Former Minister of Foreign Affairs, Professor Bolaji Akinyemi, said the United States of America has the capacity to end Israel’s war on Gaza, but President Joe Biden does not want to risk his re-election bid.
Akinyemi stated this in an interview with Arise Television on Monday.
According to Akinyemi, President Biden will not want to put his re-election bid at risk as the US conducts its elections this year.
He noted that South Africa had taken a stand against moral compulsion to file a genocide case against Israel in the International Court of Justice.
Akinyemi said, “The only country in the world that actually has the power to stop Israel is the United States, and the United States isn’t going to do that because of the electoral power of the Jews in the United States.
“This is election year. Biden is not going to risk his presidency by putting in the kind of pressure that you need to stop the Israelis. He’s simply not going to do that.
“It’s a shame that we are sacrificing our morality for electoral purposes. God is not going to forgive us. And when the history of this time is written, people are going to ask each one of us, What did you do? What position did you take? They will ask, and what will we say?
“I think South Africa has stuck its neck out—a good moral position. This is what I once referred to as the ‘Mandelisation’ of South Africa. South Africa simply did this because it had the moral compulsion to do so. So, I’m afraid we’re stuck. The Palestinians are stuck, and it’s a shame.”
When asked if South Africa has a winning chance in their genocide suit against Israel, he said, “In war, people die; in war, buildings are destroyed; infrastructure is destroyed. All those don’t constitute genocide. Genocide is constituted by two things. One is the element of elimination of an identifiable group of people, and two is the intention to eliminate them.
“And here, South Africa did brilliantly in its presentation because there were sentences on record by Herzog, the President of Israel, Netanyahu, the Prime Minister, the Defense Minister, and high officials of Israel saying we must wipe out Hamas.”
The former minister further said, “Although Hamas is not a racial group, it had been seen that the Palestinians were being wiped out. There are statements on record where Hamas and Palestinians are used alternatively.”
According to Akinyemi, it was ironic that the genocide convention was made due to the Holocaust that the Jews suffered in World War 2, and now the nation of Israel is before the International Court being charged with genocide against Palestinians.
He said, “There is no doubt that the case of South Africa is trendset by the case that Israel brought, and I must emphasize this. Israel’s defence was to talk about what Hamas has done.
But in international jurisprudence, genocide is one of the few conventions for which there is no justification, none whatsoever. You cannot defend your actions, so, that has to be borne in mind,” he said.
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