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international court of justice
Rubio Slammed for Expelling South African Ambassador Over Trump Criticism
"It underscores that his critiques of white supremacy in the Age of Trump are perceived as threatening for one simple reason: He's right."
Mar 15, 2025
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has faced a flood of condemnation since announcing on social media Friday that "South Africa's ambassador to the United States is no longer welcome in our great country."
"Ebrahim Rasool is a race-baiting politician who hates America and hates President Donald Trump," the secretary claimed. "We have nothing to discuss with him and so he is considered PERSONA NON GRATA."
In the post on X—the social media site owned by Elon Musk, Trump's South Africa-born billionaire adviser—Rubio linked to an article by the right-wing news site Breitbart about Rasool saying during a Friday webinar that the U.S. president is leading global a white supremacist movement.
As examples of Trump's "Make America Great Again" movement exporting its "supremacist assault," Rasool pointed to Musk elevating Nigel Farage, leader of the far-right Reform U.K. party, and Vice President JD Vance meeting with the leader of the neo-Nazi Alternative for Germany party.
Responding to Rubio on X, North Carolina State University assistant teaching professor Nathan Lean said: "Ebrahim Rasool is a man of genuine decency, moral courage, and is a friend. This makes me absolutely embarrassed to be an American. And it underscores that his critiques of white supremacy in the Age of Trump are perceived as threatening for one simple reason: He's right."
The Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) similarly responded: "Ambassador Ebrahim Rasool is a principled leader who fought alongside Nelson Mandela against apartheid and has dedicated his career to democracy, interfaith cooperation, and justice. Baseless attacks like this only serve to divide. We stand by him and his lifelong commitment to building a more just and inclusive world."
Laila Al-Arian, executive producer of Al Jazeera's "Fault Lines," declared that "this administration is virulently and unabashedly Islamophobic, not even trying to hide how unhinged they are as they go after people for speech."
Rasool previously served as ambassador during the Obama administration and returned to the role shortly before Trump began his second term. Earlier this week, Semafor reported on his difficulties dealing with the current administration:
He has failed to secure routine meetings with State Department officials and key Republican figures since Trump took office in January, Washington and South African government insiders told Semafor, drawing frustration in Pretoria.
Rasool is likely to have been frozen out for his prior vocal criticism of Israel, a South African diplomat, based in Washington, told Semafor. "A man named Ebrahim, who is Muslim, with a history of pro-Palestine politics, is not likely to do well in that job right now," said one of them. While South Africa brought a case against Israel to the International Court of Justice in December 2023, accusing it of genocide in Gaza, Rasool is nevertheless widely considered to be among the government's most ardent pro-Palestine voices.
South African political analyst Sandile Swana told Al Jazeera on Friday that the "core of the dispute" with the diplomatic was the genocide case against U.S.-armed Israel. In the fight against apartheid, the U.S. "supported the apartheid regime," said Swana. "Rasool continues to point out the behaviour of the United States, even now is to support apartheid and genocide."
Other critics also pointed to the ongoing court battle over Israel's utter destruction of Gaza and mass slaughter of Palestinians.
Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) national executive director Nihad Awad told Rubio: "Your declaration of Ambassador Ebrahim Rasool as persona non grata is a racist, Islamophobic, transparent act of retaliation for South Africa's opposition to Israel's genocide in Gaza."
Imraan Siddiqi, a former congressional candidate in Washington who now leads the state's branch of CAIR, said that "he stood up firmly against apartheid, so it's no coincidence you're punishing him in favor of an openly apartheid state."
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa's office said in a statement Saturday that "the presidency has noted the regrettable expulsion of South Africa's ambassador to the United States of America, Mr. Ebrahim Rasool.
"The presidency urges all relevant and impacted stakeholders to maintain the established diplomatic decorum in their engagement with the matter," the office added. "South Africa remains committed to building a mutually beneficial relationship with the United States of America."
The diplomat's expulsion follows Trump signing an executive order last month that frames South Africa's land law as "blatant discrimination" against the country's white minority. Writing about the order for Foreign Policy in Focus, Zeb Larson and William Minter noted that "his actions echo a long history of right-wing support in the United States for racism in Southern Africa, including mobilization of support for white Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) as well as the apartheid regime in South Africa."
