In bloodstained Gaza the guns have largely gone silent since US President Donald Trump presided theatrically on Monday over the start of a ceasefire and the return by Hamas of the last living Israeli hostages it has held since starting its war with Israel on October 7 2023.
But anything could happen now. The peace will not hold without competent and organised administration and policing. Hamas, unless disarmed, is a threat, as is an Israel quick to respond extravagantly to any attack or threat of one.
Trump flew to Israel, Egypt and then home within 24 hours on Monday, leaving behind no clear design for how peace will be maintained, nor how Palestinians living in the rubble of Gaza might resume their lives.
Still, it is a hugely significant moment and whatever Trump does or doesn’t do next he must get the credit at least for the ceasefire and the return of the hostages. Former president Joe Biden had a similar plan but couldn’t get it past the Israelis.
SA became more than a bit player in the conflict. It risked Western censure — or at least incredulity — when it initially launched its genocide action against Israel in the International Court of Justice (ICJ), but in the ensuing two years it has been largely exonerated by the sheer scale of Israeli violence in Gaza, even if there is disagreement whether the deaths of 67,000 people in Gaza amount to genocide.
The world has changed since 2023 and the “peace”, however brief, in Gaza represents a new opportunity for Pretoria. For there can be little doubt the hostility towards this country by Trump since January is tightly wound up with Israel and its war on Gaza. In many respects the issues of black empowerment or farm murders cited by the White House as reasons for its hostility are secondary.
At the centre is Israel. The ANC has long held that Palestinians are a racially oppressed people; Pretoria withdrew its ambassador to Tel Aviv in 2018 and shut down the embassy in November 2023. But it never cut diplomatic relations. A year later Trump won the US election and has had SA in his sights ever since.
It is no surprise that three of the most active intellectual US institutes seeding American policies on SA — the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the Hudson Institute and the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies — are all financed by Israel or its supporters.
What’s new now is an opportunity, in the Trumpian flush of success in the region, to directly palliate his view of this country. Particularly as President Cyril Ramaphosa’s people try to wrestle Trump down from his punitive 30% tariffs on imports from SA, including automobiles.
We should immediately announce that we intend to reopen our embassy in Tel Aviv as a direct result of the agreements Trump engineered on Monday. What’s more, we should leverage our ties with Hamas — arguably the first time they’ve proved useful — to try to ensure they do not disrupt whatever peace process has to follow.
There is no downside to this. We do not have to withdraw our case at the ICJ, and we would be far more effective if we had experienced diplomats in place in Israel. Trump is sending his vice-president, JD Vance, to the G20 Summit in Johannesburg next month, and he is a key figure in driving the course of our future relations with Washington.
The UK and France have both just risked upsetting the US by recognising Palestine as a state, bringing to 14 the number of G20 nations that do, and both maintain strong embassies in Tel Aviv. We should join the club.
• Bruce is a former editor of Business Day and the Financial Mail.
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