South Africa’s genocide case against Israel cites Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s invocation of Amalek, biblical Israel’s rival nation, which has long been used to justify killing Palestinians
In December 2023, South Africa filed a case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) against Israel’s genocidal acts and omissions for destroying a substantial part of the Palestinian national, racial, and ethnical group. The case under the Genocide Convention underlined the need for provisional measures to protect Palestinians against further, severe, and irreparable harm to their rights.
South Africa approached the ICJ under the Genocide Convention’s Article IX, which allows any state party to the convention to bring a case against another even if it is not directly linked to a particular conflict, as Israel continued to violate it with impunity, with unqualified Western support. The relentless Israeli bombing has killed over 40,000, mostly women and children, and prompted UNICEF to call Gaza a ‘graveyard for thousands of children’, a ‘living hell for everyone else.’
Experts such as Boston University’s International Human Rights Clinic’s Susan Akram pointed out that genocidal intent is assumed to be the most difficult element to prove. She, however, underlined that Israelis in charge of prosecuting this conflict have made statements easily proving the requisite intent to ‘destroy in whole or in part’ Gaza’s Palestinian population.
South Africa’s genocide case cited Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s invocation of Biblical Amalek to justify Gaza’s wholesale destruction: ‘Now go, attack Amalek, and proscribe all that belongs to him. Spare no one, but kill alike men and women, infants and sucklings, oxen and sheep, camels and asses.’ Netanyahu has made a similar comparison between Iran and Amalek.
Adila Hassim, one of the lawyers representing South Africa’s case, called Israel’s killing of Palestinians ‘unparalleled and unprecedented’. She laid out a series of violations of the Genocide Convention, to which Israel is a party. Hassim said Israel has transgressed Article 2 of the convention by committing actions that fall within the definition of genocide. The actions, she added, show systematic patterns of conduct from which genocide can be inferred while listing Israel’s genocidal acts.
Hassim called the mass killing of Palestinians in Gaza the first genocidal act, as she showed photos of mass graves where bodies were buried, often unidentified. She said not even newborns were spared. Hassim added ICJ has the benefit of the past 13 weeks of evidence that shows incontrovertibly a pattern of conduct and related intention that amounts to a plausible claim of genocidal acts:
Every day, there is mounting, irreparable loss of life, property, dignity, and humanity for the Palestinian people. Nothing will stop the suffering, except an order from this court
In the first Book of Samuel, God commands King Saul to kill every person in the biblical Israel’s rival nation, Amalek. ‘I will punish the Amalekites for what they did to Israel when they waylaid them as they came up from Egypt. Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them.’
Lanard cited a poll in October in which 47% of Israeli Jewish respondents said Israel should ‘not at all’ consider the suffering of Gaza’s civilians. He added that the Amalek reference is one of many that serve to help justify a devastating response to the October 7 Hamas attack. Lanard wrote that casting the enemy as Amalek reinforces that attitude. He noted Netanyahu turned to something that the far right has long used as a justification for genocide, days before UN experts said that Palestinians were at their ‘grave risk.’
College of Charleston Jewish Studies professor Joshua Shanes told Mother Jones that the biblical animosity towards the Amalekites stems from what is described as the ruthless ambush they launched against vulnerable Israelites on their way to the promised land. The attack prompted God to tell Moses to wipe out Amalek.
Saul almost fulfills the command hundreds of years later. He kills all Amalekite men, women, and children while sparing their king, whose descendant, Haman, generations later, plots to kill all the Jews in exile under a Persian ruler.
Lanard wrote that the lesson, when read literally, is clear: ‘Saul’s failure to kill every Amalekite posed an existential threat to the Jewish people.’ He added that Jews traditionally hear the story of the Amalek ambush and God’s decree that they be eliminated on the Shabbat service before the holiday of Purim.
Shanes told Mother Jones it is perhaps the most important of all Torah readings. He disagreed with Hamas’s comparison with Amalek. Shanes argued Amalek is clearly described as a nation, not a political party. ‘If someone says, “I just mean the bad members of the Palestinians. I mean Hamas…,’ that’s not the effect it has in the body politic,’ Shanes told Mother Jones. ‘The effect it has is, we have to wipe these people out.’
Rabbinical human rights organization T’ruah head Rabbi Jill Jacobs told Mother Jones that rabbis generally agree that Amalek no longer exists and that references to it do not provide a morally acceptable justification for attacking anyone.
Jacobs added that the overwhelming history of Jewish interpretation is to interpret it metaphorically. She explained that one common approach is to see it as a call to stamp out evil inclinations within themselves. Jacobs added that it remains common for Israeli extremists to view Palestinians as modern-day Amalekites.
In a 1980 article, Rabbi Israel Hess cited the story of Amalek to justify wiping out Palestinians. The title of the article has been translated as ‘Genocide: A Commandment of the Torah’ as well as ‘The Mitzvah of Genocide in the Torah.’
Lanard wrote that Brooklyn-born extremist Baruch Goldstein, who also saw Palestine as Amalek, slaughtered 29 Muslims praying at a mosque in the occupied West Bank city of Hebron in 1994 on Purim, a week after he would have heard the biblical retelling of the command to wipe out a rival nation. He cited journalist Peter Beinart, writing that the timing was not a coincidence.
Goldstein’s tomb, a pilgrimage site for the Israeli far right, says he died of ‘clean hands and pure heart.’ Lanard wrote that Goldstein’s admirers include Israel’s national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir. He added that Ben-Gvir dressed as Goldstein on multiple occasions in his youth for Purim. Lanard wrote that Ben-Gvir, whose criminal record includes convictions for supporting a terrorist organization and inciting racism, kept a picture of Goldstein in his living room until 2020.
