January 11, 2024, in The Hague. The crowd is going wild. Palestinian keffiyeh hanging around the necks of the men present in the vast majority, the songs and the jumps make the flags dance above the heads galvanized by the idea of a curious victory. A few meters away, the atmosphere is one of mourning. Israeli flags slowly come to life from the tired steps of their carrier. The faces are sad, many came accompanied by a photo of a hostage. It’s been a time of pain since October 7.
The day before, Jean-Luc Mélenchon was delighted on X to be invited to this event. In what capacity, one wonders, but he will be “present for peace”, in the camp of the celebration of what for some is the trial of the century. It is a “choice” according to him “which challenges the law of the strongest, the most armed or the injunctions of murderous theories such as that of the “clash of civilizations” or “the war of good against evil”.” A political choice, in short.
Between the walls facing the demonstrators stands the International Court of Justice where South Africa has indicted Israel for genocide against the Palestinians of Gaza, part of a “Nakba continuing for 75 years”. If political indecency has raged in all countries of the world in recent months, it finally finds its peak in the main judicial organ of the United Nations. The trial of the century, they said, or the Dreyfus affair of our time.
“Since they dared, I will dare too.” 126 years later, it’s my turn to tell the whole truth.
The truth first about the trial and the false accusations against Israel
Because the South African pleading is distressing. Edited around videos found on social networks and shocking sentences published in the press and on the web, the lawyers follow one another to assert a single message: in the bombings of the Gaza Strip, Israel’s sole objective is to there to destroy the “subgroup” of Palestinians in Gaza.
A particularly attractive idea for anti-Zionists who dream of Israel as the great tyrant of the Middle East, but what about the 1,200 people murdered in the wildest hatred, dismembered, raped, decapitated, burned? What about the more than 7,500 injured and the 139 hostages including 19 bodies removed during the massacre of October 7, 2023, not counting the 110 released and traumatized for the rest of their lives? What about the 500,000 displaced within Israeli borders? What also about the incessant salvos of rockets unleashed by Hamas? What about common sense and self-defense?
The myth of a country thirsty for Palestinian blood fueled by South African accusations is a brazen lie. The accusations of genocide also seem very weak in the face of the only democratic state in the Middle East. It would be a disgrace to recall the considerable efforts made by Israel to protect civilians from this war, despite the trouble Hamas goes to to shield them. It would be disgraceful to recall that for a State which wishes the disappearance of Palestinians from Gaza, treating Gazan children and terrorists in Israeli hospitals would be counterproductive. It would be disgraceful to point out that a genocidal state would probably not welcome tens of thousands of Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank to work with the end goal of creating the conditions that could lead to their demise. And in the face of this, it would be disgraceful for a third country to persist in condemning Israel of genocidal acts.
The truth then about a political class steeped in anti-Jewish hatred guided by an insatiable electoral thirst
For part of the European and international political class, none of all the abominations committed by Hamas on the Gazan population and the Israelis in particular on October 7, 2023 was enough. With Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Jeremy Corbyn at the head, and also major guests of the Hague trial at the ICJ, without us understanding in what capacity, neither the hijackings, nor the hostage-taking, nor the murders, nor beheadings, nor dismemberments, nor rapes, are sufficient to qualify Hamas as a terrorist movement. One more indignity which adds to the long respective lists of the two former elected officials of defamatory, anti-Semitic and hateful remarks. A real disaster for the French and British lefts who no longer retain any credit for the defense of humanist and universal values. Their Manichean vision of power and minorities deprives them of all lucidity, finding legitimacy in barbarism, and making them complicit in acts and crimes which should shake their most deeply held convictions, if any remain. This nauseating left has agreed to sell its weak convictions for the benefit of the supposed new proletariat that they set out to conquer: the great mass of immigration and Muslims and to hell with the defense of the popular classes and workers who no longer make enough victims to still be attractive.
The truth finally about this “war of good against evil”
“Martyrdom is undoubtedly the greatest secret of our success. Your adversary seeks [toujours] to kill you, except if it is not serious for you to lose your life, [si] what matters is to achieve your goal, he loses all control over you.” It is on these words of Naïm Qassem, number 2 of Hezbollah revealed in a documentary series on France 2, that this war crystallizes, not for good against evil, but this war of value. From Hamas to Hezbollah, from Daesh to all contemporary Islamist terrorist groups, the objective is the same: to destroy the West and lead a global jihad. The emergency, for Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and behind them Iran, is to put an end to the “Zionist entity” which they also call the “little Satan”, and above all to overcome the American threat (“the great Satan”).
