Veteran South African politicians and commentators have noted the irony that South Africa was not invited by Egypt to the 2025 Gaza Ceasefire Summit in Sharm el-Sheikh, despite being among the loudest voices calling for the conference.
Tony Leon, the former leader of the Democratic Alliance who served as leader of the opposition from 1999 to 2007, observed that the country that boasts of being a “moral superpower” capable of teaching conflict resolution through “the legacy of Nelson Mandela” found itself shut out of the peace process it had so vigorously claimed to champion.
Leon said that South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, “channeling his expelled ambassador to the U.S. [Ebrahim Rasool], recently advised the U.N. General Assembly that ‘inspired by its own history’, South Africa ‘strives to maintain world peace and the settlement of all international disputes through negotiation and dialogue, not war.’”
The South African government had “expended vast amounts of its ‘moral superpower’ to hold Israel to account for its Gaza incursion and never let a single Israeli human rights violation, real or disputed, pass without comment and condemnation,” he said.
The ruling African National Congress (ANC), its accomplices and handlers clearly knew that no genocide was underway. Still, by pursuing on behalf of Muslim Brotherhood-offshoot Hamas a ceasefire with a tiny country defending itself against jihadists explicitly intent on repeating their murderous achievements of Oct. 7, 2023, Pretoria’s legal counsel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), cannily if unsuccessfully, sought through lawfare to tie the Jewish state’s hands militarily.
At the same time, the ANC and its allies worked with great effect diplomatically and economically to foment hatred against Israel and Jews and their friends and supporters on the streets globally (what they call “international solidarity against apartheid”).
Even as much of the world celebrated progress toward peace, South Africa’s government and media proxies, such as journalist Redi Tlhabi and Judge Navi Pillay, continued promoting “the genocide libel.” Pillay dismissed charges of bias, claiming absurdly that “rarely does a suspect come forward and concede yes, I committed genocide,” revealing, as Leon put it, “malice and ignorance presented as legal expertise.”
South African commentators Ray Hartley and Greg Mills noted that while world leaders, including the Egyptian and Turkish presidents, the Palestinian Authority leader and even Qatar’s emir, signed the Gaza peace deal, South Africa was not only conspicuously absent but silent. Its “script to isolate Israel” had been shredded not by its usual adversaries, but by those who are far from friends of Israel, they said.
“This moral blindness might explain our exclusion,” Leon said. “Perhaps also the perception, as Police Minister Firoz Cachalia warned, that South Africa is sliding toward lawlessness—‘the next Colombia or Ecuador’—not exactly the image of a moral beacon.”
Hartley and Mills said the problem “starts at the top,” arguing that Ramaphosa appeared to be “more radical than Hamas.” As anti-Israel mobs chanted hatred at O. R. Tambo International Airport, South Africa was “out of tune with peace and out of touch with global events.”
A recurring figure in this story is Mandla Mandela, Nelson Mandela’s grandson, who has tied his grandfather’s name to Islamist causes. A convert to Islam and executive member of Al-Quds Parliamentarians for Palestine (a Turkish Muslim Brotherhood group), he maintains ties with both Hamas and Hezbollah figures.
In South Africa, Mandela is a patron of the Al Tawheed Foundation, led by Sheikh Abdel Salam Bassiouni, a Muslim Brotherhood affiliate who once faced detention in Egypt. The foundation’s use of the R4BIA “yellow hand” symbol—a Brotherhood emblem—makes its ideological roots clear.
After losing his parliamentary seat in 2024, Mandela continued acting as a social influencer for Islamist causes, aligned with figures like Naledi Pandor and Imtiaz Sooliman, founder of Gift of the Givers. Before the war ended in October, he participated in the Global Sumud Flotilla, as a result of which he was arrested and deported by Israel.
Other key figures leading the anti-Israel campaign in South Africa are Naledi Pandor, a politician and academic who served as the minister of International Relations and Cooperation from 2019 until 2024, and Imtiaz Sooliman, a medical doctor who founded Gift of the Givers, the largest disaster response NGO in Africa.
Together, Pandor and Sooliman co-founded The Coalition for Good, modeled directly on Yusuf al-Qaradawi’s Union of the Good, a network sanctioned for fundraising for Hamas. With quiet coordination from government channels, this coalition has driven South Africa’s international anti-Israel movement.
Pandor has courted Muslim Brotherhood-linked organizations in the United Kingdom and United States, including Friends of Al Aqsa, the International Center of Justice for Palestinians and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR)—whose head, Nihad Awad, a longtime Hamas supporter, publicly honored her for “suing Israel when others failed to act.”
Mandela’s Global March to Gaza in June 2025, backed by Gift of the Givers, sought to breach the Egyptian side of the Rafah border. His rhetoric—accusing Egypt of “starving 1.2 million Palestinians to death”—was met with firm resistance.
Egyptian General Samir Farag warned, “There are those who want to harm Egyptian national security and Egypt will not allow that.” Mandela and his South African delegation were detained and later escorted back to Cairo.
When Mandela’s march failed, his tone switched from “humanitarian” to threatening: “We should now shift our focus onto exerting pressure on those countries [like Egypt].” His comments mirrored the Muslim Brotherhood’s legal tactics once used to target Egypt’s own government.
In 2014, Egypt’s Freedom and Justice Party (the Brotherhood’s political arm) appointed jurists Tayab Ali and John Dugard, who later represented South Africa at the ICJ, to file war crimes charges against the Egyptian government at the ICC.
South Africa’s ICJ case against Israel was a continuation of that strategy, demonstrating that Muslim Brotherhood-aligned interests had captured the ANC’s foreign policy.
The refusal to drop the ICJ case—even after the Gaza peace deal and the severe diplomatic cost to South Africa—suggests deeper ideological alignment. Success against Israel at the ICJ could later serve to re-legitimize Muslim Brotherhood cases against Egypt’s Sisi government.
Inside South Africa’s Government of National Unity (GNU), Corné Mulder of the Freedom Front Plus led calls to “normalize relations with Israel” and end “the great and expensive failure of the ICJ genocide case.”
But Ramaphosa rejected this, insisting, “The peace deal will have no bearing on the case before the ICJ. The case is proceeding.”
This obstinacy, analysts argue, underscores how detached South Africa’s foreign policy has become from national interest, aligning instead with Islamist lawfare networks operating under a humanitarian guise.
South Africa’s exclusion from the Sharm el-Sheikh summit was not simply diplomatic snubbing; it was a matter of Egyptian national security. The ANC’s foreign policy establishment, seemingly infiltrated by Muslim Brotherhood-aligned actors and their Western partners, has turned the country into a proxy voice for Hamas rather than a neutral peace broker.
South Africa was arguably excluded from Sharm el-Sheikh due to security concerns. South Africa’s foreign ministry, now named the Department of International Relations & Cooperation (DIRCO) has arguably been captured by Muslim Brotherhood-aligned elements hostile to international security agencies and counter-terrorism efforts.
The irony is stark: a nation once revered for reconciliation and moral authority now finds itself isolated, distrusted and absent from the very peace tables it claims to lead.
