12 No. 78 JUSTICE such genocidal intent — and genocidal acts — to Israel. This is yet another illustration of many of turning facts and law on its head. 4. South Africa’s detailed 84-page Application is an Orwellian inversion of fact and law, a weaponization of the Genocide Convention. It makes no reference to the Black Sabbath of October 7. There is no mention of Hamas’s criminal aggression and invasion accompanied by war crimes and crimes against humanity. There is no reference to the indiscriminate firing of rockets targeting a civilian population, itself constituting a crime against humanity; and no reference to the mass murder, rape, torture, pillaging, and abduction of hostages then still held in captivity. 5. Astonishingly, there is no reference at all to Hamas, not only as a terrorist organization, but as a terrorist military government, let alone its ongoing acts of Genocide on October 7. 6. There is no reference in the entire South African submission to Hamas as an antisemitic, genocidal, terrorist government, not because I say so, but because Hamas says so in its Founding Charter of 1988 and since Hamas has not only engaged in acts constitutive of Genocide on October 7, but it has been engaging in an ongoing incitement to Genocide since 1988, which is a stand-alone breach of the Genocide Convention. Yet it is airbrushed away in South Africa’s application before the Court. 7. None of these genocidal acts by Hamas — let alone its genocidal intent — absolve Israel of its obligations under the Genocide Convention and under international law. But it provides a context — in fact and law — that the Court ignores at its peril. First, that it is Hamas rather than Israel that has been engaged systematically in such acts of genocide; that these genocidal acts have been underpinned by an annihilationist rhetoric and genocidal intent to “cleanse Palestine of the filth of the Jews”; that Hamas has committed itself to commit the genocidal acts of October 7 “again and again and again.” 8. South Africa’s Application not only denies Israel’s inherent right — and obligation — to self-defense, but its request for “Provisional Measures” seeks to deny Israel its right and obligation to protect itself from Hamas’s proclaimed genocidal intent and genocidal acts. It seeks to not only weaponize the Genocide Convention, but the Court’s jurisdiction, in denying Israel its fundamental rights to self-defense in International Law. 9. If there are to be “Provisional Measures,” they should be directed at South Africa and not Israel. South Africa has not only been acting as a proxy for Hamas before the Court. It has sanitized Hamas’s genocidal acts; it has ignored Hamas’s genocidal intent; and it has enjoyed close relations with this genocidal terrorist organization — as expressing solidarity with it – and has hosted members of Hamas and celebrated its relationship with it, even, astonishingly so, after Hamas’s genocidal acts of October 7. 10. In yet another Orwellian inversion of fact and law, South Africa described the suffering of Gazans as “unparalleled and unprecedented.” No one can question that Gazans have suffered, and every civilian death, whether Jew or Palestinian, is a tragedy. But what is unparalleled and unprecedented is Hamas’s use of civilians as human shields; of Hamas’s conversion of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure — hospitals, schools, mosques, UN facilities – into a composite civilian human shield. Accordingly, while Israel has sought to minimize civilian casualties, Hamas has sought to maximize such casualties, thereby inducing and maximizing the very human suffering that it attributes to Israel. 11. In the face of such ongoing genocidal acts – and Hamas’s ongoing intent to commit Genocide by its own acknowledgement, Israel has not only the inherent right but the responsibility to defend its people. Yet South Africa throughout its Application converts and inverts Israel’s exercise of its responsibilities to an imputed genocidal intent. 12. Finally, the conditions for “Provisional Measures” are not only unwarranted in that it is Hamas and not Israel that is committing genocidal acts with the requisite genocidal intent; not only prejudicial in that they deny Israel’s right and obligation to self-defense, but it would leave Hamas free to continue to carry out its genocidal actions anchored in its own stated intention to do so. The Court, by its own action, will be incentivizing further genocidal acts by a genocidal terrorist organization. That is an utter abuse of the Court’s jurisdiction, let alone the absence of any jurisdiction to begin with. The third dynamic involves the denial, erasure and coverup of Hamas’s mass atrocities on October 7. This involves the ignoring or denying, even, of the crime against humanity of “kinocide” — the crime without a name for victims without a voice — where the Hamas premeditated targeting, torturing, terrorizing and murdering of whole families,
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