Could President Donald Trump’s recent decision to halt U.S. aid to South Africa be retribution for its genocide case against Israel in the International Court of Justice?
Trump signed an executive order on Feb. 7 to cut financial assistance to South Africa, citing disapproval of its new land expropriation law and the genocide case in The Hague. The order stated that South Africa had taken “aggressive” positions against the U.S. by accusing Israel, rather than Hamas, of genocide, and by “reinvigorating its relationship with Iran.”
A White House statement said, “As long as South Africa continues to support bad actors on the world stage and allows violent attacks on innocent disfavored minority farmers, the United States will stop aid and assistance to the country.”
According to an Israeli official who asked not to be named, South Africa’s leading role in seeking to prosecute Israel for genocide against the people of Gaza at the ICJ may not have been the prime motive behind Trump’s decision, but it certainly played a role. He noted that the United States, under both Democratic and Republican administrations, strongly backed Israel in dismissing South Africa’s claims that the Jewish state’s war against Hamas in Gaza after its brutal massacre on Oct. 7, 2023, constituted genocide.
Trump posted on Truth Social a week before signing the executive order: “South Africa is confiscating land, and treating certain classes of people VERY BADLY. It is a bad situation that the Radical Left Media doesn’t want to so much as mention. A massive human rights VIOLATION, at a minimum, is happening for all to see. The United States won’t stand for it, we will act. Also, I will be cutting off all future funding to South Africa until a full investigation of this situation has been completed!”
The order added that the U.S. would promote the resettlement of Afrikaner refugees escaping government-sponsored, race-based discrimination.
Trump’s action related to legislation recently introduced by President Cyril Ramaphosa’s African National Congress-led unity government allowing the state to seize private land in the public interest, in some cases with no compensation. Purportedly aimed at righting racial disparities in land ownership three decades after apartheid’s collapse, the law allows the South African government to expropriate white-owned land and redistribute it to blacks, who comprise the majority of South Africa’s population, which exceeds 60 million.
Former envoy downplays Israel’s role
A former Israeli ambassador to South Africa, Arthur Lenk, downplayed Israel’s role in Trump’s move. “One possibility is that South Africa has clearly chosen a side—the side of Russia, China and Iran—against America and its friends, including Israel,” Lenk told JNS. “Another possibility is that our story could theoretically be an issue, but I want to play it down, because we always like to think that we’re the center of stories and that everything happens because of us. But I think it’s not true in this case. If that was the reason, maybe Trump would have even said it. He would have assuaged the Jews and Israelis who want revenge against South Africa, as it were, so I’m a little bit dubious about that angle.”
Lenk explained his reading of the broader situation: “South Africa has made a whole range of policy choices to show that it’s not a friend of the United States, and it shouldn’t surprise anybody that an American president pushes back and says, ‘You know what, we’re not talking about trade, we’re talking about foreign aid.’ And South Africa, under both left and right governments in the United States, Democratic and Republican, has chosen a different path. I think there’s a cumulation here that’s worth discussing. That’s my take.”
Under the Biden administration, Washington pledged almost $440 million in assistance to South Africa in 2023, which included funding programs to combat HIV/AIDS, according to U.S. government data. A 2023 report from the Congressional Research Service determined that the U.S. provided more than $8 billion in aid to South Africa over the past two decades. The U.S. is South Africa’s second-largest trading partner after China, with a total trade of $23.7 billion in 2023.
“While I have much respect for what the United States since the Bush administration did fighting AIDS and treating HIV+ people in South Africa and around the world, aid is not something South Africa is entitled to, is it?” Lenk said. “Is Israel entitled to aid? No. What you need to do is be a good friend, a good ally, and say thank you nicely.”
Lenk concluded: “The main thing I want to play down is the Jewish or Israeli angle. We’re going to be blamed anyway. But I don’t think that it’s us. I think that Trump has a million other things on his mind, and when he wants to signal to the Jewish world, he does. When he met with the prime minister in his first meeting with a foreign leader, it’s hard for me to imagine that they talked about South Africa.”
Trump confidant South African-born Elon Musk, who is now a key figure in the Trump administration, heading the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), accused Ramaphosa’s government of anti-white racism. “Why do you have openly racist ownership laws?” Musk asked Ramaphosa bluntly on X (which he owns) in response to a statement by the South African president denying that any land had been confiscated.
“The recently adopted Expropriation Act is not a confiscation instrument, but a constitutionally mandated legal process that ensures public access to land in an equitable and just manner as guided by the constitution,” Ramaphosa posted on X. “South Africa, like the United States of America and other countries, has always had expropriation laws that balance the need for public usage of land the protection of rights of property owners.”
Former South African opposition leader Tony Leon, who is Jewish, said the South African government had offered widely divergent responses to Trump’s threat to cut aid. However, he wrote on his website, “While Ramaphosa was vehement in credentialing his constitutionalism, he was conspicuously silent on the racial bias and prescriptions of a welter of government policies on which Trump touched. There was no answer on this since it is unanswerable. Though of course the back story here is as well-known as it is both depressing and entirely self-defeating. Musk wants to bring his Starlink broadband by satellite service to the country. It operates in Botswana, Mozambique and even Zimbabwe.”
Three days before the Trump-Netanyahu meeting at the White House, Leon pointed out, South Africa had joined “a ragtag alliance of countries, all with zero influence on the Middle East,” such as Honduras, Bolivia, Belize and Cuba, to inaugurate The Hague Group to press further for the end of “Israeli occupation” and an arms embargo on Israel. “So, just in case the new U.S. administration had forgotten quite where S.A. located itself in the world, here was a reminder,” Leon added. “Joel Pollak, who once served as my speech writer and today is tipped as possible U.S. ambassador to S.A., described the group as formed to ‘oppose Israel, [and] support terror.’”
For his part, Pollak, who currently serves as senior editor-at-large for Breitbart News, told a webinar of the SA Jewish Report that the Trump administration strongly opposed “South Africa’s close association with rogue states and terrorists, frankly.”
The conservative columnist added, “When you show up at the International Court of Justice to try to disarm Israel against defending itself against a genocidal terrorist organization, you are in effect siding with radical Islamic terrorists. It’s an immoral stance … and also a very sharp signal that South Africa is not playing along with the West, and that it is strengthening the process through which the tyrants of the Middle East and other places abuse international institutions to attack not just Israel, but also the United States. … And unfortunately, South Africa is committed to domestic policies that make it less capable, and therefore make it a problem and not part of the solution to international problems.”