Israel and South Africa are Quarrelling About the Gaza War

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, N.B.] Telegraph-Journal

South Africa’s Chief Rabbi, Dr. Warren Goldstein, addressed the Congressional Summit of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in Washington March 10, speaking about politics in Africa and the Middle East.

He observed that the ideology of Al-Shabaab in Somalia, Boko Haram in Nigeria, and Islamic State (ISIS) throughout much of Africa is the same ideology espoused, funded, and propagated by Iran and its proxies, Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis.

“Israel’s war with Hamas – and by extension Iran – is against the same enemy,” he asserted, suggesting that the way to fight a “diplomatic war” is to build alliances with states in Africa.

But relations between Israel and his own country have worsened. After the war in Gaza broke out last October, South Africa became one of the most outspoken countries against Israel in the world and one of its most vituperative critics, calling Israel an “apartheid state” and accusing it of “ethnic cleansing.

In December, Pretoria went further, charging Israel with genocide at the International Court of Justice. “Our opposition to the ongoing slaughter of the people of Gaza has driven us as a country to approach the ICJ,” South African President Cyril Ramaphosa said ahead of the proceedings.

“As a people who once tasted the bitter fruits of dispossession, discrimination, racism and state-sponsored violence, we are clear that we will stand on the right side of history.”

Israel’s Foreign Ministry responded by calling the claims “false and baseless” and a “sweeping counter-factual description” of the conflict with Hamas. It denounced South Africa for “collaborating with a terror group that calls for the destruction of the state of Israel” and accused it of participating in a “blood libel” against the Jewish state.

In January the court ordered Israel to take all measures within its power “to prevent and punish the direct and public incitement to commit genocide” and to immediately ensure that Palestinians have access to basic services and humanitarian assistance. While South Africa had called for the suspension of Israeli military operations in Gaza, the court did not grant this provisional measure.  

The world’s reaction to the landmark case showed a predictable global split. Most countries backing South Africa’s case were from the Arab world, Asia, and Africa. No Western country supported South Africa’s allegations against Israel.

Foreign Minister Naledi Pandor, visiting Washington for talks with American officials, on March 19 maintained that the International Criminal Court should have already issued an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “for war crimes committed against Palestinians in Gaza.”

South Africa also recalled its ambassador to Israel and suspended diplomatic relations. The Israeli airline El Al is planning to cancel its Tel Aviv to Johannesburg route, given a steep drop in demand.

It is the nadir of a relationship that had survived some challenges, largely thanks to the leadership of Nelson Mandela, who in 1994 became South Africa’s first president after apartheid.

Mandela supported Israeli territorial concessions and was close to the Palestinian cause, but he was also supportive of Israel, which he’d visited and where he’d received an honorary doctorate. His viewpoint was that Israel had the right to exist.

Today South Africa strongly backs the Palestinian cause, with formal diplomatic relations established in 1995, a year after the end of apartheid. It downgraded its embassy in Tel Aviv to a liaison office in 2019.

The issue of whether Israel should be granted observer status in the African Union (AU) has been subject to heated debate. In February, Israel thwarted an effort by South Africa and Algeria to deprive it of observer status in the AU. The two countries had also planned to urge the 55 member states to cut off relations with Israel. Nevertheless, leaders at the AU summit in Addis Ababa condemned Israel’s offensive in Gaza.

Both the pro-Israel and pro-Palestine movements in South Africa are large. The groups are openly hostile towards each other, especially since last Oct. 7.

Pro-Palestine marches bring together up to 200,000 people. In early December a senior Hamas delegation arrived in South Africa to participate in the Fifth Global Convention of Solidarity with Palestine. Speakers from the Hezbollah and Houthi organizations addressed students at the University of Cape Town on March 27.

The South African Jewish community numbers some 75,000, making it the twelfth largest Jewish community in the world. “Israel has many allies and friends here in South Africa who are ashamed of their government’s support for terrorist regimes and despots,” declared Goldstein.

Gabriella Farber-Cohen, former spokesperson for the African National Congress (ANC) Women’s League in Gauteng, resigned from the party in mid-October. She called South Africa accusing Israel of genocide a “slap in the face for all Jews in South Africa.”

Following threats by South Africa’s government in December to prosecute citizens who served in Israel’s army, including stripping naturalized South Africans of their citizenship, leaders of the South African Jewish community Feb. 20 organized a ceremony in Israel for members who were killed or wounded defending the Jewish state.

Already part of the white minority, South Africa’s Jews are become yet more marginalized. If the ANC is re-elected in the national election May 29, many believe that there will be a Jewish exodus from the country.

 

A Free Election in Senegal is No Small Matter

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, N.B.] Telegraph-Journal

On March 24, opposition candidate Bassirou Diomaye Faye won Senegal’s presidential election against former prime minister Amadou Ba. This was no small matter, as the contest followed several years of unrest and political crisis.

