The announcement on Friday that South Africa has given the chargé d’affaires at the Israeli embassy in Pretoria 72 hours to leave the country will set off yet another round of accusation and counter-accusation among all of us here. It will also, inevitably, strain relations with the US even further. But the decision to expelAriel Seidman, the most senior Israeli diplomat still in South Africa, has at least one virtuous quality: it is consistent.
South Africa is implacably opposed to the way Israel has behaved in Gaza, killing tens of thousands of civilians in a vastly disproportional response to the murderous attack on Israel on October 7 2023 by Hamas — the Iran-financed group that controlled Gaza. We have taken Israel to the International Court of Justice, accusing it of genocide, a position now supported by a wide array of nations, including many members of Nato. There’s little doubt that our stance on Israel lies behind the hostility we now face from the US — by some distance our most profitable trading partner.
More than 600 US companies operate in South Africa, supporting about 200,000 direct jobs and probably more than a million people indirectly. Iran murders its citizens … and yet we consort with it in naval exercises or at diplomatic cocktail parties?
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A lot of South Africans, including me, would agree with that sentiment. Ramaphosa conducts diplomacy, nominally on our behalf, often gatkruiping with appalling regimes inside and outside of Brics, almost always in the shadows and mostly to little obvious effect. But the tweet was wildly insulting nonetheless — and you simply can’t do that as a diplomat.
What happens next matters. The powerful Israeli lobby in the US will pile even more pressure on Washington to respond — sanctions on ANC leaders perhaps, or pressure on our partners. We will have to wait and see, and we will need to remain calm and measured.
The expulsion may also serve as a distraction ahead of other difficult decisions Ramaphosa must surely make. He cannot continue to be quiet on Iran, now a Brics member and a favourite of ANC leaders and our military chiefs. Until recently, Iran was cast as a bulwark against Israel, and plucky little Hamas as merely trying to set Palestinians free.
Now the ayatollahs have presided over the murder — in just a few weeks — of tens of thousands of their own protesting citizens on the streets of Iran’s main cities. Our continued close ties with Tehran cannot continue unmolested. Or can they?
In 2024, Zane Dangor, director-general of the department of international relations & co-operation, made an attempt to describe the world South Africa wanted to live in. “We need a reset towards a global political culture that is based on co-operation, peace and justice,” he wrote. “Perhaps with other middle-power countries we can work to transform the global political landscape to be peace-centred and rights-driven.
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