The Kangaroo Court: Why the ANC's ICJ extension changes nothing — and everything

The International Court of Justice has granted South Africa an 18-month extension in its genocide case against Israel — pushing any ruling past 2030. In this op-ed Ilan Preskovsky argues it no longer matters. The ANC's real objective — branding Israel a genocidal rogue state in the court of global opinion — has already been achieved. No ruling, however emphatic, will undo that. The piece takes a broader view: unpacking Hamas's deliberate use of civilians as human shields, the UN's institutional bias against Israel, and the dangerous normalisation of antisemitism dressed up as legitimate political activism. The canary in the coal mine is singing loudly..By Ilan Preskovsky.At the end of last month, the International Court of Justice granted South Africa an 18 month extension to reply to Israel’s defence on the accusations that it committed genocide in Gaza in its war with Hamas. This means that a) Israel will now have until 2029 to submit its own rejoinder to South Africa’s latest and b) that any ruling on the so-called genocide will not take place before the start of the next decade at the very earliest.This, of course, once again shows just how spurious South Africa’s accusations are. Not only is South Africa – or let’s call it what it is, the ANC – clearly struggling to build an actual case, the very idea that this court case was an urgent move to prevent a genocide seems even more ridiculous in the face of the ANC’s constant dilly dallying on the matter.It also doesn’t make the slightest difference. The ANC’s job has already been done. They can delay the case until 2060. The ICJ can give an absolute ruling of “not guilty” to all of the ANC’s accusations. It can state entirely unequivocally that there was never anything remotely resembling a genocide in Gaza. It can come out that the whole thing was a carefully orchestrated sham by the Islamic Republic and Qatar in their ongoing war with the Jewish state.And it would matter not a single jot. In the eyes of much of the world, Israel is a rogue, genocidal state, and no amount of evidence to the contrary seems able to change that.Evidence ShmevidenceIt doesn’t seem to matter that the so-called “genocide” was a direct response to Hamas’ barbaric attacks on mostly Israeli civilians on 7 October 2023 or that some 250 Israelis and foreign nationals were abducted by Hamas into Gaza. It doesn’t matter that Hamas built a network of tunnels under Gaza longer than the London Underground that it used to protect its fighters and only its fighters, while launching attacks at Israeli soldiers from within Gaza’s civilian population to ensure that as many Palestinian civilians would die as possible, and wearing civilian clothing specifically to make sure that Israeli forces would struggle to tell the difference between combatants and civilians. It doesn’t even matter that Israel sent millions of texts and phone calls to warn Gazan civilians away from areas that they were about to attack; frequently at great cost to their strategic position and at great risk to Israeli soldiers who could and did fall prey to traps left by Hamas. No, to probably more people than there are Jews in the world, Israel is guilty of genocide and Hamas are legitimate freedom fighters, and that’s all there is to it. No matter what facts you might throw at them.You can point out, for example, that of the 70,000 Palestinian lives that were lost in the war, somewhere between a third and a half of those were Hamas combatants - which does mean that a horrifying amount of civilians were casualties of the war, an undeniable tragedy, but it puts the ratio of combatant to civilian casualties well within the range of any modern war or significantly better than average. It’s also odd, one might say, that for an army that’s supposedly committing genocide, it sure seemed to go out of its way to to feed its “victims”, to provide Polio vaccine shots for their children and to pause fighting for hours at a time to provide safe corridor for civilians out of active war zones.None of this makes any impact on the dogmatically held beliefs of the “pro-Palestinian” movement, who don’t even seem to care that support for Hamas (or its funders in the Islamic Republic) only exacerbates the suffering of actual Palestinians. The whole war, after all, wouldn’t have happened in the first place had Hamas not attacked Israel, and it is currently Hamas that is blocking any rebuilding in Gaza by refusing to disarm, having spent the “ceasefire” (and their entire time as the leaders of the enclave, for that matter) murdering and torturing Gazans en masse.Because, of course, we are living in a world where truth and nuance play second fiddle to blind activism and because, well, why go through all the trouble of actually trying to understand the facts on the ground when that most hallowed of institutions, the United Nations - in a report commissioned by its Human Rights Council - has decided that Israel is guilty of the worst crimes imaginable.As if the UN is some sort of great arbiter of truth when it comes to this long, complicated and deadly conflict.It has, for a start, a long-standing and undeniable bias against Israel, as it has passed more resolutions against Israel than every other country combined - including those who have killed more of their own civilians in a couple of days than Israel did Gazan civilians over two years of war (cough*Iran*cough). Its approach to the