‘Moral superpower’ claims ring hollow as SA snubbed at Gaza Peace Summit

Why, you might reasonably ask, was the world’s “moral superpower” not present at Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt on Monday?

Just to recap: In January this year, after presenting his credentials to outgoing US president Joe Biden, Ambassador Ebrahim Rasool described South Africa as a “moral superpower”.

In his second, short-lived stint in the post, he was reprising his favoured phrase from an earlier speech in 2014 (during his first ambassadorial term in Washington DC).

Then he advised the US-Africa Leaders Summit that as a so-called “moral superpower”, SA would be “able to teach the world through the legacy of Nelson Mandela’s conflict resolution approach”.

Rasool was expelled from the US in March when the State Department decided that, far from offering any lessons in moral superiority, describing the host country as “mobilising a supremacism” was diplomatic malpractice 101.

A very different and more consequential summit was convened on Monday at Sharm el-Sheikh, jointly co-hosted by US President Donald Trump and Egyptian President Abdel al-Sisi to cement the ceasefire in Gaza and the return of all living Israeli hostages and 1 968 Palestinian prisoners, convicted or suspected of security offences, including attacks on Israelis, according to the report in the Associated Press.

Monday’s “summit for peace” was attended by the leaders of 30 countries. Several, such as Qatar and Türkiye, played a key role in mediating the end of the Gaza war. Others, such as Japan, India and Pakistan, played no discernible role at all but were invited. Staunch, though critical, Israel-backers, such as Germany and Britain, were represented by their top leaders.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez – an implacable foe of the Jewish State since it unleashed its Gaza offensive – was also in the mix on Monday. Last year, Spain submitted a declaration of intervention to the International Court of Justice in support of SA’s genocide claims against Israel.

Why, we can speculate, did SA not get the nod to attend the Sharm el-Sheikh gathering of world leaders? After all, it had expended vast amounts of its “moral superpower” to hold Israel to account for its Gaza incursion and never let a single Israeli human rights violation, real or disputed, pass without comment and condemnation.

President Cyril Ramaphosa, channelling his expelled ambassador to the US, recently advised the UN General Assembly that “inspired by its own history”, South Africa, “strives to maintain world peace and the settlement of all international disputes through negotiation and dialogue, not war”.

Noteworthy then that the “striver” for world peace did not crack the nod in Egypt on Monday. Not even our current presidency of the G20, ending next month with little achievement to date, has advanced our claim to a front, or even second or third row, seat in the councils of the world.

Perhaps this snub accounted for the very muted response of the Department of International Relations and Development (Dirco) – essentially the external wing of the ANC government (in foreign affairs, all GNU partners are entirely excluded) to dramatic events that unfolded on the screens of the world this week.

Dirco “welcomed” the release by Hamas of the Israeli hostages. And then in seven paragraphs concentrated on the “suppression of people’s fundamental human rights”, citing all manner of evils from the “abductees seized from the humanitarian flotilla” to the “inalienable rights of the Palestinian people”.

Unmentioned in any of this was a single word of criticism for the gross violation by Hamas of the human rights of the 251 Israeli hostages, many civilians, of whom 75 were killed by Hamas either on 7 October 2023 or in captivity afterwards.

Given his titanic ego and our need for a trade deal and the central role he played in the end of current hostilities, SA might have given a shout-out to President Donald Trump for this achievement. It failed to do so.

Of course, the response by ANC-Dirco will be quantitative: Just look at the tens of thousands of Gazans killed by the forces of bombardment and starvation unleashed by Israel in the wake of 7 October.

However, from the get-go and in contrast to any lessons from the arsenal of its “moral superpower”, the ANC has deliberately mischaracterised the trigger for the brutal war.

In the absence of SA, the events in Sharm el-Sheikh and the brutal but hugely effective diplomacy of Trump have certainly paused, perhaps – more hopefully – ended the Gaza conflict.

If you go back to the Hamas attack on Israel on that fateful day, Hamas unleashed an attack that killed 1 200 innocent Israelis, many attending a music festival within the original borders of Israel – a state demarcated by the UN in 1947. Many were burnt, shot and allegedly raped.

