No matter how heinous the crimes of its struggle allies, the ANC can be relied upon to defend them.
What would you do if someone, anyone, launched a surprise attack against civilian targets, committing war crimes, and conducted a ground assault on unarmed young people at an outdoor concert where hundreds were slaughtered in cold blood, some victims were allegedly raped, and others were abducted to serve as human shields?
Would you condemn this heinous massacre? Or would you blame the victims?
The ANC, and by extension the South African government, blames the victims. It is vile, but it does.
‘[T]he decision by Palestinians to respond to the brutality of the settler Israeli apartheid regime is unsurprising,’ said the party’s spokesperson, Mahlengi Bhengu-Motsiri, from the moral low ground, responding to the devastating attack by Hamas, the official government of the Gaza Strip, upon Israel, which began on the morning of Saturday 7 October 2023.
The attack has sparked a full-scale war that, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu says, ‘will change the Middle East’.
In an official statement, the Department of International Relations and Cooperation let it be known that: ‘South Africa expresses its grave concern over the recent devastating escalation in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.’
I, myself, frowned for a significant length of time. What is ‘grave concern’ supposed to mean? How is ‘grave concern’ supposed to help? Is this the government version of ‘thoughts and prayers’?
It continued: ‘The new conflagration has arisen from the continued illegal occupation of Palestine land, continued settlement expansion, desecration of the Al Aqsa Mosque and Christian holy sites, and ongoing oppression of the Palestinian people.’
Allow me to set the record straight. The ‘conflagration has arisen’ from a coordinated, large-scale attack by Hamas terrorists upon Israeli land and innocent Israeli civilians.
Morally bankrupt
Added Bhengu-Motsiri: ‘The ANC stands with the people of occupied Palestine as it is clear that the degenerating security situation is directly linked to the unlawful Israeli occupation. Israel’s policy of settling its civilians in occupied Palestinian territory and displacing the local population contravenes fundamental rules of international humanitarian law.’
Explain, then, Ms. B-M, why the attack was launched by Hamas, the terrorist organisation that rules Gaza, which is a territory from which Israel unilaterally disengaged in 2005, dismantling its settlements and evacuating both its settlers and its army?
There is no Israeli settlement activity in Gaza. There is no military occupation in Gaza. So why point to them as the reason for this attack?
The morally bankrupt ANC is just making stuff up as it goes along, to avoid having to denounce the reprehensible actions of a struggle ally.
It would be possible, of course, to condemn a particular action by an ally while remaining allies, but the ANC wouldn’t be caught dead with nuance. Instead, they make no mention of the hundreds of dead civilians, and hope nobody brings up the awkward pile of human corpses.
It is true that Israeli settlements in the West Bank are widely (though not universally) viewed as violating international law, but this attack did not come from the West Bank.
It is also not clear that the occupation itself is ‘unlawful’, as the ANC claims.
I don’t want to get into the weeds of history here, but there never was a sovereign state of Palestine for Israel to occupy.
Defence
What are now the occupied territories were previously, like Israel itself, under United Nations control, which it gained from Britain, which in turn inherited it from the defunct Ottoman Empire after World War I.
The territories were originally part of what the UN had proposed to be a Palestinian state, but this partition plan was rejected by the Palestinians and the surrounding Arab nations, who all declared war on Israel as soon as it was established in 1948.
Until 1967, the territory of Gaza was occupied by Egypt. Once again, the Arab nations went to war against Israel, and once again, they were beaten. As a consequence, Israel now reluctantly controlled Gaza. Egypt did not want it back, nor did it want to offer refuge to the Palestinians living there.
In 1973, on Yom Kippur, the Arab nations and the Palestinians again went to war against Israel. Again they were defeated.
Terrorists
Again and again, the Palestinians sent terrorists across the borders, killing civilians and bombing Israeli infrastructure. Again and again, they had to be thwarted.
Israel is the only country in the world that needs an ‘Iron Dome’ missile intercept system because rocket attacks have been a routine occurrence for decades.
When it takes action against sites from which rockets are launched against its civilians, it routinely gets accused of aggression, or a ‘disproportionate response’.
The media frequently leads with news of an ‘Israeli operation’ in Gaza, or elsewhere in the occupied territories, and mentioning the Palestinian attack that necessitated the operation several paragraphs deep into the story.
A parade of leaders and organisations in the Palestinian territories as well as their Iranian puppet-masters have declared their goal to be not merely the establishment of an independent Palestinian state, but the destruction of the state of Israel and the eradication of the Jews.
Again and again, Israel has been forced to defend itself and its people.
