Future geopolitical historians, reflecting on the hypothetical collapse of the liberal order, might highlight one episode in the midst of the thousand cuts dealt to it by imperial cruelty: the world’s first televised and livestreamed mass-murder unfolding in Gaza against the backdrop of decades of colonial occupation in Palestine.
More specifically, future historians might focus on how this seismic shift was given further emphasis by South Africa’s charge of genocide against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ). With Western powers arming Israel in Gaza, South Africa – a country with an intimate history of racial oppression – sought to give voice to the tens of thousands of Palestinian men, women and children who have been consumed by the catastrophe. Israeli forces have killed more than 34,000 Palestinians in Gaza since it launched reprisals for Hamas’s October 7th pogrom in Israel in which 1,200 people were murdered. ….more
