Three Different Articles on the War Between Israel and Hamas

I thought I'd share these with you

I collect A LOT of articles, essays, opinion pieces, etc. over the course of each week, and many of these get filed away for future use. Some just get filed away and collect digital dust. Some of these are used as research or references for my writing. Many others go into the weekly SCR. Others don’t fit anywhere but are still worthy of sharing anyway, just like the following three that I am sharing with you today.

The first one is from OpenDemocracy and describes how South Africa’s case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) is a ‘personal one’. This serves to balance the article on this very same issue that I shared in the most recent SCR, as that one came from an Israeli.

For South Africa, defending Palestine is personal

When lawyers and government officials who had represented South Africa in its dispute against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) returned to Johannesburg’s OR Tambo Airport on Sunday 14 January, they received a welcome usually reserved for world champions or Olympians.

People waving Palestinian and South African flags filled the airport’s international arrivals hall. The call and response of Amandla! Awethu! (Power! To the People!) rang out.

Placards were held aloft. Some were humorous: “Heroes don’t wear capes, they have LLBs!” Others, mournful.

“Motivating factors”:

Dangor pointed to the strong pro-Palestinian sentiment among civil society organisations in South Africa as another motivating factor for his government’s ICJ application. Likewise, the long relationship between the African National Congress (ANC), which currently governs South Africa, and the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO), when both were liberation movements.

‘Grand apartheid’ and the state of Israel, he pointed out, were both created around the same time in 1948, and both countries – considered pariahs by swathes of the international community – had a long history of collaboration, including in the dealing of arms, until Black South Africans gained freedom in 1994. In 1990, a few months after Nelson Mandela, South Africa’s first democratically-elected president, was released from an apartheid prison after 27 years, he risked the opprobrium of the pro-Israeli and Zionist lobbies in the US to reiterate the ANC’s support of the PLO.

Mandela was not shy about his support for the Palestinians:

During a heated town hall meeting at the City University of New York, hosted by the broadcast journalist Ted Koppel, Mandela, described PLO leader Yasser Arafat as “a comrade in arms” and said Black South Africans and the ANC “identify with the PLO because just like ourselves they are fighting for the right of self determination”.

Long-term goals:

Longer term, the country hopes a genocide finding by the ICJ would reign in Israel’s decades-long “belligerent apartheid occupation of Palestinian territory” and lead to processes to investigate and hold alleged genocidaires and perpetrators of war crimes to account. The application is considered a step towards finding a solution to the crisis in the Middle-East and an end to the Israeli occupation of Palestine.

South Africa’s case at the ICJ, according to both Jele and Dangor, hopes to build on a precedent set by that court in a groundbreaking 2020 ruling after The Gambia applied successfully for provisional measures, under Article IX of the Genocide Convention, to prevent Myanmar from perpetrating acts of genocide against the persecuted Rohingya minority in that country. In July 2022, the court followed up with a ruling rejecting Myanmar’s preliminary claims that The Gambia did not have jurisdiction to bring the application against it, confirming the admissibility of the African country’s application.

Good domestic politics and good Global South politics as well:

As South Africa edges closer to celebrating 30 years of democracy later this year, its “Rainbow Nation” optimism has been frayed by government corruption scandals, an energy crisis, the breakdown of infrastructure through state negligence, increasing crime rates, declining quality of services in hospitals and schools, and a sense that it has lost moral authority in the international sphere.

This case, however, has been greeted by citizens and civil society, on social media and in the streets, as a return to the heady days of the early 1990s when, after Mandela was released and the country headed to a largely peaceful transition to democracy, hope for a better society and world seemed boundless.

Ylva Rodny-Gumede, head of the Division for Internationalisation at the University of Johannesburg, and a professor in its School of Communications, said after various international policy missteps, the ICJ application had restored a sense of principle to the South African government, duly celebrated by South Africans tired of the grubby mainstream politics in the country since the end of apartheid.

Click here to read it in its entirety.

I am still of the opinion that other actors pushed South Africa to pursue this case in order to harm the legitimacy of these courts.

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The True Story Behind Merkel’s Promise to Israel

Angela Merkel introduced the concept of Germany safeguarding the State of Israel as a “reason of state” for her country. Germany feels a duty and obligation towards Jews and towards Israel because of what they did in WW2. Its leaders have gone as far as to publicly declare that they will take measures to assist Israel at the ICJ in the case brought against by South Africa.

Chancellor Olaf Scholz was wearing black when he stepped in front of Germany’s parliament, the Bundestag, on October 12 of last year. Five days after the massacre perpetrated by Hamas, he said that the hearts of all Germans were "heavy in the face of the suffering, the terror, the hate and the contempt for human lives" that had been visited upon Israel. It was clear, he said, that Germany sided with the victims.

