South Africa’s case against Israel belongs not in a courthouse, but in a nuthouse

By Lev Tsitrin

As I learned this morning, perfectly reasonable assumptions can be totally off mark. When South Africa filed a lawsuit against Israel in the International Court of Justice claiming that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, I naturally attributed the absurdity of this claim to South Africa’s exclusive focus on fixing the problems accumulated during the apartheid era — and now that at home every wrong has been set to right, every South Africa’s widow’s, and every South Africa’s orphan’s tear wiped away, heaven on earth having been established where the injustice previously ruled — South Africa’s government now had the time to turn attention to the world at large, fixing the problems overseas, too. It just didn’t know those problems too well — hence, it blamed Israel rather than Hamas on Gaza’s ordeal — an unfortunate mistake, but an honest one that was due to ignorance, not malice.

Imagine my embarrassment as I listened, while getting ready for a morning stroll, to BBC coverage of South Africa’s upcoming elections The country is rife with problems: unemployment at 42%; electricity blackouts; lack of water; governmental corruption to the tune of tens of billions of dollars; rampant crime costing a whooping 10% of the country’s GDP.

What a verdict on my gullibility! It turns out that South Africa sued Israel not because it wants to spread its good governance the world over, so nations could partake of her blessings — but because South Africa’s government has no clue of what constitutes good governance, and is only good at filling the pockets of those close to the public funds — public good be damned!

Needless to say, this puts South Africa’s case against Israel into a whole new light. South Africa supporting Hamas becomes the case of the birds of the feather flocking together, a case of the corrupt shilling for the corrupt, and shielding them. Just as South Africa’s current government, Hamas could not have cared less for the people whom they govern: Hamas used the funds and materiel not to give Palestinians better lives — by investing in civil projects, by building infrastructure, hospitals and schools — but to build up terror tunnels and rockets, to train and keep on the payroll a terror army. And Hamas bigs were not forgetting their comforts either, preferring to live luxuriously, in palatial villas built along the coast and supplied with every amenity the wealth can buy — while an average Gazan lived on handouts from the international community. In mutual corruption, the rulers of South Africa, and of Gaza are true soulmates.

Hence, just as it does care for its people at home, South Africa’s government doesn’t give a damn about the people of Gaza — but only worries about Hamas, lamenting the very real possibility that Hamas may be destroyed, and equating the impending destruction of Hamas to the genocide of Gazans. To South Africa’s rulers, small folks don’t matter, neither at home, nor abroad — only those at the top do.

While everyone can sue everyone else, it always looks grotesque when the bad sue the good. So far it seems as if ICJ takes this in stride, humoring South Africa only to a degree, perhaps realizing the irony, if not the absurdity, of the situation: that this is not even the proverbial kettle calling a pot black — but a very sooty kettle calling black a shiny gold spoon.

Put simply, it is nuts: a righteous party — Israel — is being accused of iniquity by someone practicing actual iniquity; it is accused of endangering people by someone who does not give a straw about well-being of the people.

This said, what really annoys me is that initially I was fooled into excusing South Africa’s behavior, and assumed that at least its governance at home was impeccable. But having been informed by the BBC, I now see that while South Africa indeed exported its treatment of its people to ICJ, that treatment is deceitful and corrupt. The travesty of South Africa suing Israel serves, if anything, as a sobering illustration of the upside-down world we live in. In a upside-up world, South African government would have been sent to the international nuthouse right upon filing its court case.

South Africa’s elections being on hand, it will be interesting to see whether South Africans will sent the thieves, cheats and crackpots who now rule them packing. Perhaps, the country will regain its sanity, and will start fixing its own problem before offering solutions to others — the others who are in no need of South Africa’s corrupt “solutions”? That would be a very good start for South Africa indeed — and a good response to South Africa’s nutty “case” against Israel, too.

Photograph from Al Jazeera