Nelson Mandela holds a place on a pinnacle of world opinion as a champion in the fight against racism. In that fight, as in the civil rights movement in America, he was supported by prominent Jews.
Mandela supported the Palestinian cause, but he was also very supportive of Israel, which he visited and where he received an honorary doctorate from Ben-Gurion University. Mandela firmly believed in Israel’s right to exist. But after his death, and even during his waning days, his African National Congress Party (ANC) was hijacked by radicals.
Mandela’s successor, Jacob Zuma, led the ANC into partnership with the Communist Party and began to reshape a troubling foreign policy.
We began to see a shift away from the West toward China, Russia, and Iran.
Israel became a victim of that political shift.
Under the current president, Cyril Ramaphosa, South Africa has edged away from the United States and Europe and, economically, has moved toward the BRICS grouping, hosting the BRICS Summit in Johannesburg in 2023.
During this period, we saw a strong move to embrace the most extreme elements in the Palestinian movement, namely Hamas.
A Hamas delegation, which included senior Hamas official Khaled Mashaal, was hosted by the ANC in Pretoria in 2015, where they signed a memorandum of understanding.
In 2017, Hamas politburo members attended the ANC’s 54th conference. Following the conference, the ANC downgraded its diplomatic relations with Israel. This political party decision became national policy in October 2023, when the relationship crossed from party to government lines.
Immediately after the horrific genocidal attack by Palestinian terrorists on October 7, 2023, while bodies were still on the ground, the South African government downgraded its relationship with Israel.
To rub further salt into fresh wounds, just ten days after Hamas committed its atrocities on October 7, South African Foreign Minister Naledi Pandor phoned Hamas leader Ismael Haniyeh in Doha to express her government’s solid support for Hamas and the Palestinian people, offering Hamas its support and solidarity.
The South African Jewish Board of Deputies and the South African Jewish community expressed its horror over the fact that their foreign minister had rushed a call to Hamas so soon after their “atrocious and horrific attack on Israel.”
A week later, rather than express sorrow for the staggering loss of lives in Israel at the hands of Hamas and accompanying Palestinians, President Ramaphosa and his ANC leadership shamelessly sported Palestinian keffiyehs [headdresses] symbolizing support for the killers who had so recently murdered, raped, tortured, maimed, and kidnapped Jews.
Ramaphosa disgracefully described the horrors of October 7 as “a just struggle.”
In December 2023, the ANC again hosted a Hamas delegation, at the same time officially shunning all contact with Israeli officials.
The ANC government explicitly takes sides with Hamas in this conflict and is now waging lawfare against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague.
Let it be clearly stated: The ANC South African government supports Hamas, an internationally proscribed Islamic terrorist organization.
This South African government is guilty of utter hypocrisy.
Here are the facts.
Foreign Minister Pandor frequently calls Israel “an apartheid state,” while South Africa is utterly silent over the callous execution of two young Tanzanians by Hamas, whom they passionately support.
These young Tanzanians, Joshua Mollel and Clemence Felix Mtenga, were in Israel as part of an agricultural project to equip themselves with knowledge and experience that would allow them to contribute to the economy of their own country. They were studying in Israel and were allowed to work in agriculture to learn Israeli agricultural methods and to earn money.
Some apartheid state!
Death was the last thing on their minds, but they were slaughtered by Hamas. Yet, this ANC regime cynically turned its back on two murdered Africans.
Kenneth Moeng Mokgatlhe, an African columnist and political writer, studying at Ben-Gurion University, wrote: “Mollel and Mtenga were Tanzanian students studying in Israel, not Israeli citizens. Mollel was sprayed with bullets from Hamas’s machine guns at a very close range. This after he appealed to its fighters not to take his life. Hamas was merciless and did what it always does – kill.”
The writer reminds us, and the ANC regime, that the deadly Hamas rampage of October 7 was a war crime. But it played no part in deterring South Africa from pursuing a vindictive and malevolent case of genocide against Israel at the International Court of Justice.
The South African government’s behavior is turning many educated Africans against them.
