swept under the carpet, or justified in the name of “civilization”.

So the Western Allies, the Rulers of the post WW II world, came to a decision, to the advantage of both themselves and the Jews. The Balfour Declaration, issued by the British government in 1917, justified Western Allies’ support for the establishment of “a national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine.

In 1947, as much as 97% of the land in Palestine was owned by Palestinian Arabs and Christians, just three percent by Jews. Palestinians, Muslims and Christians, constituted the vast majority of the population of Palestine. After World War II, Jews in Europe were encouraged to emigrate to the “Holy Land”, with the added incentive that the land had been promised to the Jews by the Christian God, Yahweh Himself.

An article written by Dr. V.J.M. de Silva, “The Israeli Palestine Conflict – Some Random Thoughts” (The Island, August 12, 2014) tends to support colonial conquest of Palestine by European Jews, citing the verse found in Genesis 17.8: “And I will give unto thee (Abraham) and thy seed after thee, the land wherein thou art a stranger, all the land of Canaan for an everlasting possession and I will be their God”, which gave divine legitimacy to the Jewish occupation and ownership of Palestine. The Promised Land.

The late Hameed Abdul Karim, Sri Lankan journalist and activist in the defense of the Palestinian cause, responded, “the media has projected the Palestinian catastrophe as a Muslim issue and not a humanitarian one, as it certainly is: that the conflict in Palestine is between Jews and Muslims. They have subtly left out of the picture the Palestinian Christians, who made up 20% of the population (in 1947)”. Mr. Karim goes on to say that the first village destroyed during the 1948 Israeli war against Palestine (named The Nakba, literally “the catastrophe”) was a Christian Village named Deir Yassin, when over 240 Palestinian Christians were lined up against walls and shot in cold blood by a Zionist terrorist organization, Irgun, headed by future Israeli Prime Minister and co-recipient with Egyptian President Sadat, in 1979, of the Noble Prize (for Peace, no less), Menachem Begin.

Since the Nakba, Jews, with the unqualified financial and military support of the Americans, have accelerated the establishment of a single-state Jewish state of Israel. There have been proposals over the years by various international mediators to establish a two-state solution, which have all failed because no agreement as to the proposed terms of settlement could be reached by the protagonists.

The atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7, 2023, which seems to have all the elements of a false-flag operation, with the complicity of Netanyahu and his radical right-wing cabinet, have given the perfect excuse for the Zionists to complete the job – the original goal of the extermination of the Palestinians and the establishment of the Promised Land.

President Biden may have at last realized that the ultimate motive of the right-wing Israelis was always the establishment of the sovereign Jewish state of Israel, that the Jews, especially under the leadership of Netanyahu, never had any intention for a two-state solution. Biden has threatened Netanyahu that unless the Israeli Defense Forces cease their genocidal operations in Rafah in Southern Gaza, work towards a negotiated ceasefire and a two-state solution, Americans will be forced to suspend military and financial aid to Israel. To which, as noted above, Netanyahu has thumbed his nose, saying that they will stand alone, that they already have the necessary weapons, including an estimated stockpile range of between 90 and 400 nuclear warheads – provided by the USA over the past 76 years – to complete the job.

Of course, the nations of the Arab world are prohibited by the United States from developing a nuclear arsenal as a defense against a possible nuclear attack by Israel, on pain of being bombed to the Stone Age. The hallmark hypocritical double standard of the “Free World”.

Biden’s demands for a ceasefire and political negotiations for a two-state solution has aroused vociferous protests from the powerful American Jewish lobby, members of which have always identified themselves as Jews first, Americans second.

The International Court of Justice in The Hague, Netherlands, opened hearings on Thursday, May 16 on a case filed by South Africa “that the situation in Gaza has reached a new and horrific stage, that Israel’s actions in Gaza are part of the end game. This is the last step in the destruction of Gaza”.

The election of Trump in November, which according to current national polls, seems, incredibly, an even money chance, will help Israel expedite the complete destruction of Palestine. Trump will also encourage Russia to invade other independent European nations after Ukraine, seeing that Trump is a good buddy and admirer of both Netanyahu and Putin. And with the current bromance flourishing between Putin and Chinese Premier Xi Jinping, who are currently celebrating 75 years of diplomatic relations in Peking with majestic pomp and military circumstance, Trump will be drooling for the day when he may be accepted, even as a lowly, lapdog partner, of this unholy alliance of his pantheon of strongmen.