Renowned independent Palestinian-American journalist Sam Husseini has cautioned that South Africa could face harsh economic retaliation as it awaits an outcome to the case of genocide it brought against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in 2023.
Husseini was delivering a lecture at the University of the Western Cape (UWC) Faculty of Law’s African Centre for Transnational Criminal Justice. The title of the lecture was, International Law, Gaza, and the Genocide Convention: Power, Accountability, and the Limits of Global Governance.
In the seminar room filled with eager students listening and ready to engage with him, Husseini said the outcome of South Africa’s case might be delayed for at least two years.
“The original vision of getting emergency orders and then moving towards uniting for peace wasn’t done. Because the US even avoided casting a veto by putting up this other phoney resolution and getting the countries to vote for it. If they had been backed into a corner, if the global peace movement had been so strong and coordinated that it forced Algeria to put forward their resolution in May of 2024 and force a US veto, that would have shown the world how isolated the US government was.”
He outlined a viable path forward through South Africa, obtaining another round of emergency orders from the ICJ, but cautioned that there could be immediate and long-term ramifications for the country.
“It is about Palestine, but it is about the world, because it forces a crisis to change the global dynamic. So that the US can’t continue to go on to further aggression … You know, people here think that there could even be an intervention here (in South Africa), or at least further economic attacks and so on. So it challenges that entire dynamic.”
Husseini concluded that South Africa and supporting states should use every available legal route to secure additional emergency measures to enforce the Genocide Convention, arguing that the United Nations General Assembly was capable of mobilising the political and moral pressure needed to compel action.
-
Sam Husseini is an independent Palestinian-American journalist known for his confrontational questioning of US officials and his reporting on international law, Gaza, and US foreign policy. He has been removed from the US State Department press briefings for challenging official narratives and has written extensively on the application of the Genocide Convention, the Geneva Conventions, and Israel’s legal obligations under international law.
By Nathan Adams, Institutional Advancement