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Israeli Cabinet Minister: 'Only Solution for the Gaza Strip Is to Empty It of Gazans'
"God has sent us the U.S. administration, and it is clearly telling us—it's time to inherit the land," she said.
Mar 11, 2025
Israeli Environmental Protection Minister Idit Silman argued Tuesday for ethnically cleansing the Gaza Strip of its Palestinian population so that the Jewish people can "inherit the land" many of them believe their deity promised them in biblical times.
"The only solution for the Gaza Strip is to empty it of Gazans," Silman—a member of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's ruling Likud party—said during an interview with Reshet Bet radio, according to a translation by Haaretz. "God has sent us the U.S. administration, and it is clearly telling us—it's time to inherit the land."
Last month, Republican U.S. President Donald Trumpproposed that the U.S. "take over" Gaza, remove it's approximately 2.1 million Palestinian inhabitants, and transform the coastal enclave into the "Riviera of the Middle East."
Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said Sunday that the so-called "Trump Plan" is currently "taking shape."
"It could be in single-family homes or Trump-style towers, but we will definitely go back there."
Silman said during Tuesday's interview that "Gush Katif will return, there's no question about it," referring to a former block of 17 Israeli apartheid settlements in southern Gaza that were abandoned 20 years ago. "It could be in single-family homes or Trump-style towers, but we will definitely go back there. I see no other solution to terrorism. The answer to terrorism is sovereignty."
While proponents of the plan insist that Palestinians will leave Gaza voluntarily, critics counter that this notion is utterly divorced from reality, as most Gazans are descendants of people who fled or were ethnically cleansed from other parts of Palestine during the establishment of the modern state of Israel in 1948, and are loath to be subjected to yet another expulsion. Many elderly Gazans are survivors of what Palestinians call the Nakba, or "catastrophe," of 1948.
This isn't the first time that Silman has called for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. She made similar comments during a recent rally, and last September she also said that Israel is "on a path to inherit" the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. Israel has illegally occupied the territory since 1967, and hundreds of thousands of Jewish settlers have steadily usurped Palestinians by building and expanding apartheid colonies on their land.
"We will not 'conquer,'" Silman asserted last year. "Conquer is a progressive word that the progressives brought upon us. We inherit. Inheritance from the lord."
Silman rose to prominence after abandoning the previous Israeli coalition government, prompting a crisis leading to the 2022 election that gave rise to the current far-right administration.
Numerous Israeli politicians, military leaders, journalists, entertainers, and others have called for genocide in Gaza or the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the territory. Statements from Netanyahu, members of his Cabinet, Knesset lawmakers, and others have been entered as evidence in the South Africa-led genocide case against Israel currently before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague.
More than 170,000 Palestinians are dead, maimed, or missing, and millions more forcibly displaced, starved, or sickened following 15 months of Israeli bombardment and invasion and more than 17 months of "complete siege" of Gaza, according to local and international agencies.
Palestine defenders argue the mass slaughter and annihilation of Gaza meet the definition of genocide under Article II of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. However, according to the United Nations Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect, "To constitute genocide, there must be a proven intent on the part of perpetrators to physically destroy a national, ethnical, racial or religious group."
"The intent is the most difficult element to determine," the agency stressed. But critics say that comments like Silman's could make the ICJ's final decision much easier.
"Bolstered by the hubris of settler colonial power and the knowledge that it has killed, maimed, destroyed, expelled, humiliated, imprisoned, and dispossessed with more than seven decades of impunity and by the continued material and moral support of the United States, Israelis are explicit and unashamed about their genocidal intent because they have imagined and prosecuted a war against people who they see as colonized 'savages,'" Israeli Holocaust scholar and British law professor Penny Green wrote last year.
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Could Reckoning With the Gaza War Revive International Law?
There is an opportunity for the international legal and political system to be fixed based on new standards, justice that applies to all, and accountability that is expected from all.
Mar 09, 2025
International law is fighting for relevance. The outcome of this fight is likely to change the entire global political dynamics, which were shaped by World War II and sustained through the selective interpretation of the law by dominant countries.
