Knesset Member Ofer Cassif (Hadash-Ta’al) added his name to a petition of Israeli citizens in support of South Africa in its petition to the International Court of Justice to investigate Israel on suspicion of genocide in Gaza. On February 19, the Knesset narrowly voted down a resolution to expel Cassif from the body, an action permitted in cases in which a member is found guilty by a special majority of the House of supporting armed insurrection or racist incitement. He explains here the basis for his support of the South African petition.
“For boys and girls, and we with them, / Some by action, / Some with a nod of approval, / Are thrust, muttering ‘necessity’ and ‘revenge,’ / Into the domain of war crimes!” These words are part of the poet Natan Alterman’s weekly column that appeared in the newspaper Davar in November 1948. Even as a war is raging, Alterman is critical of the war crimes committed by soldiers of the young army and calls for the supremacy of law and justice. For never, and especially not during war, must we allow the voice of morality and ethics to be muted.
Those who called or voted for my expulsion from the Knesset, sought to banish the democratic values and the most fundamental morality from parliament and from Israeli society as a whole. To that end, they disseminated hair-raising lies about me, scattered lethal poison in the public discourse, ignored my resolute condemnation of Hamas, were contemptuous of opinions rendered by both the Knesset legal adviser and Israel’s attorney general, and of the law itself, and added a little blood to top off the honey, in the form of an almost explicit demand for my murder. Remember this and don’t say, “We didn’t know.”
The expulsion scheme failed, but the fact that it was supported by 85 MKs, coming from every faction of the House other than Hadash-Ta’al, United Arab List and Labor, including ranking (in their own eyes) figures in the liberal (in its own eyes) camp, requires us to pause and look at the gloomy state of democracy in Israeli society.
South Africa turned to the International Court of Justice on the basis of the convention that prohibits the crime of genocide. Israel itself signed the convention in 1949. My decision to add my voice to a petition supporting South Africa’s application to the court was guided by three moral values: the liberal-skeptical value, the value of truth and the value of life.
A liberal-democratic society cannot of course accept as self-evident statements made by the government or by branches of state in general, including its army. Moreover, the liberal attitude at its foundation is characterized by mistrust and even wariness of the state and its institutions, and therefore seeks to limit and restrain them. When it comes to relations between state and citizen – other than in the economic sphere, about which I take a different position – I share the basic liberal assumptions.
Accordingly, I am not willing to accept as self-evident the claims that war crimes or genocide are not being perpetrated in Gaza solely simply because this is what the government says. After all, since when is the truth the government’s beacon? Isn’t it worth checking? And in fact, on February 6, this newspaper reported that in the wake of the procedure in The Hague, the army will investigate cases “where it is suspected that the international laws of war were violated.” Why did we need The Hague for this to be done?
Blind trust in the state’s institutions and branches, or forceful attempts to forge such belief, exist only in dictatorships in which there is a toxic and violent fusion of brainwashing and regime terror against dissidents and skeptics. Until the October 7 massacre, whole segments of the public, and also many members of the Knesset, frequently, and with reason, accused the government as a whole and the person who heads it in particular, of systematically spreading lies and of serial fraudulence; the army and its spokesperson were also accused on no few occasions of not telling the truth, if not worse than that, from both sides of the political map. How has that changed? Has the war suddenly turned them into truth-tellers by necessity, or is it simply making lies legitimate?
I had no intention of accepting the groundless, dangerous and contemptible concept that we can trust blindly in the government and its institutions. Not only because it conflicts with basic democratic and liberal values in the abstract or theoretical sense, but primarily, as I will show, because it runs completely against the concrete and genuine public interest in Israel.
My support of South Africa’s application to the ICJ can be seen as an expression of my doubts regarding the Israeli government’s denials about what is taking place in Gaza, but not as a categorical assertion that Israel is perpetrating genocide. As such, I supported the request to have this investigated by an institution that is recognized, by Israel too, as being entrusted with implementation of the international convention on the prevention of genocide, namely the International Court of Justice in The Hague. The text of the application also does not allege that genocide is being committed, but that the factual reality depicted in the writ of prosecution is credible and that it raises the concern that Israel is violating its commitment to the convention – something that could lead to genocide.
Indeed, even before I signed the petition, I warned in the Knesset plenum about the harm being done to innocent persons in Gaza, about the humanitarian disaster of hunger, thirst and the spread of diseases that were taking place under the aegis of Israel’s attacks, and about the fact that there is no place in the Gaza Strip that is safe. These developments were also reported in various investigations and were articulated far and wide, in Israel and elsewhere, in this newspaper and in other media outlets, and it is they that formed the basis for South Africa’s writ of prosecution.
I added my name to the petition also in the hope of stopping the war – a clearly nonviolent step whose sole aim is to halt the bloodshed and promote the freeing of the Israeli hostages. For the court in The Hague has the authority to issue an interim order without making a declaration regarding the violation of the convention itself.
Even if we assume that my signing was in fact an explicit assertion that the government of Israel is perpetrating genocide in Gaza – do that and the call to stop the war amount to support for Hamas or its armed struggle, as required by the law that would lead to my expulsion from the Knesset? Only in an Orwellian world where truth is lie, war is peace and so on, is it possible to portray my signature on the petition, whose declared aim is to stop violence, as support for violence.
The notion that South Africa is the envoy of Hamas, and therefore that supporting its application is tantamount to supporting Hamas or its crimes, not only fails to meet the test of basic logic, it is also fundamentally groundless and false. South Africa’s application itself asserts explicit opposition to Hamas’ violence and unequivocally condemns the terrorist attack carried out against Israel, which it characterizes as “atrocity crimes.” Paragraph 1, and afterward paragraph 40, of the application state: “South Africa unequivocally condemns all violations of international law by all parties, including the direct targeting of Israeli civilians and other nationals and hostage-taking by Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups.”
