OPINION:
With the end of apartheid, it was hoped that the new South Africa, the “rainbow nation,” would be an example of freedom, unity and equality.
Nelson Mandela challenged his fellow citizens and the world to act fairly and rid itself of hate, oppression and cruelty.
“Do not look the other way; do not hesitate. Recognize that the world is hungry for action, not words. Act with courage and vision,” Mandela once said.
Unfortunately, despite the efforts of Mandela and a few others, South Africa became a country sinking under corruption and cruelty.
The African National Congress, the party of Mandela, rightly received goodwill for its historic action against apartheid but quickly sunk into a party of rampant corruption and state capture.
Instead of using its power to help the Black South Africans it had formerly championed, it now turns important initiatives such as Black Economic Empowerment into fiefdoms where bribes and positions are given to “tenderpreneurs” at the public’s expense.
Understandably, the public grew restless for change and progress, but any political or public opposition was stamped out ruthlessly and violently.
The most infamous example was the Marikana massacre of 2012, when, at the behest of the authorities, police massacred 34 miners who were striking for better conditions. The massacre was the most lethal use of force by South African security forces against civilians since the Soweto uprising in 1976 and drew global condemnation.
It was against this backdrop of a failing economy and corruption that South Africa started engaging in the worst form of identity politics and hypocrisy.
The ANC controlled the whole country politically except the Western Cape, where the number of Muslims in relation to the provincial population is the highest in the nation.
Instead of trying to win support with good policies, members of the ruling ANC decided that attacking Israel would win them points in the highly sought-after region in order to gain complete control of the country.
This politically self-serving hatred for Israel is so powerful that it is prioritized over the well-being of the South African people.
In 2018, with regions of South Africa facing a terrible drought, Israel offered its highly sought-after water management systems to improve the lives of ordinary South Africans. Unfortunately, the government rejected Israel’s help because it was beholden to a narrative of the Jewish state as the devil and could not allow it to receive any plaudits in the country with national elections in the offing.
This is the little-known backdrop to what is happening now at the International Court of Justice.
By leading the charge of genocide against Israel, South Africa has desecrated the memory of all victims of genocide, including not only the Jews mass executed in the Holocaust but also the tens of millions of Africans who were the victims of colonialism, apartheid and genocide.
It is nonetheless clear that the ANC-controlled government cares little about actual genocide, as it either remains silent about real mass murder around the world or sides with the perpetrators.
It was silent in the face of Syrian dictator Bashar Assad’s killing of hundreds of thousands of his own people, the oppression and herding into concentration camps of the Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in China’s Xinjiang region, or the countless other cases of mass killing or genocides over the last few decades.
Moreover, the South African government has shown a disturbing and heartless attitude toward apprehending the perpetrators of actual genocide in the past, most tellingly when it refused an International Criminal Court order in 2015 to arrest former Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, who was considered responsible for the hundreds of thousands killed in the Darfur conflict.
So, no, this is not about genocide. This is about internal South African politics and the government’s need to ingratiate itself with the worst regimes worldwide.
By taking Israel to the International Court of Justice, the South African government has shown itself to be the cheerleader of the most repressive regimes and terrorist groups in the world, including Hamas, Iran, Hezbollah, ISIS and Syria.
No free and democratic society has lauded South Africa for this initiative, yet many repressive and totalitarian regimes have.
But this is not the first time that the South African government has partnered with oppressive regimes to target Israel and the Jewish people.
It has a history of using international institutions for narrow political purposes to attack the Jewish people, most markedly when the 2001 World Conference Against Racism, also known as Durban I, was appropriated by South Africa and Iran, among others, to malign the Jewish state and Jewish delegates in attendance while disregarding and abrogating its responsibility to the many real victims of racism, colonialism and oppression around the world.
All of this is to show that the South African government, as opposed to the long-suffering South African people, has a long and sordid history of supporting oppression, standing against progress and human rights while trying to distract and deflect from its own horrible record of governance by using an easy target — Israel and the Jewish people — to try to shield itself.
The people of South Africa deserve better. The memory of those who fought oppression and apartheid deserve better. The ANC has become fat on its own corruption and state capture and, like all oppressive regimes, will eventually fall.
We also know that the Jewish people, who have survived the most genocide attempts in human history, will survive this one, too. It will survive the death squads of Hamas and those on six other fronts, led by Iran, whose aim is to wipe the Jewish people from the face of the earth.
We also know we will not just survive but thrive in the face of their legal enablers in the South African government, the greatest hypocrites on the face of the earth.
• Ohad Tal is a member of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament.
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