AT THE ICJ: WHEN SOUTH AFRICA ACCUSES ISRAEL OF GENOCIDE

International law prescribes that the right to self-defence ofa state is subject to two conditions that also limit the use of excessive force under Article 51: necessity and proportionality.

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In the history of humankind, travelling through millennia, the Jews have been both a celebrated and persecuted community. Undeniably, no other community faced such recurrent attempts at annihilation and yet survived the ravages of time, to stay well respected. Hitler’s Third Reich attempted to exterminate the Jewish people in the last century in a Holocaust, which was followed by World War II. In the aftermath of that horrific war, came to exist a new world order under the United Nations with the promise of peace, security, justice, equality, freedom, and rule of law amongst nations.

Jurisprudential theory propounded by Hugo Grotius, known as the father of “International Law”, who wrote in his seminal work Jure Belli ac Pacis (1625; On the Law of War and Peace) stated that “war is justifiable only if a country faces imminent danger and the use of force is both necessary and proportionate to the threat”. As a result, post WWII, global institutions for international law, formally found a home in the UNO and other allied institutions.

The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide adopted by the UN General Assembly vide Resolution No.260-A (III) on 9 December 1948, was primarily due to the holocaust Jews suffered then. Ironically today,the State of Israel finds itself being accused of the crime of genocide, a term that was coined for what its citizens had encountered.

Genocide, as defined under the convention meant a “…crime committed with the intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, in whole or in part...”