There was so much history and so much tragedy in that room. For two days, ending today, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague witnessed a clash between two nations, each shaped by acts that live on in the global lexicon of good and evil.
In one corner, South Africa, which only a generation ago emerged from apartheid, still the universal shorthand for the wickedness of racism. In the other, Israel, established just three years after the Nazi murder of 6 million Jews and the attempt to eradicate the Jewish people from the face of the Earth. In a global courtroom, those who bore the scars of those two great crimes – apartheid and the Holocaust – squared up against each other, as one accused the other of the gravest crime of all: genocide.
