South Africa brought the case, but one man dragged Israel into the dock at The Hague – Benjamin Netanyahu | Jonathan Freedland

The Israeli PM's alliance with the far right made this case possible, and the result could be harmful to Jews all over the world

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.

Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist

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