The anti-Israel stance of South Africa’s ANC government in the month since Hamas launched its heinous attack on October 7 has sparked outrage among the country’s small Jewish community, including the South African Jewish Board of Deputies (SAJBD), the South African Zionist Federation (SAZF) and Chief Rabbi Warren Goldstein.
“I want to tell the president and I want to tell the ANC, you are not South Africa!” Goldstein told a SAZF rally for Israel last week. “This president, his party, and this government is supporting an evil savagery that has shocked the hearts of all decent human beings in the world. How dare they?”
South Africa this week recalled its diplomats from Israel to protest the Israeli military operation in the Gaza Strip, calling it a “genocide.”
“The South African government has decided to withdraw all its diplomats in Tel Aviv for consultation,” Minister in the Presidency Khumbudzo Ntshavheni said on Monday, condemning the “disparaging remarks” of Israeli Ambassador Eli Belotserkovsky “about those who are opposing the atrocities and genocide of the Israeli government.”
Pro-Palestinian protesters, who have held regular protests outside US and Israeli missions in the country, have urged the South African government to expel Israel’s ambassador.
In an interview with the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC), Belotserkovsky stressed that Israel wants peace with the Palestinians, but not with terrorists. “There is a possibility for peace, and we hope that we will get peace between Israel and the Palestinian people,” he said. “We cannot have peace with terrorists that slaughter innocent families [and] kidnap people, including old people and Holocaust survivors.”
International Relations Minister Naledi Pandor said the South African diplomats had been recalled from Tel Aviv to give the government a detailed briefing about the situation. “We need to have this engagement with our officials because we are extremely concerned at the continued killing of children and innocent civilians in the Palestinian territory, and we believe the nature of response by Israel has become one of collective punishment,” she said.
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa attended a peace summit convened by Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi on October 21, where he called for an immediate cessation of hostilities, the release of hostages, the lifting of the Gaza blockade, and the opening of humanitarian corridors.
South African government's support of Hamas
Although Ramaphosa is considered a friend of South Africa’s Jewish community, whose numbers have dipped below 50,000, a week after the Hamas assault he wore a keffiyeh at a news conference in solidarity with the Palestinians. “They are people who have been under occupation for almost 75 years,” he said. “They have been... waging a war against a government that has been dubbed an apartheid state.”
One Jewish ANC official, Gabriella Farber, resigned from the party to protest its support for Hamas. “It has been made very clear to me that there is no space for a proud Jew to belong to the ANC, no matter how hard I tried,” she wrote in her resignation letter.
South African Jewish leaders argue that the majority of the country’s 60 million people, most of them Christians, support Israel. They note that pro-Israel rallies have been held in Johannesburg, Cape Town, and Durban. Last Thursday, a “teddy bear protest” with photographs of children being held captive by Hamas was organized outside SABC headquarters after it aired an interview with a Hamas spokesman denying that the terrorist organization was holding children. A day later, members of the Jewish community hung red balloons across Johannesburg’s Nelson Mandela Bridge – one for each hostage – to press for their release.
This week, red beach towels with the names and photographs of 240 hostages were laid out on the beach in Durban – the same city that hosted the infamous World Conference Against Racism in 2001 that gave birth to BDS.
For the sake of the hostages, and in the name of justice, we urge South Africa to reverse its pro-Hamas stance while pushing for peace, and stand on the right side of history.