The International Court of Justice in The Hague (ICJ) will hold its first hearing on Thursday into South Africa’s genocide claim against Israel, as growing voices call for a ceasefire in Gaza. Israeli military operations there have caused the deaths of 23,000 Palestinians, including nearly 10,000 children.
Israel has angrily rejected the accusation and reportedly plans to defend itself by showing the court videos of Hamas’ massacre of Israeli civilians during the October 7 assault. The United States denounced it as “counterproductive and completely devoid of any factual basis.” South African Jewish organizations have accused the Pretoria government of anti-Semitism.
South Africa’s initiative comes after years of deteriorating relations with Israel, which maintained secret military ties with the white apartheid regime.
Israel Armed South African Supremacists
A book, published a dozen years ago by the American academic of Jewish origin Sasha Polakow-Suransky (The Unspoken Alliance: Israel’s Secret Relationship With Apartheid South Africa), detailed the close relations between the two countries. We learned that Israel even offered nuclear weapons to the white supremacists in Pretoria to ensure the sustainability of their power. However, Afrikaners were anti-Semites who, in the 1930s and 1940s, supported Nazi Germany.
Polakow-Suransky relates in his book that in April 1975, military cooperation between the two countries was formalized in a secret agreement signed by the Israeli Minister of Defense, Shimon Peres, and his South African counterpart, PW “Pik” Botha. The Pretoria government was then led by BJ Vorster, interned because of his pro-Nazi sympathies during the Second World War.
According to Polakow-Suransky, Israel continued to supply arms and military equipment to the racist South African regime until its collapse and the coming to power of Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress in 1994.
Analyzing Israel’s relations with racist South Africa, the Israeli daily Haaretz has already written that it is “a good example of the slide of Zionist utopia towards tragedy.” The founder of Zionism, Theordor Herzl, speaks in his book Altneuland (the new old country) of the Zionists’ identification with the blacks of Africa.
In his memoirs, Nelson Mandela reveals that he studied Menachem Begin’s book The revolt, which describes the activities of the Jewish group Irgun in its armed struggle against the British, for inspiration. Begin writes that one of the goals of the Zionist enterprise was to help Africans in their struggle against colonialism.
Nelson Mandela forgave Israel
The facts are inescapable. Israel was one of the rare countries to maintain economic and military relations with the apartheid regime. Despite this, the Jerusalem Post highlighted Mandela’s greatness of soul and his lack of bitterness towards the Jewish state. After his accession to the South African presidency, he asserted that if peace in the Middle East implied the complete withdrawal from the occupied territories, it also required that Arab states recognize Israel within secure and recognized borders.
Visiting Gaza in 1999, Mandela expressed solidarity with the Palestinians and encouraged them to continue the struggle, recalling that in the fight against the white supremacist regime, “we too have experienced terrible days, the sacrifice of comrades, and great frustrations.