• Issue #01
  • Issue #02
  • Issue #03
  • Issue #04
  • Issue #05
  • Issue #06
  • Issue #07
  • Issue #08
  • Issue #09
  • Issue #10
  • Issue #11
11
Contents
editorial
IMRAAN COOVADIA
Living with sorcerers
ZEINAB SHAATH
The Urgent Call of Palestine
ALLAN BOESAK
“HOW LONG FOR PALESTINE?”
MAKHOSINI MGITYWA
The Crux of the Matter
MALAIKA MAHLATSI
On the genocide in Palestine and the death of academic freedom and democracy in Western universities
BRANKO MARCETIC
Israel’s Gaza War Is One of History’s Worst Crimes Ever
CHRIS HEDGES
American Sadism
ARYAN KAGANOF
On Power and Powerlessness: Genocide in Gaza Through the Lens of Afropessimism and Decay Studies
MICHAEL SFARD
We Israelis Are Part of a Mafia Crime Family. It's Our Job to Fight Against It From Within
Theme Gaza
ZEENAT ADAM
Gaza and the Graveyard of Excuses
MAHMOUD AL SHABRAWI
Writing Between Fear and Survival
GOODENOUGH MASHEGO
Why I can’t condemn October 7
GARTH ERASMUS
Lamentations for GAZA
SALIM VALLY and ROSHAN DADOO
Africa’s strong bonds to Palestine
ZUKISWA WANNER
A Common Humanity
MUHAMMAD OMARUDDIN (DON MATTERA)
A Song for Palestine
TSHEPO MADLINGOZI
Ilizwe Lifile/Nakba: Le-fatshe & Crises of Constitution in (Neo)Settler Colonies
SINDRE BANGSTAD
Palestine, Israel and academic freedom in South Africa
GWEN ANSELL
Resistance music – a mirror reflecting truth; a hammer forging solidarity
FMFP (FREE MUSIC FREE PALESTINE)
Listening as an anti-colonial way of engaging
ATIYYAH KHAN
A movement against silencing: What the genocide in Palestine has taught us about journalism
ASHRAF HENDRICKS
Visual Memoirs of Solidarity with Palestine in Cape Town
ATIYYAH KHAN
GAZA: Where wearing a PRESS vest is a death sentence
VISUAL INTIFADA
NARRATIVE REPAIR
SHARI MALULEKE
A Prayer to the Olive Tree
THANDI GAMEDZE
Jesus of Occupied Palestine
NATHI NGUBANE
MALCOLM X IN GAZA
MARIAM JOOMA ÇARIKCI
The dark side of the rainbow: How Apartheid South Africa and Zionism found comfort in post-94 rhetoric
CRAIG MOKHIBER
The ICJ finds that BDS is not merely a right, but an obligation
ROSHAN DADOO
South African coal fuels a genocide: BOYCOTT GLENCORE NOW
IMĀN ZANELE OMAR
From the ground
DEAN HUTTON
Who would you be under Apartheid?
galleri
SÍONA O’CONNELL
Keys to Nowhere
SAMAR HUSSAINI
The Palette of Tradition and other, earlier works
SLOVO MAMPHAGA
Chronology of the Now
DEON MAAS
The Resistance
OLU OGUIBE
A Brief Statement on Art and Genocide
CANDICE BREITZ
8 may 2025 Berlin
ADLI YACUBI
A Moment Is On Its Way
TRACEY ROSE
If Hitler Was A Girl Who Went To Art School (2024-2025)
borborygmus
CHARLES LEONARD
Zeinab Shaath : the famous Teta
THE ALDANO COLLECTIVE
Withold
DIMA ORSHO
Excerpts from Half Moon, a film by Frank Scheffer
GARTH ERASMUS
Where is God?
LOWKEY FEATURING MAI KHALIL
Palestine Will Never Die
CHRIS THURMAN
Intertexts for Gaza (or, Thirteen ways of looking past a genocide)
KEENAN AHRENDS
The Wandering Dancer
NATHAN TRANTRAAL
‘D’ is vi destruction
INSURRECTIONS ENSEMBLE
Let Me Lie To You
RODRIGO KARMY BOLTON
Palestine’s Lessons for the Left: Theses for a Poetics of the Earth
MARYAM ABBASI
Drums, Incense, and the Unseen
frictions
HIBA ABU NADA
Not Just Passing
NICHOLAS MIRZOEFF
