Reflections on The Rwandan Genocide as South Africa Takes Israel to Court
Dearest Reader,
To say this week’s installment of Loving Spoonful Weekly Newsletter was challenging to write is an understatement. But to say it has not been on my mind in one form or another for months is equally dishonest. As we all know by now, in October 2023 Israel suffered an unprecedented, violent and shattering “surprise” attack from the paramilitary wing of neighboring Gaza’s governing political party, Hamas—a group many western nations have labeled a terrorist organization. I think I can safely say we were all reeling from this tragedy, none more than Israelis, when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced war was imminent. Within days the war drums were beating in the West with a predictable rhythm and tone that conjured my own memories of America after 9/11—a bad omen. What would follow has upended our global understanding of human rights, international law, the impenetrability of Israeli intelligence and Western moral authority.
I was 11 or 12 years old when I first really considered the term “genocide.” I was living in Nairobi, Kenya where my family resided. Most of my childhood was split between New York City and Nairobi. I grew up with two parents very much involved in political discourse and employed by governmental and humanitarian organizations including the United Nations. I’ve always had a frustrating preoccupation with justice and equality—frustrating because as one matures such values become corrupted by unethical compromise and materialism which explains our obsession with rich philanthropists not collective redistribution of wealth.
When I was that age, the 1994 war in Rwanda broke out. Living so close to a country that seemed to be descending into horrifying violence with no intervention was scary. Though I knew of the war broadly, the extent of what I recall discussing with elders was that we could not eat fish, a staple in our diet, from our ancestral fresh water lake, Nam Lolwe or Lake Victoria. The reason was the fish were eating decaying bodies dumped in the lake near our border with Rwanda. That thought haunted me for years, and arguably it still does. When we moved back to NYC in summer of 1994, that disturbance, the understanding that some 800,000 people can be slaughtered within months and no one intervened, stayed with me. Later that year in sixth grade, perhaps even later in 7th grade, I did a social studies project on the Rwandan genocide. I can still see the images of whole families, including children, slouching over one another, coated in blood, left to be found and photographed by Time or Newsweek. In college I went a step further and did a research paper of the genocide, diving deeper into why it happened.
I’m usually very concerned with the why of a matter, especially in war. I suppose I prefer not to repeat the horrors of our past, to truly free ourselves from the conditions that lead to mass death by confronting the conditions that inspire it. But I’ve also found that this is a minority position. I would argue most people and the mass media are obsessed with what and how—the questions that lock us into fear. When you ask what and how the Rwandan genocide happened you find a lot of gruesome albeit truthful details of war, hate speech, systemic rape, coercion, torture and the like. When you ask why you learn that the tensions between the antagonizing ethnic groups, Hutu and Tutsi, were fueled and codified by former Belgian and German colonizers who created ideological and economic rifts between communities to get a hold of resources for themselves, whereas before there was never such deep animus. Sure the tensions built up over time, after lots of grievance between Hutu and Tutsi that blew up on occasion into violence over decades of intermittent conflict, only to totally explode in 1994.
The death toll was so outsized that I think it challenged the moral authority of the West back then. I remember Rwanda became this moral flashpoint of the West’s failure to be a peacekeeping, moral leader. All these storylines in TV shows and movies popped up celebrating those who exemplified moral courage in that terrifying experience, to vilify those who succumbed to their most base instincts and to sanctify the handwringing inaction of the West. On the last point, there is always some Martin Sheen West Wing character who is tormented by his inability to save everybody. Look Westerners would have to “save” a lot less people if they would take more accountability for the why and help nations in distress really examine that, but how can they when they don’t do so at home?
Genocide according the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide is pretty straight forward. 153 nations have signed on to the Convention that agree, “genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: 1. Killing members of the group; 2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; 3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; 4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; and 5. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”
The term genocide and the above, legally codified definition of the term are born out of the tragedies of WWII and the sinister work of Nazi Germany to exterminate European Jews. The state of Israel, one could argue, was ideated during WWI and made manifest following WWII as an attempt by the British to both identify a safe haven for Jews no longer feeling secure in Europe and also to circumvent Europe’s unchanging racist views of the besieged community. Some nearly 80 years after colonizing Palestine to carve out Israel, this sanctuary has become the harbinger of the worst humanitarian crisis we have seen in the 21st century, namely this war in Gaza.
Very much like my feelings of deep sorrow and frustration during the Rwandan genocide I feel the same today. The attack by Hamas’ paramilitary wing on October 7th was terrible and replete with war crimes that should be prosecuted, but the response by Israel has been genocidal nearly from the start. Referring back to the above definition of genocide and the mandate of every signatory to prevent genocide as much as stop it when in action, South Africa and Israel signed the Genocide Convention. As detailed in the Convention, in order to successfully prosecute the charge of genocide, “proven intent on the part of perpetrators to physically destroy a national, ethnical, racial or religious group” must be clear.
Former director of the New York office of the UN high commissioner for human rights and seasoned human rights lawyer Craig Mokhiber, resigned from his post not long after the war began asserting that the United States, United Kingdom and most of Europe (all signatories to the Convention) are “wholly complicit in the horrific assault” on Gaza in their apparent refusal to prevent genocide. He even said as early as October 2023 that “The current wholesale slaughter of the Palestinian people, rooted in an ethno-nationalist colonial settler ideology, in continuation of decades of their systematic persecution and purging, based entirely upon their status as Arabs … leaves no room for doubt…this is a textbook case of genocide.”