Incumbent President Macky Sall did not seek re-election, with his ruling United in Hope (BBY) coalition instead endorsing Ba. Sall had unsuccessfully sought to postpone the election, initially scheduled for Feb. 25, to Dec. 15. In fact, prior to that, he had even suggested that he might run for a third term, beyond the constitutional limit of two terms.

But even the proposed delay to Dec. 15 had angered Senegalese. Authorities in January suspended internet services and banned a protest march against the delay of the presidential election. Opposition parties and civil society groups demanded that the Constitutional Council, the country’s highest court, intervene.

It ruled on Feb. 15 that parliament’s unprecedented postponement of the presidential vote to mid-December was not in line with the constitution. So the March voting finally took place.

Of course we might put an asterisk next to the word “free” in describing the current contest. Ousmane Sonko, who finished third in the country’s 2019 presidential election, had been widely seen as the main challenger to Sall’s ruling party. But he was sentenced to two years in prison last June 1 after a court found him guilty of “corrupting youth,” and was declared ineligible.

His imprisonment triggered deadly clashes, with supporters taking to the streets and facing off with security officers. Amnesty International accused Senegalese authorities of responsibility for the deaths of at least 23 people, including three children, during violent demonstrations on June 1-2, But Sonko was kept in jail until just three days before the vote.

Sonko’s political ally Bassirou Diomaye Faye, who had also been jailed, on charges including defamation, but had not been sentenced, was therefore selected as the opposition’s candidate.

Both men were released after Senegal’s parliament on March 6 passed a law granting amnesty to all political prisoners arrested during protests since 2021. Amnesty International estimates that more than 1,000 opposition members and activists were imprisoned in the past three years under Sall’s rule.

Faye was previously secretary-general of Sonko’s Patriots of Senegal (PASTEF) party, which was dissolved by the government last year over allegations it had called for an insurrection. Former party members joined with others in a coalition, Liberate the People (YAW), to contest the election under Faye.

Their slogan “Sonko is Diomaye, Diomaye is Sonko” resonated with the electorate. Faye also benefitted from the support of the Mourides, the most influential Muslim brotherhood in Senegal, whose population is predominantly Muslim.

Things have not been going well in the West African country, so the election results were no surprise. About one third of the population of 18 million live in poverty. Successive administrations have struggled to curb youth unemployment, an increasingly urgent issue for its fast-growing population, more than 60 per cent of whom are now under the age of 25. The median age is 19.

The share of young Senegalese who are not employed or in school or training stood at 35 per cent in 2019. Since then the economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic has further squeezed the job market. It has also caused a cost-of-living crisis. These people voice frustration over a lack of jobs, and they formed the backbone of support for Sonko and Faye.

Senegal’s problems have not come out of nowhere. Observers often present the country as one of Africa’s most stable democracies. But this claim masks a much darker history. Sall has violently degraded the country’s democratic institutions. He shut down the country’s prestigious University of Dakar, closed since June 2023, cracked down on journalists, and gave a green light to violent attacks against protesters.

Sanko and Faye presented a vision for institutional reforms and more even wealth distribution, including plans to renegotiate the country’s mining and energy contracts with foreign entities, especially oil and gas contracts for projects which are due to start production later this year.

They also want Senegal to stop using the CFA franc, the West African single currency that is pegged to the euro, which is regarded as a relic of the colonial era. In other words, they want monetary sovereignty and an end to French political intervention.

The proposals have been labelled as irresponsible by their opponents, although Sonko has sought to quell such fears by saying they would only consider introducing a national currency if other reforms fail.

In their recently published book De la démocratie en Françafrique: Une histoire de l’impérialisme électoral (Democracy in Françafrique: A History of Electoral Imperialism), French journalist Fanny Pigeaud and Senegalese economist Ndongo Samba Sylla illustrate how the currency rules have worked to benefit French business and governments and African elites.

Senegal’s political class has long defended a system that largely serves French economic and political interests as well as those of a small cadre of local elites. Even when elections are held, winners rarely help the people who voted them into power. Sall was also a reformer when first elected.

What Faye and Sonko have voiced as their goal is, first and foremost, sovereignty. And Senegalese clearly want a democracy. Will the country’s ruling class let them have one?

 

Why is Haiti in Perpetual Crisis?

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, N.B.] Telegraph-Journal

he Caribbean nation of Haiti, the western third of the island of Hispaniola, has been an independent state for 220 years. Indeed, it is the second oldest nation in the western hemisphere after the United States.

Yet it remains in perpetual turmoil. The underlying assumption is that Haitians cannot manage their own affairs. The government is corrupt or ineffective or both. One writer has called it, uncharitably, a “permanent slave revolt.” But is that the whole story?

History says otherwise. Even after two centuries, Haiti has rarely, if ever, been allowed to manage its own affairs. In Haiti, foreign intervention and humanitarian disaster have become so intertwined that it is hard to tell one from the other. They are locked in a vicious cycle.