The Visible and the Unspeakable (For Mahmoud Khalil)
MPHUTLANE WA BOFELO
Before You Kill Them
ABIGAIL GEORGE
4 Struggle Songs for Palestine
MIKE VAN GRAAN
4 Poems for Gaza
EUGENE SKEEF
To The Demise of War Mongers (a suite for the people of GAZA).
ALLAN KOLSKI HORWITZ
Gaza: two poems
MALIKA LUEEN NDLOVU
At the end of a thread, holding my breath, beading
NGOMA HILL
From the River to the Sea
JESÚS SEPÚLVEDA
Gaza 2024
ARYAN KAGANOF
GAZA (body double)
VONANI BILA
Under Rubble
JACKSON MAC LOWE
Social Significance
FRANK MEINTJIES
5 poems from A Place to night in
DIANA FERRUS
Burdened man
claque
FINN DANIELS-YEOMANS
‘If Cannes did not want to go to Gaza, Gaza had to go to Cannes’: Institutional Censorship at Film Festivals post-October 7.
FRANK MEINTJIES
Abigail George’s SONGS FOR PALESTINE - "struggle poems" in an age of livestreamed genocicde
PHILLIPPA YAA DE VILLIERS
ukuphelezela and Nida Younis’ Two Bodies/Zwei Korper
RUTH MARGALIT
Writing the Nakba in Hebrew
NATHAN TRANTRAAL
Ons is gevangenes van dit wat ons liefhet: Magmoed Darwiesj gedigte in Afrikaans
HEIN WILLEMSE
Frank Meintjies: a mature poet, intellectually astute with a refined social, political and ecological consciousness
M. SOGA MLANDU
'Tell Them I Am Dead’: Sithembele Isaac Xhegwana’s Dark Lines of History
NIKLAS ZIMMER
Détourning the cut
ekaya
LYNTHIA JULIUS
I believe the children for the future
JENNIFER KESTIS FERGUSON
Nikita
CHERYL DAMON
No Ordinary Rage
SKHUMBUZO PHAKATHI
Don’t forget Phila Ndwandwe
INGRID ORIT HURWITZ
SHATTERED
STEVEN ROBINS
The blindspots of Zionist history and the ‘ancient scripts’ of primordial Jewish victimhood
LIESL JOBSON
Sorrowful Mysteries
herri
Towards a Preliminary Archaeology of herri
off the record
STEPHEN CLINGMAN
The Voices in My Head: Reflections on South Africa, Israel, Palestine, Gaza
ANNI KANAFANI
Ghassan Kanafani
FILMS
by Palestinian Women
STEVEN ROBINS
Re-reading Jabotinsky’s The Iron Wall in the time of genocide in Gaza.
JANNIKE BERGH in conversation with HAIDAR EID
Even Ghosts Weep in Gaza
ASHRAF KAGEE
Three friends in Gaza
AMIRA HASS
"Resist the Normalization of Evil": On Palestine and Journalism
GEORGE KING
Fields, Forests and Fakery: ‘Green Colonialism’ in Palestine
HEIDI GRUNEBAUM
The Village Under the Forest
MEIR KAHANE
Jewish Terror: A JEWISH STATE VERSUS WESTERN DEMOCRACY
FRANK ARMSTRONG
Ireland and Palestine: A Crucial Vote Awaits
NIKHIL SINGH
The Siege of Gaza 332 BC
feedback
DENIS EKPO
1 April 2025
DEON-SIMPHIWE SKADE
23 March 2025
LIZ SAVAGE
10 January 2025
CEDRIK FERMONT
10 August 2024
AZSACRA ZARATHUSTRA
6 August 2024
FACEBOOK FEEDBACK
Facebook
PhD
COLE MEINTJIES
Power in Relation to Life and Death: Israel's genocide in Gaza
the selektah
CHRISTINA HAZBOUN
Palestinian Women’s Voices in Music and Song – 2025 version
ATIYYAH KHAN
IQRA!
hotlynx
shopping
SHOPPING
Order Online | Pay Online |
contributors
the back page
MICHAEL TAUSSIG
Two Weeks In Palestine
GEORGE STEINER
This is called History
© 2025
Archive About Contact
    • Issue #01
    • Issue #02
    • Issue #03
    • Issue #04
    • Issue #05
    • Issue #06
    • Issue #07
    • Issue #08
    • Issue #09
    • Issue #10
    • Issue #11
    #11
  • Theme Gaza

