Israel is an apartheid state committing genocide

By Usuf Chikte

While Gaza’s children are buried beneath rubble and hospitals collapse under the weight of relentless bombardment, South African MPs from the Democratic Alliance (DA), Patriotic Alliance (PA), and African Christian Democratic Party (ACDP) embarked on a propaganda tour of Israel, echoing the occupying regime’s denial of both apartheid and genocide. Their so-called “fact-finding mission,” funded and orchestrated by groups closely tied to the South African Zionist Federation, was not an exercise in truth-seeking but a grotesque betrayal of South Africa’s anti-apartheid legacy; a legacy built on the recognition and dismantling of systemic oppression.

The timing of their visit could not have been more damning. While Gaza was enduring one of the deadliest periods since October 2023, these MPs were entertained by their Israeli hosts. Israeli forces slaughtered 700 Palestinians in a single night, including 200 children bombed in their beds during Ramadan preparations. The death toll has now surpassed 50,000, with 600,000 people left without clean water after Israel sabotaged Gaza’s last desalination plant. Meanwhile, 20 neonatal ventilators have sat idle at border crossings, blocked by Israel while babies suffocated. This is the deliberate destruction of a people in a ruthless campaign chillingly described by Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz as the “final warning” to Palestinians. The parallels to the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto are undeniable: walls, starvation, mass graves, and the world’s silence.

The DA, PA and ACDP’s recent whitewashing of Israel’s crimes is not merely willful blindness. It is active complicity in genocide. Their claim of finding “no evidence of apartheid” is as morally bankrupt as those who once denied our own suffering under apartheid. That these MPs, from a nation birthed in the anti-apartheid struggle, could return parroting the talking points of the occupation state, reveals either staggering ignorance of the more than 200 human rights reports documenting Israeli crimes, or a craven political opportunism that trades Palestinian blood for Zionist approval.

The legal and political architecture of Israeli apartheid is not a matter of opinion but of record. In 2018, Israel enacted the Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People, which unambiguously defines Israel as a state that belongs exclusively to the “Jewish people,” even though one in five citizens of Israel is an Indigenous, non-Jewish Palestinian. This law cements a regime of Jewish supremacy, a reality acknowledged even by Hendrik Verwoerd, the architect of South Africa’s apartheid, who remarked in 1961 that “Israel, like South Africa, is an apartheid state.” The parallels are stark: segregated roads, unequal citizenship, and state-sanctioned violence against Palestinians mirror the brutality of South Africa’s past.

B’Tselem, Israel’s leading human rights organisation, confirmed this in 2021, stating that “the entire area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River is organised under a single principle: advancing and cementing the supremacy of one group, Jews, over another, Palestinians.” For South African MPs to deny this, after meeting with Israeli officials who openly celebrate ethnic cleansing, exposes either a profound ignorance or a deliberate complicity.

The shame of this delegation is compounded by their opposition to South Africa’s groundbreaking legal initiative at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which stands as a rare beacon of accountability against Israel’s impunity. Supporters of Zionism wilfully criticise South Africa’s stand claiming falsely that the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has no jurisdiction over Israel. But South Africa’s case at the ICJ,  which is the highest legal body of the UN, was a legally grounded indictment under the Genocide Convention, which explicitly gives the ICJ jurisdiction over Israel. The court’s provisional orders in January 2024 found plausible evidence of genocide, demanding Israel prevent acts under Article II of the Convention, including:

• Killing members of the group (over 50,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children)
• Causing serious bodily or mental harm (hospitals bombed, children amputated without anaesthesia)
• Deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to destroy the group (starvation, blocking aid, destroying water infrastructure)
• Imposing measures to prevent births (targeting maternity wards, blocking incubators)

Yet Israel has brazenly flouted these orders, continuing its slaughter. The latest atrocity – the bombing of the Arab Ahli Hospital on Palm Sunday – is further proof. This was no accident; it was part of a systematic campaign to eliminate Gaza’s healthcare system, a war crime under international law.

Where is the outrage over Israel’s Apartheid Bill criminalising solidarity? Where is the condemnation of Netanyahu, a fugitive from ICC justice? These so-called “leaders” disgrace the memory of Tutu and Mandela, who called Palestine the moral test of our time.

South Africa must move beyond symbolic gestures and take decisive, legally mandated action to confront this genocide. Our government must immediately suspend all diplomatic, economic, and military relations with Israel under the Apartheid Convention. There can be no more trade, no more arms deals, and no more normalcy with a regime committing mass slaughter. As a nation that understands justice, we must pursue arrest warrants against Israeli political and military leaders under universal jurisdiction, just as we did with apartheid-era criminals. Netanyahu and his butchers must know they will face handcuffs, not handshakes, on South African soil. We must also arrest and charge South Africans who have participated in the genocide in Gaza as part of the IDF.

Most crucially, we need mass grassroots mobilisation. Trade unions, students, faith groups, and ordinary citizens must rise with the same intensity that brought down apartheid here. This means sustained boycotts, protests, and direct pressure on corporations and institutions complicit in Israeli war crimes. Israel’s apartheid will fall, just as South Africa’s did, but it will require the same concerted international coercion that dismantled our own oppression. History proves this. Successive condemnations by the UN General Assembly and Security Council, the establishment of UN anti-apartheid mechanisms, and the adoption of binding sanctions cumulatively strangled apartheid South Africa and liberated Namibia. These were not symbolic gestures; they were weapons of justice.

Today, the same tools exist to crush Israeli apartheid. The Apartheid Convention and laws of state responsibility require all nations to cease recognition of Israel’s apartheid regime, end all complicity –  whether through arms trade, economic ties, or diplomatic cover – and cooperate to dismantle the system through sanctions and ICC prosecutions. Universal jurisdiction allows third states to arrest Israeli war criminals, a tool used against Nazi and apartheid-era killers. While these laws were enforced relentlessly against Pretoria, Western powers have granted Israel criminal impunity. The ICJ rulings gather dust. The ICC’s warrants go unexecuted. The UN’s resolutions are vetoed. This selective justice is why Gaza burns.

South Africa must lead where others falter. We need to trigger the Apartheid Convention’s enforcement mechanisms at the UN, cut all ties with Israel in compliance with ICJ orders, and mobilise the Global South to impose the same isolation that broke apartheid. The DA, PA, and ACDP’s delegation did not just fail Gaza. They betrayed every South African who remembers how sanctions saved us. We know better than anyone – apartheid only falls when the world turns its back on the oppressor.

The cowardice of the representatives of these political parties cannot be the final word. History is watching: either we stand with the oppressed, or we stand with the butchers. History will record the DA, PA, and ACDP not as fact-finders, but as the fools and collaborators who saw genocide and called it peace. There is no neutral ground.

Usuf Chikte is an Emeritus Professor in Health Systems and Public Health, at the Department of Global Health, Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, University of Stellenbosch. He is the coordinator of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC), Cape Town, an affiliate of the SABDS Coalition, advocating for Palestinian rights and self-determination, equality, and justice.