And then he uttered a notable sentence: "Israeli security is Germany’s 'reason of state.'" In other words, Germany’s very existence was linked to Israel’s security.

It was almost the exact formulation that Angela Merkel used during her famous speech before the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, in 2008. Since then, there has been plenty of head-scratching and debate: What does the statement mean? Is it an element of foreign policy doctrine? Is it a blank check for Israel, enabling the country to turn to Germany at any time?

Was it careless and short-sighted opportunism?

And she was well aware of the weight of the historical burden born by Germany. Her father became a pastor in response to the Holocaust, and the mass murder of the Jews was a topic frequently discussed in her childhood home in Templin. Still, Merkel would say after the fall of the Berlin Wall that she "only learned quite late just how inconceivably massive was Germany’s loss because of the Shoah." Some of her contemporaries believed that her fondness for Israel was a kind of overcompensation.

Merkel’s team had a hard time fulfilling the task their boss had given them. But then, in April, an essay appeared by Rudolf Dressler, a former SPD parliamentarian and now Germany’s ambassador in Tel Aviv. Dressler wrote that he was concerned about anti-Semitism back home, with the piece concluding with the statement: "The secure existence of Israel is in Germany’s national interest and is therefore an element of our reason of state."

Merkel’s staff was electrified. They felt that the concept of "reason of state" was "CDU language," with former Chancellor Helmut Kohl and CDU cornerstone Wolfgang Schäuble having frequently used the term. Who would care if they stole the sentence from a Social Democrat? Plus, Dressler and Merkel knew and respected each other.

Submarines to be fitted with nuclear warheads:

Merkel won the election and had just taken power when Ehud Olmert, Israel’s deputy prime minister, spoke with her on the sidelines of an event. Olmert doesn’t recall the precise date – he was in Berlin twice in the autumn of 2005. But he has clear recollections of his chat with Merkel. He had been charged by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon with finding out if Merkel would be prepared to export Dolphin-class submarines to Israel, an inquiry that involved the most sensitive arms export in Germany.

Israel had been purchasing such vessels from the production site in Kiel since Kohl’s tenure in the Chancellery. Hardly anyone doubted at the time that the special configuration of the submarines served to enable Israel to arm them with nuclear warheads. Any country willing to attack Israel had to anticipate a nuclear counterattack launched from a vessel that was almost impossible to locate. From the Israeli perspective, it was Germany’s most important contribution to the security of the Jewish state.

This is a very long piece and quite an interesting bit of history. Click here to read it.

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“What Caused the Terrorist Attacks Was Arrogance”

This is another entry from Der Spiegel, but this time it’s an interview with former Israeli PM Ehud Olmert. Naturally, he blames Bibi Netanyahu for the attacks that took place on October 7th of last year.

Of course Bibi deserves blame, but I can’t help but notice that this is just a continuation in the western media offensive against him, one that really got into high gear when his government attempted to reform the Israeli judiciary. Olmert openly states that “…in principle, yes. However, I’ll be very honest with you. Everything that can bring down Netanyahu is worthwhile.”

DER SPIEGEL: You think it's not possible to dismantle Hamas?

Olmert: We are not going to destroy or dismantle Hamas completely and we are not going to remain in Gaza. We will have to pull out 90 percent of the Israeli army. The most that we can think of doing are specific overnight operations in order to get rid of specific targets. But this is much below the expectations that this government created. The reserve soldiers will come back bitter and upset. Some 150,000 Israelis do not live in their homes. They can't come to the south because there are no houses. In the north, they do have houses, but they don't want to take the risk of being subject to a similar operation. And the government doesn't have the credibility to convince them. All these angry people join the people that were sick and tired of Netanyahu before because of the judiciary reform and nepotism. The bitterness and disappointment will build up into a rage that will erupt like a vulcano. And at the peak of it, Bibi will not be prime minister anymore.

DER SPIEGEL: What must happen so that the army can withdraw from the Gaza Strip and the government can say: We have achieved at least two or three goals there?

Olmert: Most of Gaza is nearly completely destroyed. I think at the end, central Gaza will be completely destroyed. Possibly the army will be successful in eliminating one of the leaders. We could have eliminated Mohammed Deif and Yehiyeh Sinwar long ago.

Olmert on the cause of the attack:

What caused October 7 was not a failure of Israeli intelligence or Israeli technologies. What caused the terror attacks was arrogance. The arrogance that we have been looking down on the Arabs. What can they do – they are Arabs! So, in 1973, they proved to us that they can be smart and sophisticated. They fooled us and caught us with our pants down. And now they did the same. We saw everything but we didn't believe it. Because of our arrogance.

Click here to read the rest.

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