Advertisement
Supported by
Guest Essay
By Sean Jacobs
Mr. Jacobs is an associate professor of international affairs at the New School and the founder and editor of the website Africa Is a Country.
Earlier this month, I went with my 18-year-old daughter to see the South African singer Thandiswa Mazwai perform with her band at a music festival in Manhattan.
Many of my fellow South African expatriates were in the audience. As we took our seats, my daughter, Rosa, noticed concertgoers waving South African flags. You rarely see such displays outside political or sporting events, but many South Africans seem to be having a moment of self-assertion and patriotism now that our government has brought a genocide case against Israel to the International Court of Justice in The Hague for its actions in Gaza, solidifying its place on the world stage in solidarity with Palestinians.
On the eve of the hearing, a friend messaged me from Cape Town: “It feels a little bit like Christmas Eve or something here. Or the night before a big final.” Because of the time difference, I watched a recorded version once I got to my office on Jan. 11, the first of two days of hearings. By then, Francesca Albanese, the U.N. special rapporteur on Palestine, had already sent a message on X that “watching African women & men fighting to save humanity” from the “ruthless attacks supported/enabled by most of the West will remain one of the defining images of our time. This will make history whatever happens.”
As a Black South African who grew up during the nation’s liberation struggle and came of age watching the birth of South African democracy, Albanese’s words resonated for me. So does the case, regardless of the outcome on Friday, when the court issued a preliminary ruling that called on Israel to take steps to prevent genocide in Gaza but did not demand a cease-fire.
The South Africans in the court that day represented the country that many of us had imagined as we tried to think beyond apartheid to a new country. The lawyers’ last names — Hassim, Ngcukaitobi, Dugard, Du Plessis — evoked a number of the nation’s population groups: Indian South Africans, Xhosas, English-speaking whites and Afrikaners. On the bench (countries that are party to a dispute at the International Court of Justice may nominate a judge to hear the case) was Judge Dikgang Moseneke. As a teenager, he had been imprisoned on Robben Island, where he met and befriended Nelson Mandela, and after democracy came, he was elevated to South Africa’s Constitutional Court, the nation’s highest judicial body.
This group in The Hague, in its diversity, represented a country whose national identity is a product of collective struggle and a rejection of the ethnonationalist blood-and-soil politics that South Africa left behind when we defeated legal apartheid. That kind of politics seemed to many of us to define Israel’s policy toward Palestinians; for years, the country’s now-governing African National Congress has made common cause with the Palestinians. In the international court, these South Africans were at once fighting for, and helping us imagine, nationhood built on shared struggles and ideals rather than group identities.
After the end of apartheid, there was a sense that South Africa, with its history of struggle and its progressive Constitution, would meaningfully transform its old racial order and be the world’s moral conscience. Except for a brief, hopeful period under President Nelson Mandela, the country has largely failed to live up to that ideal.
Some of this couldn’t be helped. The politics of nonalignment — an ideal that many developing countries at independence set for themselves — largely faded in the 1990s. The Washington consensus on free markets and trade, the exigencies of financial markets, and failures of political imagination further limited South Africa’s economic transformation and its hopes of forging a new path. The ideals of the nation’s liberation movement came up against a complicated world of compromise and accommodation. In the past month, we’ve received a glimpse of some of those old hopes.
The case before the court has aligned South Africa firmly with what used to be known as the third world and is now known as the global south, and it has attracted other allies. A barrister from Ireland, another country that experienced colonialism and colonial violence, joined the South Africans at court. Survivors of the Bosnian genocide are also petitioning the court in favor of international action to protect Palestinians.
As the proceedings opened, South Africa’s lawyers were uncompromising and principled, speaking from, and to, our national experience. The lawyers said out loud things that to many South Africans seem self-evident but are often suppressed in public discourse about Israel-Palestine in the West. They said the word “apartheid.” They said the word “Nakba,” which means “catastrophe” in Arabic and refers to the displacement of Palestinians from their land in 1948 when Israel became a state. That same year, South Africa established legal apartheid, which contributed to a process of forced removals of Black South Africans, including my father and his family, from their land and homes. Israel’s representatives forcefully rejected the charges the next day.
In the lead-up to the hearings, some international commentators and critics of South Africa suggested that members of the legal team were political tools, carrying water for the A.N.C., which is facing a tough re-election fight this year and which could benefit from wide public support for the Palestinian cause among South African citizens. Of course, some in the South African government and political circles indeed seem to be backing this case opportunistically. But at home, these same lawyers who are at The Hague have long been thorns in the side of government officials, taking on the South African state over its obligations to redistribute land, support public education and health care, and fight corruption, and representing opposition parties, among many other things.
In the days after the hearings, I reflected that this might well be another hopeful moment followed by a complicated and depressing reality. Often, the best one can hope from international judicial bodies is watered-down resolutions of little consequence to perpetrators.
At the same time, by taking these institutions at their word and forcing the International Court of Justice to act, South Africa is putting down a marker for global civil society. South Africa stepped up. It showed what we can be, how groups that have faced oppression and violence can stand up confidently for one another on the world stage. What those lawyers were saying was: Get used to hearing our voices.
Sean Jacobs is an associate professor of international affairs at the New School and the founder and editor of the website Africa Is a Country.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.
Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X and Threads.
Advertisement
login
who are we?
contact us
qosheapp
Toi Staff
Gideon Levy
Belen Fernandez
Andrew Mitrovica
Mort Laitner
Nikkei Editorial
Ali Fathollah-Nejad
Rami G Khouri
visit website
