The easiest thing to do in the face of the Hamas massacre in Israel and the subsequent Israeli bombardment of the Gaza strip is to take sides.
Back Israel and you have the open or unspoken approval of millions of Jewish people around the world, and the combined authority of the US and most of Western Europe. Back the Palestinians and the UN and the rest of the world is with you.
SA has unequivocally sided with the Palestinians. Five years ago it withdrew its ambassador to Tel Aviv. This week it pulled the rest of its diplomats from the Jewish state and international relations minister Naledi Pandor has called on the International Criminal Court to issue a warrant for the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
More than 1,400 Israelis were killed — slaughtered — by Hamas terrorists on the morning of October 7. So far more than 10,000 people have been killed in Israel's grotesque retaliation, chiefly from missile attacks and aerial bombardment. CNN says more than half of them may be children, and that many of the hundred or more Palestinian children unaccounted for could be buried under the rubble of bombed homes and institutions in Gaza.
The war has split the world. It threatens to undo years of Western diplomacy and to trigger global economic recession. The winners, if they can be called that, are Hamas and its sponsor, Iran. Hamas is dedicated to the destruction of the Israeli state.
In launching its terror attack Hamas has realigned the politics of the Middle East. Arab countries considering establishing formal relations with Israel have pulled back and the US now has two carrier groups in the eastern Mediterranean, within striking range not only of the Palestinians but Iran as well.
And Hamas must surely have known how the Israelis would react to the ferocity of the atrocities it committed in October. Netanyahu, unpopular and facing legal action and political defeat at home, would see an all-out attack on Gaza as a way of repairing his position.
There is little point in rehashing the centuries of murder and persecution of the Jews. It is simply a fact and even the Russians and Chinese, now enemies of the West, supported the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine in 1947. China is now Israel’s third largest trading partner. Almost no country of any consequence does not recognise Israel’s right to defend itself.
Nor is there much point in debating the immense hardships of the Palestinian people. Logic and decency demands that they have the right to a state they can call their own and cannot simply be “accommodated” or absorbed by neighbouring Arab states. The 1947 UN partition plan that gave rise to the establishment of Israel was rejected by the Palestinians and Arab countries in the region.
Big mistake, and the world has had to live with it ever since. But it does not mean it was a bad idea at the start. In its wake, however, the refusal to recognise Israel’s right to exist has caused untold pain in the world and has asked almost impossible forbearance on the part of the civilised world.
To even question the morality of the current destruction of Gaza and its civilian population by Israel in its pursuit of Hamas is to invite instant condemnation from one side. To mourn the deaths of the Israelis killed in the Hamas attacks is inevitably to be labelled an imperialist by the other.
Taking sides also stretches the credibility of neutrality or nonalignment of many nations. Including SA, which now finds itself — again — on the opposite sides of the political fence to its biggest trading partners in the West. This will not be without consequence.
One of the tragedies of renewed conflict in Palestine is that it obscures the terror visited by the Russians on Ukraine for almost two years now. In that conflict, declarations of nonalignment and peace missions aside, SA showed its hand by refusing to condemn Moscow’s invasion in successive UN resolutions.
But what, in essence, is the difference? The UN estimates that roughly 10,000 civilians in Ukraine have died since the invasion began in February 2022. Nearly 2,000 of those are children. But SA has not recalled its ambassador to Russia. If anything, ties between the two countries are more intense than ever.
So what might minister in the presidency Khumbudzo Ntshavheni have meant when she told Newzroom Afrika this week that “the two-state solution should be on the table so that the babies and the children of Palestine and any other civilian can be free to act and exist in their own homeland”?
What about Ukrainian babies and children and women? Are Palestinian lives more important than Ukrainian lives? Surely someone who springs from a movement dedicated to undoing the horrors of racial and ethnic division would value all human life equally?
It is not an unfair question. SA foreign policy has been put to the test since February 2022 and it has been found deeply wanting. Where once we had a place to stand we are now all over the place. Nelson Mandela, feted in the West, was quick and scathing in his judgment of the decision to invade Iraq, and he was right.
Now we pick sides, and while there’s safety in taking sides there’s no honour in it at all.
• Bruce is a former editor of Business Day and the Financial Mail.
