politics

I don't know what the outcome will be. Of course I read the complaint and some of the initial legal opinions, as to jurisdiction, application of the conventions, and the preliminary injunction, and at this stage of the case, the decisions are based on the complainance statements and are presumed to be true. Like, if everything South Africa says happened really did happen exactly as they say, does the court have jurisdiction, do the convention supply, and did they state a plausible case for genocide?

My takeaways from the complaint are posted in detail elsewhere, but in summary it provided a lot of hyperlinks to news articles that were based on second and third hand reports, mostly from anonymous sources, with pretty half assed reporting.

For example, reading the articles, it's impossible to determine if you just read 10 articles about 10 different events, or 10 articles about the same event, because the articles don't include enough detail. Yet, if people read the same headline then times, they're going to think it must be true. I've gotten into it with people here on Lemmy where they tell me how wrong I am and just look at all these examples of Israel doing a thing, and then they post three examples all talking about the same one event and they don't even realize.

To prove up the claims in court, South Africa is not going to be able to rely on hearsay and anonymous sources; Twitter posts aren't evidence. They're going to need names, dates, exact locations, credible witnesses, and Israel is going to have a chance to respond and cross-examine every claim.

A lot of the most sensational claims are going to fall apart when Israel's position is included. Like the headline might have said that no weapons were present, no terrorists were killed, just all kids and women. And when the IDF investigators present their evidence, it will show that there were weapons, or there were terrorists present.

A lot of claims fall apart now just with critical analysis. I recall a series of articles about a local doctor quoted as saying that he treated a boy who had been shot by an Israeli sniper, and others with similar wounds, but if you actually look at what the guy said, he based his opinion on the idea that because a kid had a hole through his center, it must have been fired by a sniper; he said something like 'only a sniper could be so accurate.' Maybe that sounds plausible, especially if you want to believe Israel is monstrous, but it's absurd on its face; emergency room doctors cannot identify the shooter or the motive or intended target from a bullet wound. It could have been fired from two miles away at some other target entirely. That's how bullets work.

On the other hand, there have definitely been what seems like some pretty egregious war crimes; IDF blames a lot of horrible things on freak accidents and mistakes. Some I'm sure are freak accidents snd honest mistakes, sometimes I find that unbelievable. So when the media reports a bunch of wild nonsense, sprinkled with a little truth, people find the nonsense believable. I tend to think that when any news articles makes me think "God damn, that's unbelievable," such as Israel sniping kids, it shouldn't be believed without extraordinary evidence.

I've found that a lot of the reporting has been like this, rhetorical or wildly exaggerated, claims that the declarant could not possibly know. In law that's called incompetence. Like the driver of a car could testify as to what they experienced, but would be incompetent to testify that a manufacturing defect caused a crash; you need a mechanic to say that, and at that, one who examined the car at issue.

A lot of the claims are circumstantial, which is fine, but if the reporting only includes one view of the circumstances, it's insufficient to draw a conclusion. Much of that sort of coverage begs a conclusion anyway. Al Jazeera constantly does this. They'll talk about one recent report, which is often just some random Twitter post with nothing else, just to have an article, and then they'll say "well Israel has been accused of this kind of thing several times before, so it must be true." Again, if people want to believe Israel is a monster, they're likely to accept the article at face value without thinking through the clearly false logic.

Further, part of the Hamas strategy is to lie and encourage people to lie. By their account, everyone killed is a woman or child, no terrorists are ever among the dead, and none of the dead ever had any weapons. Hospitals are always hospitals and schools are always schools. Israeli troops are getting in small arms fire fights everyday. Someone must be a terrorist, someone must have some weapons.

All this said, I'm not there, I don't know what's true or not, and like mostly everyone with an opinion on this stuff, I only have my experience and instincts to guide me, and this has been how I see it.