On his website on Jan. 4 John Wright, in an article, The South African Government Emerges as a mMoral Giant over Gaza, makes the case that with its application against Israeli genocide at the International Court of Justice, South Africa’s government has become a moral compass for the world. The reprint in Consortium News is accompanied by a photo of the Nelson Mandela statue outside the Union Buildings in Pretoria, the seat of South Africa’s government.
Wright asserts:
“Pretoria is challenging the Israeli government’s claim to innocence, which for far too long has allowed it to act with impunity against the long-suffering Palestinians. The collective West will forever stand disgraced and exposed due to its blind support of Israel’s genocidal slaughter of Palestinian civilians in Gaza since Oct. 7….
“Israel’s ability to act with impunity is a feature of the innocence it has claimed to enjoy as the national home of a Jewish people whom Hitler marked out for extermination in a European Judeocide that ranks as a crime of the ages. The tragic aspect to this horrific episode in ‘European history’ is the cynical fashion in which a Zionist movement, rooted in the ethnic cleansing of a people deemed to belong on a lower rung of a malign cultural ladder, manipulated it in order to achieve its aims.”
Wright cites Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s “brazen and chilling biblical injunction,” in a speech before his military operation against Gaza in October. To wit: “Remember what Amalek did to you (Deuteronomy 25:17).” Wright adds: “This particular Old Testament injunction sanctions the extermination of the ancient tribe, Amalek, by God in the name of his chosen people, the Jews, after they emerge from bondage in Egypt.”
In counterposition, Wright states: “Which brings us to the current government of the Republic of South Africa’s quite stunning intervention in bringing legal proceedings against the state of Israel to the International Court of Justice in The Hague.” This, he advances, “forms the backbone of what will be [a] landmark” event.
Wright quotes from a powerful speech that President Nelson Mandela delivered in December 1997 at a gathering, “International Solidarity Day with Palestinian People.” Most of that speech is excerpted in Documentation in today’s briefing.
Wright concluded that the “post-apartheid South Africa, with this legal case, now accuses Israel of being a genocidal state and breaks new ground.” He implies that this could alter the world.
