The ICJ Victory will be costly. Our fearless championing of global justice will have a price.

Published in the Sunday Times on 18 February 2024.

In times of political upheavals and uncertainty, few countries have weathered what South Africa has gone through. Despite our relatively small GDP per capita compared to economies we would diplomatically take on global issues, it has always been the greater good for humanity that we stood for, which gave us the moral high ground to mount difficult-to-comprehend campaigns. Even if the campaign is at the expense of critical aspects of our national interests, such as the well-being of citizens, our assumed an almost sacred role as the human rights lung of the world reigns supreme. In all the epochs where we tested our resolve to the limit, it has always been the wisdom of those who were in charge of the oldest leader of society, the African National Congress, that could rescue us because of the respect that ANC commanded globally. 

The decision by South Africa to stick its neck out in what will go in history as its second anti-apartheid frontier might be the most costly one. The hegemonic victory character of the ICJ case has, in real terms, subjected South Africa, and the ANC in particular, to a storm of heightened (friends of Israel) investment strikes, sophisticated regime change funding of its political adversaries, and a cocktail of interdependent decisions by the global Israeli lobby to supercharge the neutralisation of South Africa as an emerging existential threat to the moral legitimacy of the State of Israel's occupation ambitions of Palestinian territory. 

 

In the parlance of RSA's chief diplomat, not only has Israel been forced to account, but those complicit in its yet-to-be-proven genocidal acts will also be held to account. What is loud and potentially not properly foregrounded as a risk to the stability of our constitutional and democratic order is Minister Pandor's statement that "when you take on a cause, you must expect that there will be retribution". It is this retribution that South Africans are not engaging in. 

 

It is indisputable that the Israeli occupation of Palestine cannot co-exist with what defines South Africa as a nation and state in the same way the holocaust of the nineteenth century would never have. South Africa's constitutional values, a background of permanence to its international relations policy posture, cannot be reconciled with the occupation ambitions of Israel. RSA's concept of freedom for all of humanity exerts a powerful sway over how it relates to other nations, including those with an abnormal balance of trade deficit. With apartheid being declared a crime against humanity and genocide being known to have been a currency of most occupations and land dispossession successes, South Africa is thus constitutionally obliged to act in a way that legitimises the foundations of its existence as a democracy. The reconciliation of South Africa and the State of Israel would, in this context, require deep ideological shifts from the two countries and their allies. 

 

With American Middle East policy being dictated and influenced by the Israeli lobby, South Africa's relationship with the US will be drawn into a new analysis prism. In such circumstances, the lobby has been known to factorise where the policy it is fighting originated. Israel has been able to sustain a duality of being a country pursuing human dignity, social justice, non-racialism, non-sexism, human rights, comprehensive freedom, and the right to self-determination for the Jewish community on one hand and acting almost the opposite when the same is demanded for Palestinians. The moral correctness of its occupation is, in Israeli democratic parlance, legal and somewhat legitimate. 

 

The first shot at dealing with South Africa has been fired, and a Bill cited as "the US-South Africa Bilateral Relations Review Act” is now a reality in the American law-making process. The tone of the US Congress Findings isolates the governing African National Congress from the South African State as established by its Constitution. It suggests that South Africa's posture towards the State of Israel can be differently managed with another governing party in charge or a new cohort of leadership in charge of the governing party. It characterises RSA foreign policy within the prism of the ANCness of government as a function of the hold of the ANC as the governing party; this makes the ANC the liability of South Africans. This strategy was up to the ICJ case working on the isolation of Hamas and others in the Middle East. 

 

The Bill in the US Senate declares that "the ANC’s foreign policy actions have long ceased to reflect its stated stance of nonalignment, and now directly favour the PRC, the Russian Federation, and Hamas, a known proxy of Iran, and thereby undermine United States national security and foreign policy interests." This declaration creates a policy context to reposition the ANC's relationship with the US's national security management juggernaut, including its regime change global apparatuses. The thrust of the Bill is to determine whether South Africa has engaged in activities that undermine United States national security or foreign policy interests. The discourse has shifted from being about any other interest, legitimate or otherwise, to that of the US. 

While apartheid, genocide, imperialism, or interests of other governments, which are inconsistent with what South Africa stands for, are an impunity our human rights lung posture as a nation cannot tolerate, it will always be the costs we have to pay that will determine the health and well being of our democracy. Once enacted, the US Bill will redefine South Africa's relations with all US allies. The diplomatic relations template has shifted; our politics will be more geopolitical than we have bargained for. CUT!!!