After South Africa turned to the International Court of Justice with an accusation that Israel is committing genocide, Jerusalem on Tuesday announced it would defend itself at the Hague against being libeled with a crime label most often associated with attempts to annihilate the Jewish people. 

Libeling Israel as genocidal is an attempt to “stick a swastika on the Jewish people,” a former French ambassador for human rights, Francois Zimeray, tells the Sun. “It comes from countries that have shown indifference to crimes against humanity committed against civilian populations all over the world, including Jews who were expelled from the vast majority of the Arab world.” 

South Africa filed a complaint last Friday over Israel’s alleged violation of its obligations under the 1948 Genocide convention. In it, Pretoria is asking the top United Nations court to issue a preliminary order to stop all military operations in Gaza until the matter is decided. 

Such an order, according to Pretoria, is “necessary in this case to protect against further, severe and irreparable harm to the rights of the Palestinian people.” A previous order issued by the ICJ to end the war against Ukraine was ignored by Russia. Israel, in contrast, decided to fight the “baseless” accusation at the Hague.   

The ICJ deliberations over the genocide issue are expected to last months or years. Jerusalem is concerned that in a preliminary hearing, expected on January 11-12, the court would issue an order to satisfy the South African demand for an immediate Gaza cease-fire.    

Israel “will appear before the International Court of Justice at the Hague to dispel South Africa’s absurd blood libel,” a government spokesman, Eylon Levy, told reporters Tuesday. “We assure South Africa’s leaders: history will judge you, and it will judge you without mercy.” Jerusalem is yet to name a jurist to argue the case. 

The word genocide — derived from the Greek genus, for people, and cide, for killing — was coined in the aftermath of World War II by a polish-born lawyer, Rafael Lemkin. As a student in the 1920s, Lemkin was horrified by the Turkish massacres of the Armenian people. Later, 49 members of his Jewish family were murdered in the Holocaust. 

After the war, Britain’s prime minister, Winston Churchill, called the Nazi systematic killing of Jews a “crime with no name.” After his escape to America, Lemkin decided to name it. Genocide is “directed against individuals not in their individual capacity, but as members of the national group,” he wrote.

Largely due to Lemkin’s writings, the UN General Assembly approved the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in 1948, and it came into effect in 1951. Israel is among the convention’s 152 members. Accusations of violating the convention were lobbed against Burma, Russia, and the former Yugoslavia. In the 1950s, left-wing activists charged America with attempting genocide against its Black population. 

The South African accusation against the Jewish state is uniquely potent, as it inverts the original meaning of genocide as a concept that originally referred to the annihilation of the Jewish people.

South Africa has long considered itself a champion of Palestinian struggle against the state of Israel. Its ruling party, the African National Congress, has directed barbs at Israel ever since the country emerged from the apartheid regime that some of its leaders now liken Israel to. South Africa has long battled Israel in international fora. 

Things got even worse after President Ramaphosa assumed office in 2018 and under Pretoria’s foreign minister, Naledi Pandor, a former leader of South Africa’s opposition Democratic Alliance party, Tony Leon, tells the Sun. Pretoria is now much closer to Russia, Communist China, Iran, and the growing Brics alliance, he says. 

“The country is in a deep crisis as it faces an election next year,” Mr. Leon says, adding that turning on Israel, which is seen as an “outpost of white Western colonialism in Araby, helps the ANC domestically.” Internationally, he says, the party uses its ICJ complaint to appear as a champion of human rights following its defense of Russia’s assault in Ukraine. 

Beyond South Africa, the cry of “genocide” has been popularized in anti-Israel rallies around the world since the October 7 terrorist attack from Gaza. That is despite the fact that the terrorist group that launched it, Hamas, has etched the need to kill all Jews into its founding charter. 

“What was a genocidal intention was the atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7 against Israelis,” Mr. Zimeray says. “One could contest the way Israel retaliates, one could discuss the very meaning of this war, one could raise the question of proportionality, but one cannot seriously say that it is genocide.”