Numerous international human rights organizations including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Israeli human rights group B’Tselem who document human right violations and the United Nations have called Israel an apartheid state because of its multi-tiered system of rights and privileges on the basis of ethnicity and religion. Under these conditions of war in Gaza and apartheid, a group of South African lawyers and international legal allies have presented a case before the U.N. affiliated International Court of Justice (ICJ) to charge Israel with the crime of genocide beginning proceeding this month, January 2024.
Although the case will take years to prosecute, South Africa hopes to secure a ceasefire of the ongoing hostilities until all the facts can be investigated. Human rights lawyers made a similar intervention during an ongoing genocide in Bosnia and sought to prevent further hostilities in the 1990s with a successful ICJ case that found genocide occurred, arguably saving countless lives. By the early aughts, there was legal accountability and prosecution of genocidal acts for what happened during the 1992-95 Bosnian war that claimed some 100,000 lives. However, proving that Serbia was intent on committing genocide was not conclusive, but the nation was found guilty of dereliction to prevent genocide.
In the case of Israel as South Africa expertly laid out in their opening arguments at the ICJ, the question of genocidal intent that was not sufficiently proven in Bosnia may be a cake walk in the case of the war in Gaza. In their damning 84-page application to the ICJ, South Africa has a treasure trove of official public statements by Israeli government leaders from the prime minister and president to the Knesset members (Israeli parliament/congress) demanding the extermination of Palestinians in Gaza: declaring [we] are fighting “human animals,” making Gaza a “slaughterhouse,” or “erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth.”
South Africa has also laid out how official genocidal statements from the Israeli government have directly impacted the behavior of soldiers in Gaza. President Isaac Herzog said “its is the entire nation out there that is responsible. It is not true this rhetoric about civilians not being aware, not involved. It’s absolutely not true.” To this end, South African lawyer Tembeka Ngcukaitobi said the following in his remarks at the ICJ: “[Regarding intent] in communicated state policy, it is simple. If the statements were not intended they would not have been made. The genocidal intent behind these statements is not ambiguous to Israeli soldiers on the ground. Indeed it is directing their actions and objectives.” In Ngcukaitobi remarks he illustrates this through documented statements from government officials to recorded video of soldiers on the ground gleefully singing, “we know our slogan: there are no uninvolved civilians.”
Since the beginning of the War in Gaza in October 2023, Israel has cut off food, water and electricity in illegal collective punishment of Gaza from day 1, killed at least 25,000 civilians with thousands more under the rubble, employed AI technology to maximize bombing targets for a ‘mass assassination factory,’ bombed myriad internationally protected structures/spaces including hospitals, ambulances, churches, mosques, schools, refugee camps, civilian infrastructure and is even carrying out controlled demolitions of cultural institutions, murdered a record numbers of journalists and media workers (the most ever killed in a single conflict, 83 and counting), record deaths for UN employees (100 and counting, the most in UN history), made Gaza a graveyard for children with over 10,000 children dead and thousands more maimed and forced women into unbearable circumstances where they miscarry, lose newborns, risk death in childbirth, watch their children starve or are killed themselves.
Some might argue that since security technology and the banner of ‘the only democracy in he Middle East’ (a great incubator for Western interests in the region) are foundational elements of Israel’s national identity, this zealous response to Hamas’ violent attack is a feverish attempt to reassert authority both militarily and economically. After all, in a world where war is a booming industry, Israel cannot let being caught on the back foot in October 2023 upend the gravy train. In a twisted way, the theatre of this war is an amazing playground to test military and security technology and its paying off.
As we await the initial conclusions to South Africa’s case against Israel for ongoing genocide in Gaza and consider the facts of this article from so many reputable sources, the question of ‘is this or is this not a genocide’ reveals an even larger question. As Bosnian war survivor Arnesa Buljušmić-Kustura said recently, in light of all the horrors in Gaza with disease and starvation afoot, “We’re really on the precipice right now where it is not just Israel that is on trial, in a way it is the entire international humanitarian law and the framework of it.”
Indeed, how much evidence of clear violations of human rights targeted at a community are we willing to ignore to maintain the status quo? As famed Jewish New Yorker Magazine journalist Masha Gessen pondered in a recent, brilliant editorial entitled In the Shadow of the Holocaust, how has the politics of memory of WWII given cover to extremist right wing agendas that distort our collective ability to hold a state accountable for its actions for fear of antisemitic smears? Right now, Israel is very much aligned with and supported by some of the most extremist leaders in the world. How much of the global order that works for human security are we willing to sacrifice? And if we take this Faustian bargain, what does the war in Gaza mean for future global security in hospitals, ambulances, churches, mosques, schools, civilian infrastructure, etc.? Will journalists and UN workers ever be safe again? Are we actually willing to live in a world without any rules of warfare and human rights? I truly hope we ponder these questions well and remember how easily our humanity, codified into law, can slip away.
With Love During End Times,
Agunda