The International Court of Justice in The Hague (ICJ) will hold its first hearing on South Africa's genocide allegation against Israel on Thursday, as growing voices call for a ceasefire in Gaza. Israeli military operations there left 23,000 Palestinians dead, including almost 10,000 children.
Israel has angrily denied the accusation and reportedly plans to defend itself by showing the court videos of Hamas's massacre of Israeli civilians during the Oct. 7 attack. The United States condemned it as “counterproductive and completely lacking 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 racists
A book (The Unspoken Alliance: Israel's Secret Relationship With Apartheid South Africa) published a dozen years ago by the American scholar of Jewish origin Sasha Polakow-Suransky describes in detail 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, Africans were anti-Semites who supported Nazi Germany in the 1930s and 1940s.
Polakow-Suransky reports in his book that military cooperation between the two countries was formalized in April 1975 in a secret agreement signed by Israeli Defense Minister Shimon Peres and his South African counterpart PW “Pik” Botha. The Pretoria government was then led by BJ Vorster, who was interned during the Second World War because of his pro-Nazi sympathies.
According to Polakow-Suransky, Israel continued to supply arms and military equipment to the racist South African regime until its collapse and the rise to power of Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress in 1994.
The Israeli daily Haaretz, analyzing Israel's relations with racist South Africa, has already written that this is “a good example of the Zionist utopia sliding into tragedy.” The founder of Zionism, Theordor Herzl, speaks in his book Altneuland (The New Old Land) of the Zionists' identification with the blacks of Africa.
In his memoirs, Nelson Mandela reveals that he was inspired by Menachem Begin's book The Revolt, which describes the activities of the Jewish group Irgun in their armed struggle against the British. Begin writes that one of the Zionist enterprise's goals was to help Africans in their fight against colonialism.
Nelson Mandela forgave Israel
The facts are inescapable. Israel was one of the few countries that maintained economic and military ties with the apartheid regime. Nevertheless, the Jerusalem Post emphasized Mandela's greatness of spirit and his lack of bitterness toward the Jewish state. After taking office as South African president, he stated that while peace in the Middle East meant complete withdrawal from the occupied territories, it also required that Arab states recognize Israel within secure and recognized borders.
When Mandela visited Gaza in 1999, he expressed solidarity with the Palestinians and encouraged them to continue the fight. He recalled that “we too have experienced terrible days, sacrifices of comrades and great frustrations in the fight against the white supremacist regime.”