The fraught relationship between South Africa’s Jewish community and the country’s president has reached a new nadir Monday after he failed to acknowledge Hamas’s atrocities against Israelis in a speech about the war in Gaza.
On the day that President Cyril Ramaphosa noted the “severe humanitarian crisis faced by Palestinians in Gaza,” Hamas “paraded four coffins of Israeli civilian hostages in a macabre ceremony that violated basic human rights principles and every standard of basic human decency,” wrote Zev Krengel and Karen Milner, the president and national chairperson of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies, respectively.
“It is reprehensible that on the very day these depraved acts shocked the world, once again exposing the brutality of Hamas, you chose to omit any mention of this in your comments regarding Palestine in your speech at the G20,” Krengel and Milner wrote about Ramaphosa’s Feb. 20 speech.
The coffins contained the bodies of Kfir and Ariel Bibas, two children abducted by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, and murdered in captivity. The terrorist group claimed that the third coffin contained the body of their mother, Shiri, but forensic analysis conducted by Israel determined the remains were not hers. Shiri Bibas’s body was transferred to Israel on Feb. 22. The final coffin contained the body of Eded Lifshitz, a peace activist Hamas abducted along with the Bibas family from Kibbutz Nir Oz.
“Your complete lack of any form of sympathy for this elderly man, these babies, and their mother, and your failure to call out Hamas for this atrocity shows how far your government has deviated from the moral compass we were recognized as having in 1994,” the SAJBD wrote, referring to the year apartheid ended in South Africa.
Ramaphosa has led a strident anti-Israel line. His government initiated a case accusing Israel of genocide at the International Court of Justice. Ramaphosa has accused Israel of genocide. He has failed to condemn several attacks against the Jewish community in South Africa despite requests to do so by the South African Jewish Board of Deputies.
Israel and South Africa recalled their respective ambassadors in November 2023, as South Africa began ratcheting up its rhetoric about Israel over its war against Hamas in Gaza. Israel invaded the Gaza Strip after Hamas terrorists murdered some 1,200 people in Israel and abducted another 251, among other atrocities.
On Tuesday, Foreign Policy published an op-ed co-authored by Ramaphosa that says that U.S. President Donald Trump’s plans for relocating Gazans “strike at the very foundations of international law, which the global community has a duty to defend.”
The text condemns Trump’s decision to sanction the International Criminal Court for its decision last year to issue arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister Yoav Gallant. The op-ed’s authors did not name the United States but spoke of “brazenly challenge the world’s top courts—with sanctions on officials, employees, and agents of the ICC.” South Africa will uphold the warrant if the two Israelis enter its jurisdiction, the authors also wrote.