Despite this, Israel fully withdrew from Gaza in 2005. It isn’t clear that Gaza is occupied at all, or who would have any claim of sovereignty over the territory if it was.
Normalising relations
I have long challenged the notion that Israel is an ‘apartheid state’, as the ANC claims. It isn’t. The situation is simply not comparable.
I have also debunked the idea that Israel is dealing with counterparts in the Palestinian territories who earnestly seek a peaceful resolution to the 75-year-old conflict.
On the contrary, even the most ‘moderate’ of the lot, Al Fatah, persistently lauds and rewards terrorism aimed at Israeli civilians, despite Israel’s policy of appeasement to ‘shrink’ the conflict, trying to reduce frictions and support the Palestinian economy.
And yet, the ANC believes that the people of a territory that Israel does not occupy, but was building growing economic ties with, are justified in attacking and killing hundreds of Israeli civilians. How low can they go?
Israel has been working on normalising relations not only with the Palestinians, but also with its Arab neighbours.
After achieving agreements with Sudan, Bahrain, Morocco, and Egypt, and going as far as establishing a free-trade agreement with the United Arab Emirates, the latest country in talks with Israel was Saudi-Arabia, an important US ally.
Iranian involvement
Iran, which is the primary instigator and funder of terrorism against Israel, and calls the alliance between Israel and Arab countries the ‘Israel-Sunni Alliance’ (its own regime being Shiite) cannot tolerate this.
It recently came into a $6 billion war chest as a ransom for five US citizens held in its notorious Evin prison for political prisoners. It appears some of that war chest has now procured the deaths of 700 innocent Israeli civilians.
As news of the Hamas slaughter in Israel broke, celebrations broke out in Tehran. Iranian security officials reportedly helped orchestrate the attack.
The Supreme Leader of the Iranian theocracy, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, posted a video of concert-goers fleeing for their lives across the Negev Desert, saying: ‘God willing, the cancer of the usurper Zionist regime will be eradicated at the hands of the Palestinian people and the Resistance forces throughout the region. #AlAqsaStorm.’
Again with the ‘eradication’. This is not an enemy that Israel can sit down with to discuss peace. It is an enemy that only understands one thing, and that is resolute defence against their unprovoked aggression.
Anti-Western
Iran’s position on the war started by Hamas is part of a broader anti-Western movement that in recent years has come to include Russia. The same people who support Russia’s unprovoked aggression against Ukraine also support the incursion into Israel by Hamas.
Just as Ukraine’s approach to NATO threatened to bolster the West’s influence on Russia’s borders, which Russia couldn’t tolerate, Israel’s rapprochement with Arab nations threatens to bolster the West’s influence in the Middle East, which Iran cannot tolerate.
While Russia has a history of fighting against Islamist terrorism, and has traditionally had good relations with Israel, it now finds itself a pariah state, in tentative alliance with Iran, the primary sponsor of Islamist terrorism.
The war declared by Israel against Hamas is, therefore, part of a larger geo-political conflict, between successful liberal democracies on one side, and failing authoritarian nations with medieval moral principles and a lust for conquest on the other.
The ANC, and South Africa’s government has chosen to side, blindly and stupidly, with the latter, and they are willing to remain silent about the wanton slaughter of innocent civilians in defence of their allies.
Their idea of ‘a lasting and durable peace’ is one ‘that produces a viable, contiguous Palestinian State, existing side-by-side in peace with Israel, within the 1967 internationally recognised borders, with East Jerusalem as its capital’.
Someone ought to tell them that the ‘1967 borders’, also known as the ‘Green Line’, or the ‘1949 Armistice Lines’ do not include a contiguous Palestinian State. To form such a contiguous state, Israel itself would have to be carved into one or more non-contiguous pieces.
There is zero chance of this happening, though doing so would certainly make it easier to ‘eradicate’ the state of Israel.
Blame Israel
Within Israel, the attack has, ironically, also been blamed on the Israeli government and its leader, Netanyahu. Not because Israeli policy provoked it, but because Netanyahu was distracted and the Israeli defences were caught napping.
Israeli intelligence believed that Hamas did not want to fight, and would not provoke an attack. Hamas set out to deceive Israel, and it succeeded. For that, Israel can only blame itself.
Just like with the Yom Kippur War which started 50 years and a day before the latest Hamas attack, the security forces were totally unprepared for war.
Heads will likely roll in Israel, but first, another defensive war must be won. I expect Israel will get enough leeway to make it decisive, this time around.
Hamas may just have signed its own death warrant. Here’s hoping.
The accompanying photo is a screen grab from a video taken of Israeli Noa Argamani being abducted by Hamas terrorists at the Supernova Trance Music Festival.