If Everything is Genocide, Nothing is Genocide.
On 29 December 2023, South Africa applied to the International Court of Justice requesting the Court to institute proceedings, including an urgent provisional measures procedure, alleging that Israel violated its obligations under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (the “Genocide Convention”) in its conduct towards Palestinians in Gaza.
The International Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists (IJL), founded some 55 years ago by, among others, French Nobel Prize laureate René Cassin, an initiator and co-drafter of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights – calls on governments, international institutions and the international legal community, to denounce and reject this cynical and dangerous misuse of the Genocide Convention.
The attempt to harness the Genocide Convention to target the very people whose murder led to the Convention reflects a growing phenomenon of undermining the right of the Jewish people to a state of their own through accusations comparing Israel with the Nazi regime. In practice, it is intended to deny Israel the right to defend itself against those seeking its destruction.
The deeds of Hamas, including the October 7 massacre, accompanied by its clear statements of intent to bring about the destruction of Israel while calling for the murder of Jews fulfill the definition of Genocide.
Notwithstanding the bitter and protracted dispute between Israel and the Palestinians, Israel has never displayed any hint of intention to harm the Palestinian people per se. To impute such an intention to Israel today can only be understood as an attempt to focus the international discourse on Israel and away from Hamas’ egregious and heinous crimes.
More broadly, by labelling Israel’s defensive war against Hamas an act of genocide, South Africa is effectively stripping the term of its meaning. If this is genocide, then many instances of the use of force in response to an armed attack could easily meet that definition.