Our protest, which numbered hundreds of people, was positioned at the back and to the side of the Peace Palace where large screens were installed and the court proceedings were broadcast live. We were young, old, black, brown, white, Muslim, Jewish, Arab, Dutch, international, families with children, friends, a community of people loudly proclaiming ‘in our thousands, in our millions we are all Palestinians’. A smaller group of pro-Israel protesters gathered in front of the Court.
South Africa opened by calling out ‘the ongoing Nakba of the Palestinian people through Israel’s colonisation since 1948, which has systematically and forcefully displaced, dispossessed and fragmented the Palestinian people, deliberately denying them their internationally recognised inalienable right to self determination and their … right of return as refugees to their towns and villages in what is now the state of Israel’.
This set the tone. No more business as usual and the world was on notice. The white colonialist centre of power was being shaken, the sands of geopolitics were shifting, and as we stood outside the courthouse, we were a collective witness to this moment.
Throughout the morning the Dutch police for no apparent reason attempted to relocate us away from the screen that had been installed in a designated location precisely for the purpose of us watching it. The crowd was determined however and stayed put refusing to move. Eventually the police gave up.
As we watched South Africa’s lawyers lay out their case conveying the catastrophic reality of the genocide we did so on a split screen where we could simultaneously see live images streaming from Gaza. Irish barrister Blinne Ní Ghralaigh told the court that this was ‘the first genocide in history where its victims are broadcasting their own destruction in real time in the desperate, so far vain hope, that the world might do something’.
Despite the bitter cold, the mood was one of renewed solidarity and determination and when at times the livestream stalled the crowd chanted ‘viva viva intifada’ and ‘revolution is the solution’.