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Selling Apartheid & Genocide? Secret Visit to Israel by DA and Fellow MPs Sparks Controversy. Questions Raised About Who Funded It and Why?

Members of the multi-party South African delegation to Israel meet with Israel’s President Isaac Herzog. (Photo: South African Friends of Israel)

By Iqbal Jassat   

The shocking but not surprising news that a number of South Africa’s MPs undertook a so-called “fact finding” mission to Israel is rightly causing a political storm with demands that they be hauled over the coals by the National Assembly.

Daily Maverick’s Rebecca Davis revealed that at least nine MPs from three SA political parties made their way there and included high profile members of the Democratic Alliance (DA).

Among them was DA spokesperson on justice – yes justice ironically – Glynnis Breytenbach, and DA spokesperson on international relations, Emma Louise Powell.

They were accompanied by fellow DA MPs Katherine Christie, Bridget Masango, Nicholas Myburgh, Liam Jacobs and Bonginkosi Madikizela.

Davis previously reported that Patriotic Alliance (PA) MPs Ashley Sauls and Millicent Mathopa together with African Christian Democratic Party (ACDP) MP Steve Swart, were part of the trip.

Though this scandalous visit has now become public, it appears that the DA had hoped to have kept it under wraps. Davis wrote that none of the DA MPs have posted about it on their public social media platforms.

What is clear and embarrassing too for the DA MPs is that their Zionist hosts aptly named “Friends of Israel” (FOI), let the cat out of the bag following DM’s earlier report which raised questions about the “secrecy” of the visit.

So while Breytenbach and Powell have yet to make known their “findings”, their hosts FOI has preemptively announced that the script is ready.

The MPs will testify that “there was no evidence of apartheid and, to the contrary, Israel is a vibrant progressive multi-racial and multi-ethnic society, in which the rights of all citizens are protected and upheld by the rule of law”.

This statement captures the fact that the so-called “fact finding” had nothing to do with facts but everything to do with white-washing Israeli apartheid.

That Breytenbach and Powell have been boxed in by a pro-Zionist Israel outfit is as scandalous as the trip’s propagandist mission.

Though according to Davis it is unclear what message the MPs were conveying to the “high-level meetings with Israeli President Isaac Herzog and senior Foreign Ministry officials”, I am in no doubt they would have been repeatedly and emphatically told that the regime’s conduct in Gaza and the Occupied West Bank was “necessary to combat Khamas terrorism”.

After all Herzog is on record for not only justifying but also strongly defending the regime’s military operations in Gaza.

In a BBC interview during October 2023, he stuck to Benjamin Netanyahu’s war aims and as a faithful Zionist apologist misleadingly insisted Israel was putting “a huge focus” on reducing civilian casualties.

Between then and now, Herzog’s script has not changed despite overwhelming evidence of a genocide in Gaza: “We are fighting a bitter enemy”.

During January 2024 when the International Court of Justice ruled that there was plausibility to South Africa’s claims on genocide, senior Israeli officials including Herzog were found to have made highly inflammatory comments that unambiguously directly supported harming civilians in Gaza.

At a news conference during October 2023, Herzog referred to Palestinians in Gaza by stating that “an entire nation” was responsible for the October 7 attack, noted the ICJ.

Posing proudly in photos with a war monger heading a pariah regime found to be engaged in the slaughter of thousands of innocent Palestinians, is disgraceful and abominable.

But worse is to be part of a propaganda junket that has no other purpose except to whitewash Israeli state terrorism and to deny the existence of apartheid.

It is also no secret that as for the regime’s belligerent Defence Minister Israel Katz, he is on record confirming that the occupation army is tearing the Gaza Strip apart and implementing a plan to forcibly displace its entire population.

Will Breytenbach, Powell and company deny Katz’s claim that the army is “dismembering the Gaza Strip” or justify it as necessary to seize large chunks of Gaza – reduced to rubble by the regime’s scorched-earth bombing spree – and added to Israel’s ever increasing military zones?

Indeed, an equally important challenge to the MPs is whether they concur with US President Donald Trump’s vision of a “Riviera” which Netanyahu is engaged in serious pursuit though misleadingly projected as “voluntary migration”?

The GOOD Party’s Secretary-General Brett Herron has correctly demanded answers:

“The DA and PA must tell South Africans what their MPs are doing in Israel, who they have met, what they told them about South Africa, who they have claimed to represent, and who paid for the trip?”

No matter how the MPs and their Zionist hosts attempt to spin their indefensible junket, it will be regarded as no less than selling apartheid.

Iqbal Jassat

Executive Member

Media Review Network

Johannesburg

South Africa

 

 

Iqbal Jassat
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