South Africans often treat the “Green Mamba” as a kind of mobility scorecard. Passport-ranking tables are watched like market indices, and every new visa-free destination is celebrated. The number of countries a South African passport holder can walk into without applying for a visa beforehand has become a proxy for how much the world “trusts” them.
Far less attention is given to the other side of that equation: how South Africa’s own visitor-visa exemptions work, who they favour, and how quickly they can be reconfigured when security, foreign policy and domestic politics collide — as the weekend withdrawal of the 90-day exemption for ordinary Palestinian passport holders has just shown. The weekend announcement is a stark reminder that what many travellers experience as an almost automatic stamp at OR Tambo rests on a political decision that can quickly be revisited.
The structure of SA’s visa policy
The legal starting point is that foreign nationals may only be admitted if they hold a visa or qualify for a short-stay exemption that can be processed at a port of entry. Against that default, the minister of home affairs, in consultation with foreign affairs, maintains a shifting whitelist of exempt nationalities for short stays, typically 30 or 90 days, sometimes limited to particular passport categories.
Those exemptions are never purely technical. They are negotiated and adjusted against a matrix of considerations. Reciprocity and diplomacy matter: states are far more likely to exempt nationals of countries that extend similar treatment to their own citizens, or where there is a clear political or solidarity interest. The 2023 decision to extend a 90-day exemption to holders of ordinary Palestinian passports, including at ports of entry, fell into that category. Tourism, business travel and investment all favour lighter-touch entry requirements; short-stay visa waivers are routinely used as a signal that a country is open for business.
Charter flight as stress test
The most recent stress test for this system arrived on November 13 2025, when a chartered flight carrying 153 Palestinian travellers landed at OR Tambo from Nairobi. In a detailed factual update issued the following day, home affairs and the Border Management Authority explained that officials had noticed missing departure stamps in some passports, the absence of return tickets and the lack of confirmed accommodation details for a number of passengers.
The same statement went out of its way to confirm that “as with many other countries”, holders of ordinary Palestinian passports enjoyed 90-day visa-exempt access to South Africa, albeit subject to security and verification procedures, “including to protect travellers”. After further checks, and once arrangements for accommodation and support were confirmed in communication with the Palestinian embassy and local partners, most of the group were admitted on the standard exemption, with a smaller number routed onwards to other destinations.
At that stage the episode looked like a messy but ultimately resolved collision between humanitarian instincts and border-management caution. The exemption had held. Less than a month later, the focus has shifted decisively to the policy itself.
Revoking the exemption: process and impact
On December 7 the department confirmed that it had withdrawn South Africa’s 90-day visa exemption for ordinary Palestinian passport holders. The department did so after investigations by national intelligence structures and consultations within the Security Cluster concluded that the exemption was being subjected to “deliberate and ongoing abuse” by external actors arranging charter flights for residents of Gaza under so-called “voluntary emigration” schemes.
In the department’s account, the short-stay regime was being used not for the purposes of tourism or genuine short visits, but to relocate Palestinians from Gaza to South Africa on a one-way basis. Home affairs minister Leon Schreiber has presented the revocation as the most effective way to prevent further flights of this nature.
For South Africa’s policy architecture, it is a rare and very public example of an exemption being pulled for a specific nationality, with the state explicitly linking that decision to security assessments and international-relations considerations.
Unequal passports, unequal access
The Palestinian case highlights a broader truth that is rarely acknowledged in public debate: the apparent “automaticity” of visitor entry is deeply uneven and profoundly political. A holder of a highly ranked passport, whether American, German or Canadian, may breeze through OR Tambo with minimal friction. Many of those travellers are unaware that the endorsement they receive on arrival is itself a visa, or of its conditions — including that it allows multiple entries and that each re-entry does not automatically trigger a fresh 90-day stay.
A traveller from a lower-ranked passport state, on the other hand, may invest months in compiling a visitor-visa application only to be refused. The gap is not explained purely by neutral risk calculations. It reflects the accumulated weight of history, economic leverage and foreign-policy priorities. It is not accidental that all South Africa’s original Brics partners — Brazil, Russia, India and China — now appear on its visa-exemption schedule, though on different terms. Bloc politics and economic ties clearly influence who is waved through the visitors’ queue, and for how long.
Globally, African and other Global South nationals are consistently excluded from the most generous visa waiver programmes; South Africa’s own exemption list sits within that wider cartography of unequal mobility.
Within that system, the Palestinian exemption was always more fragile than, for example, long-standing arrangements for EU or Southern African Development Community states. It rested on a recent political decision taken in a highly volatile regional context.
Once it became entangled with allegations of “relocation” out of a conflict-ridden zone, and with the risk that South Africa might be perceived, by different audiences, either as complicit in displacement or as having lost control of its own borders, pressure to reassert state discretion became inevitable.
Short-stay visas, long-term signals
Visa exemptions should be understood and communicated as privileges with conditions attached. Even at the most practical level they are always “subject to security and verification procedures”. Overstay patterns, document irregularities, asylum surges and overt politicisation can all trigger recalibrations; that is not unique to South Africa.
Visa policy is never only about migration management. It is a signalling instrument. Granting Palestinian passport holders visa-free access was widely read as a gesture of solidarity. Withdrawing that access in December 2025, explicitly in response to “relocation” concerns related to Gaza, is equally a message with implications beyond the immediate case.
The hard part of any border policy is distinguishing signal from noise. Humanitarian emergencies generate the most noise; Schreiber’s decision is presented as an attempt to look past a single dramatic episode and interrogate the longer-term trajectory of the Palestinian exemption, its use and possible abuse.
For many frequent travellers the queue at passport control is the most tangible point at which they experience global inequality. The ability to step off a plane and receive a 90-day stamp is not a neutral technicality of border control. It is a political privilege that is contingent on behaviour, the conduct of intermediaries and how a particular passport is read in Pretoria’s security and foreign-policy calculus. That privilege is not afforded equally, and it can be withdrawn.
The harder task for the government is to prevent South African territory being instrumentalised in ways that contradict its stated position on Gaza and international law, while resisting the temptation to reproduce, in its own visa regime, the hierarchies of mobility and dignity that it criticises elsewhere.
• Pizzocri is CEO at Eisenberg & Associates.
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