My statements against Hamas in general, and against its crimes on October 7 in particular, were presented in detail in the meetings of the [Knesset’s] House Committee about the expulsion request; all of them included an unequivocal and fierce condemnation of the massacre and of its perpetrators. For example, in an interview to the American TV show “Democracy Now,” I said: “Nothing, absolutely nothing, can justify or legitimize the carnage that Hamas carried out.” On December 13, in another interview, with the local DemocraTV, I said, “Hamas, from my point of view, is an abominable body. Hamas carried out crimes against humanity, massacred and murdered innocent civilians, women and children.”
On November 26, I shared a report of Physicians for Human Rights (which I also forwarded to the chair of the Knesset Committee on the Status of Women, MK Pnina Tamano-Shata) stating that Hamas had committed sexual crimes against women, and I joined the organization’s call to investigate this as a crime against humanity and to place the criminals on trial. On January 4, I added my name to a petition of Amnesty International against “a disturbing trend [that] has emerged among some young people of dehumanizing Israelis, and, sometimes, Jews. This serves to rationalize killing them or violating their rights,” as occurred in “the massacre and atrocities committed against Israeli civilians and other nationals on October 7.”
The accusation that I support Hamas’ armed struggle against Israel is a particularly blatant and crass lie, a wild and baseless distortion, fraudulence behind which lies a clear malicious intent: political persecution and silencing of every critical voice in general and of the Arab citizens and their representatives in particular, with the final goal being their complete exclusion from the public and parliamentary discourse and the perpetuation of the right-wing, Kahanist government. Indeed, just recently, the chairman of the Yisrael Beiteinu party admitted to his Knesset faction, with respect to the attempt to unseat me: “I think we have already achieved an excellent result by dint of the fact that we created deterrence. There is no doubt that it’s working.”
In 2013, on the eve of the election to the 19th Knesset, Yossi Sarid remarked: “Yitzhak Shamir once said that it’s permissible to lie for the sake of the Land of Israel. My stance is different: There is nothing that it’s permissible to lie for.” Elsewhere, Sarid added that the truth must be spoken for the sake of Israel. I can only agree. It’s not the truth that is the problem; the problem, rather, is the ugly reality it points to and which those with vested interests are always trying to hide, not least by silencing its exposers.
The ugly reality needs to be repaired, but to that end it must first be exposed. If, hypothetically, a government commits a war crime, the problem lies not with the crime’s exposure but with its actual occurrence. In order to halt it and bring those responsible to justice, first of all it must be exposed.
It follows that the truth is never contrary to the interests of the state and the people, or contrary to their good. The opposite is the case: Recognizing reality and changing it for the better, or at least allowing an open debate on its nature, is an interest, indeed a right of the country’s citizens; and it is also a central principle in a democratic regime. It is concealing reality, however grim it may be, that is contrary to the good of the state and the people, because that is what undercuts the transparency of the government and hampers the ability to recognize its failures and to critique it.
My commitment is to Israeli society and all its members, not to the government, still less to a government some of whose members are calling for ethnic cleansing and even for genocide. They are the ones who are doing us harm and whose words led to South Africa’s application to the ICJ – not my colleagues and me. It is my right, indeed my duty, to do everything, within the framework of the law, to prevent the harm they are doing. Otherwise, I would be derelict in my duty. I will not give up the struggle for our existence as a moral society. That is the true patriotism – not wars of revenge and superfluous bloodshed, and not sacrificing in pointless wars civilians who were abducted and soldiers.
Thus far I have referred to two values that led me to sign the petition: liberal skepticism and truth. But the most important value that guided me is the value of life. After all, the petition seeks mainly temporary relief in the form of stopping the war and stopping the bloodshed. How can one remain indifferent in the face of the killing of tens of thousands of civilians, including more than 10,000 children? How can one remain silent in the face of the horrific destruction and devastation in Gaza, in the face of the hunger, the thirst and the absence of the most basic medical care?
Stopping the fighting is not only an elementary moral act for the sake of Gaza’s citizens’ – it is also the right thing to do for us as Israelis, for the Israeli interest: Opposing the war not only enables us to be a moral society, it is also a security matter. As the Military Appeals Court wrote in the case of the Kafr Qasem massacre, in 1956: “The supreme military need [is not] only our soldiers’ spirit of sacrifice, [and] our technical skill alone, but also – and perhaps mainly – the moral level of the state, of its army and of all its citizens.”
One can of course dispute and even be irate about my signing the petition, but there is absolutely no connection, not even a coincidental one, between that and an armed struggle. I am proud to continue a humanistic and democratic heritage of those who, in the course of history, stood against a roughshod majority and violent governments, clung to the truth and fought for the enfeebled and trampled populations, even if they themselves were not part of them.
But I am no less proud to continue what I see as the most important heritage of Judaism. In the words of Rabbi Dr. Daniel Epstein: “The supreme ethical imperative, which lends meaning to our personal and national existence, obligates us to resist laws whose aim is to validate tyranny, lies and corruption. In the spirit of the prophets, who risked their lives for the sake of truth and justice, we are duty-bound to utter in a clear voice: No to tyranny! No to corruption! That is the whole Torah in a nutshell.”
It’s good that the Knesset rejected the expulsion request, but I would have stood proudly and with head held high even had the scheme been approved, compelling me to appeal to the Supreme Court. Paraphrasing Albert Camus, I will say that I will continue to love my homeland and to love justice alike; but I do not seek any sort of greatness for my homeland if that greatness is forged from blood and falsehood. I seek to breathe life into justice, and through it to breathe life into my homeland.
Source : haaretz