Understanding what is happening today in the Middle East means understanding the challenges we will have to overcome tomorrow. The barbarity that was expressed and the inhumanity of the actions of October 7 gave us all a lesson about the enemies, the Islamists, terrorism, which Israelis have to fight. Ours in France and in Europe have not been and are not very different.
In this war of life against death, it is neither the Israeli bombings nor the words of the leaders that are genocidal, but rather the very existence of the State of Israel as a genocide in itself. For too long, the Palestinian flag has not been raised in pain to mourn the loss of civilians. No, for too long the Palestinian flag has been brandished with fierce rage as the political symbol of a war waged today against Jews and Israel, and tomorrow against democracies and the West. It is this visceral hatred of the values that Jews and Israel embody that unites terrorists, sovereign states and political leaders without any other apparent coherence. This “war of good against evil” that Jean-Luc Mélenchon calls is none other than a war of values between two worlds, a tireless repetition of history, and the precipitous fall into an era that we would have liked to forget.
For the reasons given, I accuse Hamas terrorists of genocidal acts against the Palestinian population in Gaza and specifically of murder and torture of homosexuals and political opponents; serious attacks on the physical and mental integrity of Gazans by using the population, women and children, as human shields as well as schools, universities, hospitals and ambulances for terrorist purposes; intentional submission of Gazans to conditions of existence leading to its partial destruction by diverting international aid for the benefit of the development of weapons and the financing of terrorism, by confiscating humanitarian aid from civilians and holding the population hostage despite the Israeli bombing announcements; measures aimed at hindering births by depriving Palestinian women in Gaza of quality care in hospitals widely used as weapons warehouses.
I accuse Hamas of incessant attacks aimed at threatening Israeli territorial security and of war crimes and hostage-taking that led the State of Israel to initiate a military response in self-defense. I accuse Hamas of being solely responsible for the dramatic situation in Gaza for the Palestinians since its takeover in the strip, and for the war waged there by Israel.
I accuse Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and Iran of making genocidal remarks against the Jewish community, Israel, the United States and Western nations.
I accuse South Africa and their supporters of bringing the voice of Hamas and their propaganda to the highest authorities in the world. I accuse them of guilty silence when it was necessary to condemn Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, Sudan, Iraq and Iran for genocide against their populations and war crimes. I accuse South Africa and their supporters of failing in their duty to prevent and punish genocidal remarks made directly and publicly against Israel. I accuse South Africa and their supporters of ignoring the massacres of October 7, which they do not consider as part of the Israeli response. I accuse South Africa and its supporters, for the reasons set out above, of bringing to the International Court of Justice an unfounded and politically motivated complaint by a rejection of the right of the State of Israel to exist and to enjoy assertive territorial security.
I accuse Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Jeremy Corbyn of acting as political relays for the anti-Zionism carried by Hamas by refusing to recognize the organization as terrorist and by attributing resistance activities to it.
I accuse the UN of lacking impartiality towards Israel, targeted by 17 resolutions in 2020 compared to 7 for the rest of the world (including one against Iran and one against Syria). I accuse the UN of incomprehensible blindness until January 8, 2024 on the rapes and sexual mutilation carried out on October 7, 2023 in Israel. I accuse the UN of a lack of distance from the information provided by Hamas concerning the deaths and attacks attributed to Israelis. The pitiful response given by the UN to Hamas’s misleading information on Al-Shifa Hospital should have alerted us. I accuse UNRWA of complicity with Hamas terrorists to the detriment of the civilian population. I condemn in the strongest terms the misappropriation of European and international funds by Hamas to finance anti-Semitic school books, weapons and war infrastructure, and the terrorist group’s food rationing.
More than 100 days after the largest pogrom that Israel is known for and the attempted genocide that it had to combat, I condemn the undignified summons of Israel to answer to accusations of genocidal acts and support the Israeli democracy in this unbearable political war of which it is the target. I join the Israelis who mourn their dead and share their terror of knowing that at a time when Israel is being tried for genocide, 120 Israelis are still hostages of terrorist groups in the Gaza Strip, and victims of the abuses of which we know they are capable.
I expect from France the same commitment as Germany alongside the Israelis, a total and clear commitment, and an unequivocal condemnation of South Africa’s initiative.
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