Pollak: South Africa’s ‘Genocide’ Case Against Israel Is Classic Antisemitism

South Africa’s case against Israel on Thursday at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) at The Hague was a classic display of antisemitism, in that it portrayed Jewish victims of genocide as the aggressors — a familiar pattern from Babylon to the Nazis.

Palestinian Hamas terrorists launched an unprovoked attack against Israel on October 7, murdering 1,200 people, most of whom were civilians. Hamas also raped, kidnapped, and looted Israelis — and has promised to do so again until Israel is destroyed. The Hamas charter goes even further, calling for the murder of Jews all over the world. Indeed, the October 7 attack incited a wave of antisemitic violence worldwide, accompanied by calls to uproot Israel, “from the river to the sea.” That is “genocidal intent.”

But instead of accusing Hamas — and its collaborators, including Iran, Qatar, and Turkey — South Africa targeted Israel. Its 84-page indictment portrays the very existence of Israel as a crime; its lawyers argued that Israel has no right of self-defense in Gaza.

So Israeli Jews are to be passive victims of terrorist genocide; the moment they fight back, they are the ones who are condemned.

The irony of the Jewish state being accused of “genocide” is not lost on Israelis, whose country emerged in the wake of the Nazi Holocaust. Israel signed the 1951 Genocide Convention, a document that emerged as a response to the mass murder of Jews.

To accuse Israel of “genocide” is to undermine its legitimacy, and to re-traumatize the victims of both October 7 and the Holocaust.

The Bible tells one of the earliest stories of antisemitism in the Book of Daniel. The protagonist, who is among the Jews exiled during the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem, later becomes an adviser to the enemy king, who recognizes his talent. Daniel even persuades the king not to execute the other, lesser advisers.

But his colleagues become jealous, and trick the king into passing a decree that criminalizes Jewish prayer. Daniel is thrown into a lions’ den — as Israel has been thrown into the dock at The Hague.

South Africa, like other post-colonial nations, covets Israel’s success. Israel remains the best example of how an oppressed people can achieve greatness by taking control of their own destiny. Its success arouses admiration — but also jealousy.

In South Africa’s case, the ruling party uses Israel as a scapegoat for its own failures, which have turned a once-thriving nation into a dangerous kleptocracy that can barely keep the lights on. South Africa defends Russia, and Zimbabwe, and Sudan — but only targets Israel.

That is blatant discrimination, and the inversion of victim and aggressor is a classic theme of antisemitism.

In his last political statement, from a bunker in Berlin, Adolf Hitler claimed that the Second World War had been started by Jews, “the real criminal of this murderous struggle.”

That is the tradition to which South Africa and its legal team, which even managed to misquote the Bible in its arguments, belong.

Note that South African lawyer Tembeka Ngcukaitobi, who is responsible for the biblical misquote, also defended radical black nationalist, Julius Malema, against charges of “hate speech” for using the song “Kill the Boer,” which white farmers in South Africa believe encourages the problem of farm murders. According to Ngcukaitobi, however, the song is not meant to be taken literally. He has a different standard for Israel: when a Jew quotes the Bible, apparently that is a literal incitement to genocide.

The spectacle of Jews — or, in this case, Israel — being made to answer for an interpretation (or misinterpretation) of a Jewish text is another feature of classic antisemitism.

In the medieval era, Church authorities would persecute Jews by demanding that they be held responsible for passages in Jewish texts they found offensive, when stripped of their context.

Ngcukaitobi and South Africa have turned back the clock to those Dark Ages, bringing back a primitive form of Jew-hatred from an illiterate epoch.

Israel, like Daniel, will survive the lion’s den. But South Africa’s global reputation should not.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the 2021 e-book, “The Zionist Conspiracy (and how to join it),” now updated with a new foreword. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.