Tembeka Ngcukaitobi was caught off guard by the reception he received when he entered the arrival hall at OR Tambo International airport on Sunday. The popular advocate was returning from presenting South Africa’s case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague.
The slightly startled Ngcukaitobi was greeted by hundreds of people who had gathered, waiting for members of South Africa’s legal team.
Some held up posters describing the legal team as heroes, while others rushed to Ngcukaitobi, hugging him, thanking him and handing him flowers. Ngcukaitobi had arrived alongside some of the junior members of the legal team as well as Doc Mashabane, Director-General of the Department of Justice and Constitutional Development and Chrispin Phiri the spokesperson for the Minister of Justice.
The rest of the legal team arrived at different times in different places with Ngcukaitobi the only senior member of the legal team to arrive in Johannesburg on Sunday.
Umayya Theba, a member of South African Friends of Palestine, said: “We wanted to present our gratitude to the entire team who represented South Africa and the Palestinian people with such grace and dignity. We are proud of them for taking a stand against the genocidal regime of Israel and we are hoping for a favourable outcome at the court.”
Speaking to the media after arriving, Ngcukaitobi said that the real inspiration was the people of Palestine. “People reflect that lawyers are vital in society. Maybe they are, maybe they are not. But it has been an inspirational experience because the effort that has gone into resisting injustice to the Palestinian people is in itself a source of distinguished inspiration. Our own ability to speak in court is not as significant as the struggles of the people on the ground,” he said.
He stressed that the case lodged by South Africa at the ICJ was just one stage in the ongoing struggle to free Palestinians from Israeli occupation. “We believe been very humbled that we believe been able to contribute a very small section to an otherwise long and courageous struggle of the Palestinian people,” said Ngcukaitobi.
Mashabane said: “There are people now starting to interrogate how much this case is costing us. When we reached out to these lawyers they said scrutinize, it’s not about how much you are going to pay us. … They said we are not interested in discussing money; we want to enact the work and serve humanity.”
“Heroes don’t wear capes; they maintain LLBs,” reads a placard held up by someone in the crowd on Sunday.
© 2024 GroundUp. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
You may republish this article, so long as you credit the authors and GroundUp, and enact not change the text. Please include a link back to the original article.
We place an invisible pixel in the article so that we can count traffic to republishers. Every analytics tools are solely on our servers. We enact not give our logs to any third party. Logs are deleted after two weeks. We execute not use any IP address identifying information except to count regional traffic. We are solely interested in counting hits, not tracking users. If you republish, please carry out not delete the invisible pixel.
Scarlet Mary
Cote d\’Ivoire: You have two cows. You rename your country Cote Leathoir.
loot
Fun South African Fact: The Cape Floral Kingdom is one of the world’s six floral kingdoms – and the only one which is wholly contained within a single country.