In principle, international law should have always been relevant, if not paramount, in governing the relationships between all countries, large and small, to resolve conflicts before they turn into outright wars. It should also have worked to prevent a return to an era of exploitation that allowed Western colonialism to practically enslave the Global South for hundreds of years.
Unfortunately, international law, which was in theory supposed to reflect global consensus, was hardly dedicated to peace or genuinely invested in the decolonization of the South.
Instead of reconsidering their approach to Israel, and refraining from feeding the war machine, many Western governments lashed out at civil society for merely advocating the enforcement of international law.
From the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan to the war on Libya and numerous other examples, past and present, the United Nations was often used as a platform for the strong to impose their will on the weak. And whenever smaller countries collectively fought back, as the U.N. General Assembly often does, those with veto power, military, and economic leverage used their advantage to coerce the rest based on the maxim, "Might makes right."
It should therefore hardly be a surprise to see many intellectuals and politicians in the Global South arguing that, aside from paying lip service to peace, human rights, and justice, international law has always been irrelevant.
This irrelevance was put on full display through 15 months of a relentless Israeli genocidal war on Gaza that killed and wounded over 160,000 people, a number that, according to several credible medical journals and studies, is expected to dramatically rise.
Yet, when the International Court of Justice (ICJ) opened an investigation of plausible genocide in Gaza on January 26, followed by a decisive ruling on July 19 regarding the illegality of the Israeli occupation of Palestine, the international system began showing a pulse, however faint. The International Criminal Court's (ICC) arrest warrants were another proof that West-centered legal institutions are capable of change.
The angry American response to all of this was predictable. Washington has been fighting against international accountability for many years. The U.S. Congress under the George W. Bush administration, as early as 2002, passed a law that shielded U.S. soldiers "against criminal prosecution" by the ICC, to which the U.S. is not a party.
The so-called Hague Invasion Act authorized the use of military force to rescue American citizens or military personnel detained by the ICC.
Naturally, many of Washington's measures to pressure, threaten, or punish international institutions have been linked to shielding Israel under various guises.
The global outcry and demands for accountability following Israel's genocide in Gaza, however, have once again put Western governments on the defensive. For the first time, Israel was facing the kind of scrutiny that rendered it, in many respects, a pariah state.
Instead of reconsidering their approach to Israel, and refraining from feeding the war machine, many Western governments lashed out at civil society for merely advocating the enforcement of international law. Those targeted included U.N.-affiliated human rights defenders.
On February 18, German police descended on the Junge Welt venue in Berlin as if they were about to apprehend a notorious criminal. They surrounded the building in full gear, sparking a bizarre drama that should have never taken place in a country that perceives itself as democratic.
The reason behind the security mobilization was none other than Francesca Albanese, an Italian lawyer, an outspoken critic of the Israeli genocide in Gaza, and the current United Nations special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories.
If it were not for the U.N.'s intervention, Albanese could have been arrested simply for demanding that Israel must be held accountable for its crimes against Palestinians.
Germany, however, is not the exception. Other Western powers, lead amongst them the U.S., are actively taking part in this moral crisis. Washington has taken serious and troubling steps, not just to protect Israel, and itself, from accountability to international law, but to punish the very international institutions, its judges, and officials for daring to question Israel's behavior.
Indeed, on February 13, the U.S. sanctioned the ICC's chief prosecutor due to his stance on Israel.
After some hesitance, Karim Khan has done what no other ICC prosecutor had done before: issuing, on November 21, arrest warrants for two Israeli leaders, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and then-Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. They are currently wanted for "crimes against humanity and war crimes."
The moral crisis deepens when the judges become the accused, as Khan found himself at the receiving end of endless Western media attacks and abuse, in addition to U.S. sanctions.
As disturbing as all of this is, there is a silver lining, specifically an opportunity for the international legal and political system to be fixed based on new standards, justice that applies to all, and accountability that is expected from all.
Those who continue to support Israel have practically disowned international law altogether. The consequences of their decisions are dire. But for the rest of humanity, the Gaza war can be that very opportunity to reconstruct a more equitable world, one that is not molded by the militarily powerful, but by the need to stop senseless killings of innocent children.
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