Palestinians, meanwhile, is even more harmful as its Palestinian refugee agency, UNRWA, has robbed the Palestinian people of any agency by ensuring they retain their refugee status in perpetuity, even as full citizens in another country. UNWRA itself, of course, has also become a hotbed for Jihadists and Jihadist sympathisers, who either cheered on the October 7 atrocities or actively took part in them. Beyond even the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, though, the UN has done all it could to become a parody of itself. That it has never actually been of any practical use at stopping wars, genocides, or systematic oppression is pretty much a given at this point, but even as an organisation of empty gestures and emptier moral arbitrations, it has lost any legitimacy whatsoever. This is an organisation, after all, whose Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) nominated the Islamic Republic of Iran to its “Committee for Program and Coordination” – a key body in the UN that shapes global policies on - *checks notes* - “human rights, women's rights, and terrorism prevention”. You really can’t make this stuff up.“Just as Every Cop is a Criminal, and All Your Sinners Saints...”Look, obviously, none of this is a laughing matter. The accusations against Israel are not be taken lightly, nor are the thousands of people who have lost so much in this conflict, including their lives. Certainly, just because Israel isn’t guilty of the worst crimes it’s accused of doesn’t mean that its government, especially certain far-far-right sectors within it, haven’t said or done things that are utterly beyond the pale, or that the IDF didn’t make grave mistakes during the war. It’s just very, very difficult not to be facetious when it looks like the whole world has lost its damn mind.ECOSOC really did nominate representatives of that government for that job. Murderous jihadists really are seen as heroes, and their victims oppressors. Leftist and LGBTQ activist groups really are standing for, even venerating, people that would sooner throw them off a roof (literally) than look at them. Israel, which remains to this day, smaller than the Kruger National Park, really is being accused of expansionism and colonialism by Americans, Australians, Canadians, Arabs, the British, and much of Europe. And defensive wars really are being rewritten as genocides.That the world seems to have shifted off its axis is pretty much undeniable at this point. And the fact that hatred of the Jewish state and, by extension, hatred of Jews everywhere is at the centre of it all is no coincidence.This explosion of anti-Jewish hatred that is couched in or justified by hatred of the Jewish state obviously hurts Israel and diaspora Jews both. For all of our government’s allegiances with the most despotic regimes on the planet, including the Islamic Republic and Hamas, South Africa has actually largely been resistant to flagrant, let alone violent antisemitism (at least in comparison to most of the rest of the world) but even that’s hardly guaranteed to last forever. We’re still nowhere near what Jews in places like Australia, the UK and Canada have been facing, but it says something that even here, Jewish schools, synagogues and events employ a level of security that is normally reserved for presidential visits: including but not limited to imposing physical barriers, tightly controlled entry points, and trained security personnel with assault rifles. Certainly, nothing like this is seen outside mosques or churches.The Canary In the Coal MineBut, how it affects Jews is only the tip of the iceberg. Antisemitism isn’t a “Jewish problem”; it’s something much more pervasive than that. Some particularly apropos quotes come to mind here:“The hate that starts with Jews never ends with Jews,” (Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks).“Tell me what you accuse Jews of—I’ll tell you what you’re guilty of,” (Vasily Grossman).“Jews are the canary in the coal mine,” (source unknown).The rise, justification and ultimately permissiveness of Jew-hate is as sure a sign of societal and civilisation decay as you could hope to find. Jews have been the chief scapegoat of societies across the globe for as long as there have been Jews, and scapegoats are not, as a general rule, needed when things are going well. Which is why unlike most bigotries, hatred of the Jews morphs according to whatever is wrong with a society at a time. As such, Jews can and have been be accused of being both arch capitalists and communists, godless and religious, lowly vermin and incredibly powerful overlords..Read more:.Iran, Hamas and the ANC: How South Africa got played at the ICJ.The question, then, is what does today’s antisemitism – which mostly, but not exclusively, takes the form of anti-Zionism - say about the state of our world? And what does it say when the left and the right; the secularist and the religious fundamentalist; the academic and the working Joe, have all fallen back, once again, to the “world’s oldest hatred” and have returned, without a shred of self-awareness of originality, to blaming the Jews (and now the Jewish state) for all that is wrong with the world.I can only hope that we figure it out before it’s too late..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox every morning on weekdays. 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The Kangaroo Court: Why the ANC's ICJ extension changes nothing — and everything

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