Written by
Justice for all! This statement is a great sound bite but little more than that. Indeed, as it is used today, it is superfluous on the surface and vacuous once a brief examination is undertaken. However, given that Americans have been conditioned to respond to sound bite journalism and half-truths and worse masquerading as fact-based news, this mantra has become a dangerous, misleading, and effective tactic utilized by those bent on destroying Israel, in part by undermining American support for it.
The recent action by the South African government in filing a legal proceeding with the International Court of Justice against Israel, accusing it of violating the Genocide Convention agreement, is one example of the upside-down world in which we live. I admire the detailed response by Tal Becker, legal advisor to the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In his opening statement on January 12, 2024, he called the character of the government of South Africa into question. He said in part:
But, as this Court has already made clear, the Genocide Convention was not designed to address the brutal impact of intensive hostilities on the civilian population, even when the use of force raises “very serious issues of international law” and involves “enormous suffering” and “continuing loss of life”. The Convention was set apart to address a malevolent crime of the most exceptional severity.
We live at a time when words are cheap. In an age of social media and identity politics, the temptation to reach for the most outrageous term, to vilify and demonize, has become for many irresistible. But if there is one place where words should still matter, where truth should still matter, it is surely a court of law.
The Applicant has regrettably put before the Court a profoundly distorted factual and legal picture. The entirety of its case hinges on a deliberately curated, decontextualized and manipulative description of the reality of current hostilities.
South Africa purports to come to this Court in the lofty position of a guardian of the interest of humanity. But in delegitimizing Israel’s 75-year existence in its opening presentation, that broad commitment to humanity rang hollow. And in its sweeping counter-factual description of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it seemed to erase both Jewish history and any Palestinian agency or responsibility. Indeed, the Application delegitimization of Israel since its very establishment in 1948 in its submissions, sounded barely distinguishable from Hamas’s own rejectionist rhetoric.
It is unsurprising, therefore, that in the Applicant’s telling, both Hamas’s responsibility for the situation in Gaza and the very humanity of its Israeli victims are removed from view.
For justice to be realized by all, at least two things are necessary foundational:
- There must be a standard or system of justice available to all that is objective, that is, beyond the frailties and double-mindedness of man
- All parties interested in justice for all must recognize this objective standard as the guiding principles for determining when justice has been exhibited.
In other words, there must be law and the rule of law must prevail over all well-intentioned and/or misguided arguments based on emotions, feelings, or the ideology-du-jour of the day.