As Mokgatlhe wrote, “Those who compare the struggles on the African continent with that of Hamas are misdirected factually and morally. Why would South African President Cyril Ramaphosa support an organization that doesn’t hesitate to kill a black person, and for no reason?
“For me, race matters. I cannot support anyone who wishes, or has no problem with, brutally killing any African who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
His message should light a flame for any right-minded African who truly stands for justice and progress.
Many democracies around the world support the Palestinians, but they unequivocally condemned Hamas and acknowledged Israel’s right to self-defense.
But not South Africa.
Regardless of where one stands on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, it is totally undemocratic to support an internationally designated terrorist organization with an expressed policy of genocide against Jews and a desire to wipe Israel off the map.
And here is another glaring example of South African hypocrisy.
Within a week of the South African delegation’s lodging its prosecution against Israel on genocide charges at the International Court of Justice, Ramaphosa hosted Sudanese leader Hamdan Dagalo in Pretoria.
Dagola is one of the perpetrators of the Darfur genocide and countless crimes against humanity.
It is clear that Ramaphosa’s government has lost all moral authority on any issue relating to genocide in any international forum.
The South African government obsessively condemns Israel while cozying up to some of the world’s most horrific dictators, such as those of Venezuela, Cuba, Russia, and Iran.
While Iranians risked their lives in street protests against the killing of women who were being tortured and shot by their regime, the ANC government played host to the mass-murdering Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi.
After the October 7 massacre in Israel, Foreign Minister Pandor visited Tehran. During her visit to Iran, she met with Raisi. She also met with terrorist leaders and spoke to Hamas leader, Ismail Haniyeh.
The ANC led the campaign against Israel’s observer status in the African Union, even though Israel has done tremendous work to assist many African nations with development and agricultural technology.
And now the ANC is accusing Israel of genocide. But while the ANC is busy smearing Israel, it is failing its own people.
Under the ANC, South Africa became one of the most dangerous countries for women, leading the world rating in rape statistics, domestic violence incidents, and murders.
In researching material for this article, I came across statistics that truly shocked me.
In a three-month period in late 2023, there were 7,000 murders and 13,000 rapes in South Africa. This, according to South Africa’s News24.
While South Africa is pursuing Israel on genocide charges, there is an ongoing genocide in South Africa of white farmers. This, according to The Spectator.
As for South African claims that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza, since Israel left the Strip in 2005 the Gazan population increased from 1.3 million in 2005 to 2.3 million in 2023.
Even life expectancy is higher in Gaza than it is in South Africa. In that regard, South Africa is 120th on a list of 177 countries. Palestine is 102nd, according to the UN Development Program’s human development index. People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.
As for its dalliance with terror, South Africa was sanctioned in 2023 as being the African headquarters for terror financing, resulting in the country’s being gray-listed for failure to adhere to tariff-finance laws.
Yet this is the government that welcomes Hamas terrorists, uses South African tax revenue to fund the Palestine Embassy in South Africa, and is prosecuting Israel on genocide charges on behalf of the Hamas genocidal terror regime in Gaza.
The quadruple hypocrisy of the ANC government is that it turns its racist blind eye to the genocide of its own minority white farmers; fails to deal with the massive murder and rape of its own people; refuses to condemn Hamas for their murder of Africans and Asians, let alone over a thousand Jews; yet has the gall to represent Hamas, the most heinous mass murderers of Jews since the Holocaust, to prosecute the Jewish nation with a crime that was introduced into law as a result of the Holocaust.
South Africans and Africa deserve better.
If Israel is at fault, it is in not making its own application to the ICJ prosecuting Hamas on genocide charges.
Israel should, based on the overwhelming evidence, have indicted Hamas for the crime the Jewish state now faces.
Instead, Israel, after it presents its defense, will have to rely on the judgment of members of the ICJ bench representing countries that have long held the same jaundiced political positions as South Africa. ■
The writer is Strategic Affairs Associate at the Israel Institute for Strategic Studies and author of the best-selling book Fighting Hamas, BDS & Anti-Semitism.