CRAIG MOKHIBER

The ICJ finds that BDS is not merely a right, but an obligation

Israel and its lobby have, for years now, been engaged in a frenzy of activity to further insulate Israel from accountability by using their influence in the West to effectively outlaw organized opposition to Israel. Foremost among these efforts has been the Israeli campaign to penalize calls to Boycott, Divest from, and Sanction Israel for its gross violations of human rights. As a result, countless laws and policies are now on the books across the U.S. and the broader West, trampling on core constitutional principles and internationally guaranteed human rights in defense of Israeli impunity. But an advisory opinion issued last month by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) should help to turn that around.

In its historic ruling, the ICJ found that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza is entirely unlawful, that Israel practices apartheid and racial segregation, and that all states are under a duty to help bring this to an end, including by cutting off all economic, trade and investment relations with Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. In other words, as a matter of international law, all countries are obliged to participate in an economic boycott of Israel’s activities in the occupied Palestinian territory and to divest from any existing economic relations there. 

BDS activists in New York City (Photo: Joe Catron)

Because the court was bound by the parameters of the request from the UN General Assembly that triggered its findings, it did not address duties and obligations relating to activities inside the 1948 Green Line. However, the court’s authoritative statement of the requirements of international law makes clear that proponents of BDS have not only the moral high ground but also a firm grounding in international law. 

The court’s advisory opinion in July comes on the heels of the commencement of genocide proceedings against Israel in the ICJ last December, and a request in May by the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court for arrest warrants for the Israeli Prime Minister and the Defense Minister for crimes against humanity, including extermination. Together, they represent a historic shift away from 76 years of Western-sponsored Israeli exceptionalism and impunity, feeding hope of a new era of accountability.  

Recognizing this, Israel, as well as its Western allies accused of complicity in Israel’s international crimes (chief among them, the U.S., UK, and Germany) have been scrambling to oppose, delay, and obstruct action by these courts, both by intervening in court proceedings and, in some cases, by threatening court officials. And indeed, the ICC warrant process has already been inordinately delayed when compared to previous cases. Nevertheless, for its part, the ICJ advisory opinion was both timely and uncompromising in its application of international law to Israel. 

Israel and its allies also defensively claim that advisory opinions of the ICJ are “non-binding” and, indeed, the court cannot compel a state to comply with its findings. But what this tactic ignores is that the laws to which the court refers in its authoritative opinion are, in fact, binding on all states. For example, the court observed that the right of the Palestinians to self-determination, their rights under international human rights and humanitarian law, and the prohibition of Israel’s acquisition of territory by force impose so-called “erga omnes” obligations, that is, binding obligations that apply to all countries. 

Among these obligations are the duty not to recognize or assist the occupation in any way, and the duty to take action to realize the equal rights and self-determination of the Palestinian people. It follows that any policies or acts by a Western country that in any way recognize Israel’s occupation, assist Israel in that occupation (economically, militarily, diplomatically, etc.), or prohibit persons under its jurisdiction from respecting international law by boycotting or divesting from Israel’s illegal occupation, would be unlawful. 

CRAIG-MOKHJIBER-3
CRAIG-MOKHIBER-4
CRAIG-MOKHIBER-5

Of course, the U.S., which has long ignored the constraints of international law and invested decades of effort in carving out an exception for Israeli impunity, is likely to reject the court’s findings and oppose the implementing resolution of the UN General Assembly, which is expected to follow. Some other Western states invested in the Israeli axis, like the UK and Germany, may follow suit. But it is likely that most countries, including other Western states, will adjust their policies to ensure legal compliance. 

Groups and individuals targeted by efforts to penalize BDS or to compel people to reject it will now have an important new tool in their legal arsenal as they assert their rights either administratively or judicially. They can now invoke the authoritative ruling of the World Court to credibly assert that participating in boycotts, divestment, and sanctions against Israeli occupation, colonization, and apartheid is not only a moral imperative and constitutional and human right, but also an international legal obligation. 

Share
Print PDF
MARIAM JOOMA ÇARIKCI
ROSHAN DADOO
© 2025
Archive About Contact