Recently in Parliament, in answer to a question by DA MP GR Krumbock, Naledi Pandor, minister of international relations and co-operation, stated that “South Africa does not consider Hamas” – perpetrator of the mass slaughter of civilians in Israel on 7 October, “as a terrorist organisation”.
In her answer, Pandor claimed that SA’s stance is in part “in line with the United Nations”. There is a lot of wriggle room in that justification: for example, UN General Assembly resolutions are not determinative of public international law; and even the notoriously one-eyed UN released a report on 4 March which found “reasonable grounds” to believe that sexual violence occurred during the Hamas assault on Israel, including gang rape.
When will terror be called out as terror?
The detailed report stated that in most of the incidents, “victims first subjected to rape were then killed, and at least two instances relate to the rape of women’s corpses”. It strangulates the ordinary, plain meaning of words to understand how Pandor, who herself, four months after these events, finally called for Hamas to be investigated for “war crimes”, cannot call out terror as terror.
The easy explanation for this moral blindness is that Pandor’s ANC sees Hamas, whose charter calls for the elimination of Israel (or the “Zionist project” in Hamas-speak) in its entirety and the murder of its Jewish residents, as a fellow liberation movement. That “explanation” falls flat on its face if the ANC evidence to our Truth and Reconciliation Commission is correct that ANC policy (whatever the reality) explicitly avoided targeting civilians during the struggle against apartheid.
A second explanation offered by some critics of the ANC is that Hamas is indirectly funding the ANC via its sponsors, Iran and Qatar. On this version, the quos for these quids is for SA to use its international clout, to support Hamas by attacking Israel and calling for a ceasefire in Gaza before Hamas’ military capacity is destroyed. But no one advancing this argument has yet provided evidence of this funding or a paper trail linking the miraculous financial recovery of the recently bankrupt ANC to either Doha or Tehran. So, this explanation remains, thus far, unproven.
A third explanation – offered by President Cyril Ramaphosa, endorsed by Pandor, is that SA cannot remain silent as a hideous death toll of Gazan civilians’ mounts and a humanitarian catastrophe unfolds in the territory.
Ramaphosa advised Parliament recently that SA’s advocacy for Palestinians and demand for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza (declined by the ICJ despite South Africa’s legal case that one be imposed) because the country’s actions are “guided by the fundamental principle of human rights and freedom”.
It hardly required much research to prove just how fungible and elastic these principles are in the hands of Ramaphosa’s ANC. Readers know how many omissions, elisions and contradictions arise when you place “human rights” and “South Africa” in the same sentence.
Double-standards
Last Saturday, for example, in the New York Times, Nicolas Kristof noted that double standards go many ways in international relations but that while there is an immense double standard in singling out Israel for exemplary attention, “however insidious” this cannot “justify the deaths of thousands of children in Gaza”.
But Kristof also reminds his readers “people are more focused on Israel than on what Unicef [an UN agency] describes as the ‘wave of atrocities’ against children in Sudan, while the number of children displaced by recent fighting in Sudan (three million) is greater than the entire population of Gaza… The Darfur region of Sudan two decades ago endured what is widely described as the first genocide of the 21st century”.
It is not “whataboutism” to point out that not only did our government violate its own courts to bundle out of the country, the “butcher of Darfur” then-president of Sudan Omar al-Bashir. And before writing that legal violation as a lapse to be blamed on then-President Jacob Zuma, just consider that only weeks ago, Ramaphosa met at his official residence with Sudanese warlord General Mohamed Dagalo, of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), who was chosen by al-Bashir to destroy the civilian population of Darfur. Which he undertook with grotesque enthusiasm.
What guidance SA’s claimed respect for “fundamental principles of human rights and freedom” informed this meeting was never explained. However, even the dimmest light at Dirco would know that Sudan, far more than Gaza, is within SA’s sphere of continental influence than we enjoy in the Middle East, where pretensions and posturing aside, we have little influence or power -either hard or soft.
However, while Dirco and Ramaphosa barely mention Sudan in any statement, and while influence on the world stage for a small power like ours is fleeting if not ephemeral, most of our international relations oxygen is consumed by Israel and – implicitly – by support for Hamas.
A fourth explanation offered for this concentration of scarce resources is that the ANC and the government are basically antisemitic, and since Israel was founded and exists as a Jewish state (supported overwhelmingly by most South African and world Jewry), this lies at the heart of our myopia. I don’t subscribe to this view, and while the minister of justice, Ronald Lamola, clumsily explained in novel terms in a recent interview that SA Jews “are free to worship in their churches” – I am fairly certain that Jew-hatred is not at the root of our foreign policy.
Even though, as The Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland writes:
Thus, when motor-mouth ANC secretary-general Fikile Mbalula chants “from the river to the sea”, that is a signal to the local Jewish community that, whatever his motives, he (and by extension, his party) favour the elimination of the State of Israel. So, what then lies at the heart of SA’s fixation, to the exclusion of all other rights-delinquent countries, omitting far graver human rights atrocities and potentially jeopardising our preferential trade access to the United States?
While logical consistency and national interest might be missing in action from our international alignments, I think the best single explanation to hand was offered last month by (Lord) Daniel Finkelstein in The Times of London.
The ANC is unmentioned in his article but since it regards itself pre-eminently as a “a party of the progressive left”, his analysis fits it like the proverbial “t”.
He locates the fight against Israel by the left and left-wing governments as part and parcel of its fight against capitalism, and VI Lenin’s idea that to end the final stage of capitalism required an end of “the profits of imperial adventure”.
As Finkelstein writes:
“So, it doesn’t matter if a group jails opponents or rapes women or throws gay people from buildings. As long as they help bring down capitalism – which as anti-imperialists they do -they are liberating forces, and their other faults will dissolve once capitalism dissolves.”
You can immediately place the horrors of Hamas and the ANC’s support for it in this frame. Of course, it is a bit awkward to shoehorn Israel into this narrative given its founding as a refuge for Jewish survivors from the Nazi Holocaust. But as the writer explains, “all international problems must be squeezed into the battle against imperialism and colonialism and [Israel] is described by the left as a conquering power sustained by wealthy financiers to advance international capitalist control”.
This, of course, comports with an antisemitic trope of several of them rolled into one. But I think it says far more about the ANC’s antique world view than about targeting Jews as such – though some see this as a distinction without much difference.
And if you thought the lingering attachment of the ANC to Leninism was confined just to cadre deployment, think again: it informs our global positioning, whatever the cost.
