A firebrand Israeli parliamentarian provoked a political and social media storm earlier this week when he signed a petition supporting South Africa’s case of genocide against Israel, which is to be heard at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague.
Ofer Cassif, who declared his backing for South Africa on social media, will support the country’s legal bid when it comes before the ICJ on Thursday and Friday this week.
“My constitutional duty is to Israeli society and all its residents,” he wrote on X on January 7. “Not to a government whose members and its coalition are calling for ethnic cleansing and even actual genocide. They are the ones who harm the country and the people, they are the ones who led to South Africa’s appeal to The Hague, not me and my friends.”
The Palestinian death toll from Israel’s near-100-day bombardment of the Gaza Strip has crossed 23,000 people, including nearly 10,000 children.
Cassif is a politician from the left-wing, Arab-majority Hadash-Ta’al party, Hadash being the Hebrew acronym for the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality. Born in Rishon LeZion near Tel Aviv in 1964, he has been a member of the Israeli parliament for nearly five years.
Cassif has a doctorate in political philosophy from the London School of Economics and he was an academic at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem before he entered parliament.
His penchant for going against the grain of Israeli society is not new. In the late 1980s, the pro-Palestinian Israeli, who is also a proud communist, spent time in jail for refusing to serve as a soldier in the occupied territories.
In 2021, he claimed police beat him while he participated in a protest against an illegal Jewish settlement in Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem.
His pre-parliamentarian attacks on the Israeli state – for instance, calling one-time Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked “neo-Nazi scum” – led the Central Elections Committee to keep him off the ballot for the 2019 elections.
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