WHAT does it take for South African politicians to recognise genocide when they see it? When the bones of Palestinian children protrude from mass graves? Already, hospitals have been reduced to rubble with patients still inside.
Journalists have been targeted for assassination to prevent their truth telling. Mosques, churches, schools and universities have been willfully destroyed. An entire population is being subjected to bombardment and systematically starved under the world’s gaze.
The Democratic Alliance and Patriotic Alliance’s recent whitewashing of Israel’s crimes during their so-called “fact-finding mission” isn’t just willful blindness. It’s active complicity in genocide. Their claim of finding “no evidence of apartheid” is as morally bankrupt as those who once denied our own suffering under apartheid.
While these MPs sipped coffee with their Israeli hosts, Gaza was enduring wholesale slaughter by the IDF as Israel broke the ceasefire agreement during the Holy Month of Ramadaan, and unleashed on Palestinians:
- The deadliest 72 hours since October 2023 when Israeli forces slaughtered 700 Palestinians in a single night, including killing 200 children who were bombed in their beds during Ramadaan preparations.
- The murder of 50 000 dead and counting,
- 600 000 now without clean water after Israel sabotaged Gaza’s last desalination plant,
- 20 neonatal ventilators sitting at borders blocked by Israel, while babies suffocate.
- This isn’t collateral damage. It’s the Zionist endgame — Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz, chillingly termed the “final warning” to Palestinians. The parallels to the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto are undeniable: walls, starvation, mass graves, and the world’s silence.
That MPs of the DA and PA, accompanied by the African Christian Democratic Party (ACDP), from a nation birthed in the anti-apartheid struggle, could return parroting Hasbara talking points reveals either:
- Staggering ignorance of the 200+ human rights reports documenting Israeli crimes
- Or craven political opportunism, trading Palestinian blood for Zionist approval.
Where is the outrage over Israel’s Apartheid Bill criminalising solidarity? Where’s the condemnation of Netanyahu — a fugitive from ICC justice? These “leaders” disgrace the memory of Tutu and Mandela, who called Palestine the moral test of our time.
South Africa has a legal and moral obligation to act
South Africa must move beyond symbolic gestures and take decisive, legally mandated action to confront this genocide. First, our government must immediately suspend all diplomatic, economic, and military relations with Israel under the Apartheid Convention — no more trade, no more arms deals, no more normalcy with a regime committing mass slaughter.
Second, as a nation that understands justice, we must pursue arrest warrants against Israeli political and military leaders under universal jurisdiction, just as we did with apartheid-era criminals. Let Netanyahu and his butchers know they will face handcuffs, not handshakes, on South African soil. We must also arrest and charge South Africans, who have participated in the genocide in Gaza as part of the IDF.
Third, and most crucially, we need mass grassroots mobilisation - trade unions, students, faith groups, and ordinary citizens - to rise with the same intensity that brought down apartheid here. This means sustained boycotts, protests, and direct pressure on corporations and institutions complicit in Israeli war crimes.
Israel’s apartheid will fall, just as South Africa’s did. But it will require the same concerted international coercion that dismantled our own oppression. History proves this. Successive condemnations by the UN General Assembly and Security Council, the establishment of UN anti-apartheid mechanisms, and the adoption of binding sanctions cumulatively strangled apartheid South Africa and liberated Namibia.
These were not symbolic gestures. They were weapons of justice. Today, the same tools exist to crush Israeli apartheid:
The Apartheid Convention and laws of state responsibility require all nations to:
- Cease recognition of Israel’s apartheid regime;
- End all complicity (arms trade, economic ties, diplomatic cover);
- Cooperate to dismantle the system through sanctions and ICC prosecutions;
- Universal jurisdiction allows third states to arrest Israeli war criminals - a tool we used against Nazi and apartheid-era killers.
While these laws were enforced relentlessly against Pretoria, Western powers have granted Israel criminal impunity. The ICJ rulings gather dust. The ICC’s warrants go unexecuted. The UN’s resolutions are vetoed. This selective justice is why Gaza burns. Our nation must lead where others falter.
We need to trigger the Apartheid Convention’s enforcement mechanisms at the UN; cut all ties with Israel in compliance with ICJ orders; and mobilise the Global South to impose the same isolation that broke apartheid.
The DA, PA and ACDP’s delegation didn’t just fail Gaza. They betrayed every South African who remembers how sanctions saved us. We know better than anyone: apartheid only falls when the world turns its back on the oppressor.
The cowardice of the representatives of these political parties cannot be the final word. History is watching: either we stand with the oppressed, or we stand with the butchers. History will record the DA, PA and ACDP not as fact-finders, but as the fools and collaborators who saw genocide and called it peace. There is no neutral ground. Free Palestine.
Usuf Chikte is a Palestine Solidarity Campaign co-ordinator.
** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media.