South African Jews for a Free Palestine supports the call for an investigation into the trip taken by Members of Parliament to Israel. Though this jaunt was characterised as a ‘fact finding mission’, such a description is preposterous given the organising body. Furthermore, comments made in the wake of the trip are highly offensive if not outright grotesque, given that more than 51000 Palestinians have already been killed in Gaza since October 2023; given that even infants have been enduring amputations without anaesthetic; and, given that a population of over two million people, by Israel’s own admission, are being systematically starved.
The delegates included the Democratic Alliance (DA) spokespersons on Justice and on International Relations, Glynnnis Breytenbach and Emma Louise Powell, respectively; DA members of Parliament, Katherine Christie, Bridget Masango, Nicholas Myburgh, Liam Jacobs and Bonginkosi Madikizela. From the Patriotic Alliance (PA) came MPs Ashley Sauls and Millicent Mathopa; and MP Steve Swart represented the African Christian Democratic Party (ACDP).
Democratic South Africa has long supported the Palestinians. This is unsurprising, given the obvious similarities between the plight of the Palestinians and South Africa’s apartheid experience. South Africa’s apartheid government was even inaugurated in the same year as the founding of Israel and the so-called “War of Independence” that followed. This was a time known to Palestinians as the Nakba, in which over 750,000 people were driven from their homes. This violent dispossession that was the mark of apartheid in South Africa is also a defining feature of the Zionist State of Israel.
South Africa’s support has not been merely theoretical. In 2023, it approached the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague with respect to the genocide being perpetrated in Gaza. The case is ongoing — so is the genocide.
In the midst of the atrocities in Gaza, and the ongoing pogroms against Palestinians in the West Bank, this delegation found it fit to go on a trip arranged by a propaganda organisation called South African Friends of Israel (SAFI). SAFI describes itself as ‘a dedicated movement committed to uniting South Africans in support of Israel and the Jewish community. Founded in response to the rise of anti-Israel sentiment, [the] organisation aims to challenge these narratives by promoting a positive informed understanding of Israel’s vital role in the world today.’
Suppose it were 1977 and one decided to visit Cambodia on a ‘fact finding mission’. This would be akin to having the trip arranged by ‘Best-Buds-of-Pol-Pot’, a group, let us imagine, set up with the objective of countering negative perceptions of the brutal Cambodian dictator. They further advertise their agenda as dedicated to countering anti-Khmer-Rouge sentiment.
Indeed people did go on such propaganda trips and returned denying the many first hand accounts of atrocities perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge. Closer to home, there was no shortage of propaganda trips to South Africa specifically designed to show what a shining success apartheid was. In all these cases the relevant diplomats could announce with confidence that they had really been to the relevant countries and seen for themselves.
The diplomats of those earlier times might have been able to claim naïveté, that they were simply gullible enough to swallow what they were fed. After all, they presumably weren’t shown the horror of Tuol Sleng, or the abominations of John Vorster Square. However plausible such denial is, it simply isn’t available to our nine MPs. Today allegations of crimes against humanity do not depend on mere testimony: social media has made witnesses of all of us.
Despite having seen what we have all seen, and knowing what we all know, these representatives of the Democratic Alliance, the Patriotic Alliance and the African Christian Democratic Party happily went on what was clearly a propaganda tour. Given further the pro-Zionist stance of these parties, it is unsurprising that they would return with the breezy pronouncement that there is no evidence of apartheid in Israel, and no genocide.
While the organisers ensured exposure to spin about the wonders of Israeli technology, it seems safe to assume they were not introduced to Adalah, the legal centre for Palestinian minority rights. The Adalah website documents the copious legislation that discriminates against Palestinians in Israel itself.
Furthermore, the full implication of the fact that Palestinians in the West Bank live under a different legal system to Jewish Israelis, and are constantly subjected to violent pogroms and other forms of abuse, also seems to have eluded them. One wonders if they underwent the grueling experience of the endless blockades that Palestinians must pass through, or encountered any of the more than 40,000 refugees there that Israel has recently, once again, displaced.
The visit to the site of the Nova music festival and the kibbutzim attacked on 7 October 2023 was not followed by a visit to the decimated sites of hospitals, schools, churches, mosques and residential buildings in Gaza. Reports of heartfelt meetings with relatives of the more than 50 000 Palestinians killed in Gaza might be very hard to find…
It is laughable that the DA, which wishes to style itself as the more honest political alternative, should so utterly discredit itself, along with the PA and the ACDP, by simply ignoring what is close to an international consensus.
Consider that in January 2021 Israel’s own human rights organisation, B’Tselem, released a report titled This is Apartheid. In the same year, Human Rights Watch published a comprehensive 213-page report that reached similar conclusions.
In 2022, Amnesty International was even more thorough in its report Is Israel Committing the Crime of Apartheid? It described Israel’s apartheid against Palestinians as a cruel system of domination and a ‘crime against humanity’. Also in 2022 a Report was published by the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. He stated he had concluded that the political system of entrenched rule in the occupied Palestinian territory satisfied the prevailing evidentiary standard for the existence of apartheid.
Most important of all, in 2024 the International Court of Justice delivered an Advisory Opinion to the effect that, indeed, Israel is responsible for maintaining a system of apartheid.
Despite all of this meticulously documented evidence and careful analysis, nine Members of Parliament went on a field trip to Israel and — just as South African Friends of Israel expected them to do — announced that there is no evidence of apartheid in Israel.
Dare one say that this is a debacle from which the implicated parties will not easily recover.
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