“I’m accused of being a traitor,” says politician Ofer Cassif (59), at his home in the Israeli city of Rehovot. More than 80 members of the Knesset have called for Cassif to be expelled from the Israeli parliament for supporting South Africa’s genocide case at the International Court of Justice in The Hague.
A leftist former academic who supports the creation of a Palestinian state, Cassif is familiar with political isolation after serving in successive Knessets over the last five years that have swung heavily to the religious right. Yet, even he was surprised by the backlash and mounting calls for expulsion he has faced since publicly supporting South Africa’s petition last Sunday.
“I’m accused of supporting armed struggle against Israel – which is a total lie. I’m against violence, not just terrorism,” says Cassif, the only Jewish member of the Arab-majority Hadash-Ta’al party. His party leader, Aymen Odeh, described the decision to collect signatures for impeachment proceedings against Cassif as “the elimination of democratic spaces”.
Since Israel launched its military operation on Gaza in response to the Hamas-led attack on October 7th, critics say the Israeli authorities have curbed avenues for both Knesset members and citizens to oppose the Government.
Cassif, who was briefly barred from running for the Knesset in 2019, was suspended from the parliament in October for 45 days for remarks criticising the war on Gaza, including from an online interview with Irish journalist Finian Cunningham. The outspoken politician says that supporting the South African petition is “more or less the only channel that is left because all channels within Israel are blocked”.
Israeli police and the prime minister’s office did not respond to requests for comment.
A cessation of Israel’s war on Gaza would save thousands of Palestinians, says Cassif, as well as Israeli soldiers “who are sacrificed by a cynical Government on the altar of its own survival” and “the Israeli hostages who live under terrible inhumane conditions at the hands of Hamas”.
The Israeli politician emphasises that his position is not that the legal threshold for genocide has conclusively been met in Gaza, but that allegations should be investigated. “If there is any suspicion – even a minor one –, that a government is engaging in war crimes, that should be investigated,” says Cassif, adding that, as a signatory to the UN Genocide Convention, the Israeli state should not be “above the law”.
Cassif believes it is particularly hard for Israel to defend public statements made by Israeli officials, which South Africa referenced in its submissions to The Hague on Thursday, as evidence of genocidal intent, including Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s description of Gazans as “Amalek”, a biblical reference to a group of people whose annihilation was directed by God, and Israeli president Yitzhak Herzog’s statement that “it’s an entire nation out there that is responsible [for the Hamas massacre]”. Herzog recently signed an artillery shell destined for Gaza which “statistically, will probably kill children”,says Cassif.
“If the situation wasn’t so sad it would be a joke,” he adds. “How can you say that those people have no influence, or are not decision-makers, or that you can ignore what they’re saying? It’s the prime minister; it’s the president.”
Cassif says that the Israeli coalition Government and “its proxies” have sought toto delegitimise the judges overseeing the genocide case at The Hague, including Aharon Barak, Israel’s appointee on the 17-judge bench. Minister for heritage Amichai Eliyahu of the far-right Otzma Yehudit party said Barak, a former Israeli supreme court chief and a Holocaust survivor, did not have “the correct notions on the subject”; while articles referring to “a bloc of anti-Israel judges” at the UN court and the presence of judges from “autocracies or very flawed democracies” such as Somalia and Lebanon have been published by Israeli media.
Cassif claims that the EU and the US are focused on defending the Israeli government – not Israelis – and that UN warnings of Gaza becoming uninhabitable could materialise if the international community allows the war to continue. “If you really want to stand by the Israelis like I do, you will have to be against the Israeli government.”
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