Far from the attackers believing in the two-state solution to which SA and (even notionally at least, the ANC) “the horrifying context of the attack”, as two of Britain’s most eminent jurists (Lords Pannick and Ken Macdonald) noted at the time was the “intention to destroy Israel and all Jews living within its borders”.

Days ago, when the Trump-brokered ceasefire was signed, the New York Times, an arch opponent of both Trump and the excesses of the Israeli government and its leader, Bibi Netanyahu, published a document apparently authored by the late Hamas leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar.

It also published intercepts from the Hamas commanders on the day of the 7 October attack.

According to The Times, “When a militant asked if he should confront people on the road [at a kibbutz] a commander from the Jabaliya battalion responded in the affirmative: “Kill everyone on the road,” he said. “Kill everyone you encounter.”

“Now we are at the beginning of the kibbutz’,“ said one combatant. “We have wiped out those in it. There are settlers whom we killed.”

“Guys, take a lot of hostages”, said the commander Abu Muath, according to the intercepts. “Take a lot of hostages.”

On publicising the 7 October horror show, the worst attack on Jews since 1945, the intercepts were very explicit.

“Document the scenes of horror now, and broadcast them to the whole world”, a commander from Gaza City called Abu al-Baraa told operatives.

“Slaughter them. End the children of Israel.”

Before the “children of Israel” had fired one shot outside Israel in response to this in Gaza, or unleashed their disproportionate two-year military campaign, the ANC made its views on the killing of Israeli innocents and the unlawful abduction of hostages.

One day later, on 8 October 2023, ANC spokeswoman Mahlengi Bhengu-Motsiri stated: “The decision by Palestinians to respond to the brutality of the settler Israeli apartheid regime is unsurprising.”

Not a single word of criticism or vague condemnation; no word of condolence; no reference to the regime of terror unleashed on 7 October against innocent civilians (whose crime was to attend a music festival). In other words, and with spectacular moral inversion, where victims become perpetrators, the Jews had it coming to them. No differentiation, in the ANC view, between resistance and indiscriminate terror.

From this perspective, the Hamas attack is understandable, Israeli actions are genocidal.

Ramaphosa, always quick to call out various Israeli misdeeds, stayed his hand for nine days after the events of 7 October. Then he offered an equivocal, difference-splitting temporising remark that the “killing of civilians in Israel by Hamas just over a week ago and the ongoing killing of civilians in Gaza by Israeli forces goes against the tenets of international law”.

No doubt he waited until after Israel began its right to self-defence against the attack on Hamas, which indeed caused civilian deaths from the start, until he felt emboldened to say anything at all – terrified that any upfront words of comfort to Israel would dilute his government’s pro-Palestinian credentials.

And to burnish these, his international relations minister, Naledi Pandor, at this time engaged in telephone diplomacy with Hamas, though the precise topics discussed remain disputed.

These initial responses set the template for the words and deeds that the governing party and Dirco followed in the two years since.

The inability to call things as they are and to simply acknowledge the proximate cause of an event is both striking and wilfully self-defeating in terms of being treated as a serious and engaged player in the world.

Even socialist Bernie Sanders, perhaps the staunchest critic in the US Senate of both Trump and Israel’s actions in Gaza after 7 October, referenced his latest comments with this observation on this “extremely dark chapter”: “The vast majority of Americans understand that Israel had the right to defend itself against the horrific Hamas terrorist attack that killed 1 200 innocent people and took 250 hostages.

“But most Americans also understand that Israel did not have the right to go to war against the entire Palestinian people … killing or wounding more than 10% of Gaza’s population…”

The SA government, by word and deed, entirely identifies with the second paragraph above and deliberately disregards the first paragraph of Sanders. This suggests that posturing is preferred over “serious mediation and conflict resolution”, the sign-off phrase of every Dirco statement on the topic.

This moral blindness, or one-eyed approach to a tragic conflict, might be one reason for our exclusion from a seat at Sharm el-Sheikh on Monday.

Or perhaps it was the description of SA today offered by Police Minister Firoz Cachalia. Over the weekend, he warned that our country is heading down a slippery slope of lawlessness en route to becoming “the next Colombia or Ecuador”. That is not a great bracketing for a “moral superpower”.

They too were not present at Sharm el-Sheikh on Monday.