Haiti had been a French colonial possession with perhaps the most brutal plantation system built on the enslavement of Africans. It wrested its independence from France in a revolution during the Napoleonic wars in Europe.

But few countries got off to as inauspicious a start as Haiti. It remained surrounded by British, French, Dutch and Spanish colonies where slavery remained legal and so it was shunned by European powers. France demanded the then enormous sum of 150 million francs in return for “losing” its colony diplomatic recognition. It was not fully paid until 1947.

The United States, the only other independent republic in the Americas, was wary of a free Black country whose example might encourage rebellions by its own enslaved people. It refused to recognize Haiti until 1862.

Even then, Washington treated Haitian sovereignty very cavalierly. It sent the U.S. Marines to govern the country from 1915 until 1934. In the 1950s the U.S. acquiesced in the establishment of a brutal dictatorship under the reign of Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier, who was succeeded by his son, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier. The latter was overthrown by a popular uprising in 1986.

A succession of ineffectual leaders, often deposed by violence, followed over the next four decades. Fourteen presidents have ruled the country, some for only days, since then. Haiti has been in even greater turmoil since the assassination of the most recent president, Jovenel Moise, in 2021.

There have been no elections since 2019. Following repeated delays to hold legislative elections, the terms of all elected official have run out, leaving the country’s institutions rudderless. Since Moise's murder, the country has been governed by Prime Minister Ariel Henry.

A wave of violence broke out in late February while Henry was visiting Kenya to push for a UN-backed deployment of a police force led by Nairobi, to fight criminal gangs.

Since then, gangs have taken control of about 80 per cent of the capital, Port-au-Prince, and have extended their reach into the countryside. Haitian police have been outgunned and outnumbered by the gangs.

From where did these gangs emerge? During the 29 years of the dictatorship of the Duvaliers, a paramilitary force called the Tonton Macoutes used extreme violence to stamp out any opposition to the Duvalier regime. Though those are long gone, since then gangs have continued to exert varying degrees of power, sometimes shielded and encouraged by the politicians with whom they forged alliances.

In 2018 the Moise government turned to the gangs to quell a popular uprising demanding political change and an end to corruption. The power vacuum created by his murder three years later allowed these gangs to become more influential.

They have attacked key infrastructure, including two prisons where the majority of the 3,800 inmates escaped. The airport in Port-au-Prince remains closed, and the main seaport, which serves as the primary gateway for food imports, suspended operations on March 7 after it reported looting. Gangs attacked two upscale neighbourhoods in the capital March 18 in a rampage that left at least a dozen people dead.

More than 360,000 Haitians have been internally displaced because of the violence, the UN’s International Organization for Migration has reported. They are living on the streets, in tent cities or in overcrowded schools. Almost half of Haiti’s people are struggling to feed themselves, with several areas close to famine,

The idea of a nation of some 11 million people being run by gangs is of huge concern, particularly the potential impact on outward migration during an election year in the United States.

On March 11, a meeting of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) finally convinced Henry to leave office. He has been replaced by a transitional presidential council which will pave the way for new elections.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken had earlier called for the creation of a “broad-based, inclusive, independent presidential college.” It will also enable the pending deployment of the multinational Kenyan-led security force.

He also announced that Washington plans to provide “significant” logistical, communications and medical support. Will that turn things around? A UN stabilization mission from 2004 to 2017 had achieved mixed results against the gangs. But it is remembered mostly for a cholera outbreak that killed nearly 10,000 people.

The country’s most notorious gang leader, Jimmy Chérizier, had demanded that the prime minister resign. He got his wish. Guy Philippe is another gang leader. He helped lead a coup against a former president, Bertrand Aristide, in 2004. He has now openly expressed his desire to be Haiti’s next president.

Israel and South Africa are at Odds

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Sydney, N.S.] Cape Breton Post

South Africa’s Chief Rabbi, Dr. Warren Goldstein, addressed the Congressional Summit of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in Washington March 10, spotlighting a growing issue that elicits scant media coverage: the murder of Africans by terrorist groups.

The ideology of Al-Shabaab in Somalia, Boko Haram in Nigeria, and Islamic State (ISIS) throughout much of Africa is the same ideology espoused, funded, and propagated by Iran and its proxies, Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis, he asserted.

Recent atrocities have included mass kidnappings, beheadings, and the explicit targeting of children. “Israel’s war with Hamas – and by extension Iran – is against the same enemy raping and pillaging its way through African villages.”

During the 1950s and the 1960s, Israel had strong agricultural, economic, and trade ties with sub-Saharan Africa, and bilateral relations with states were very warm. The newborn state of Israel and the newly independent states in Africa were looking to build on their shared experiences as developing nations, confronted with parallel economic and security challenges.

However, between 1967 and 1970, these relations began to deteriorate. This culminated in the October 1973 war between Israel and a coalition of Arab States led by Egypt and Syria. The majority of African states severed their diplomatic ties with Israel. Over time, formal and informal relations began to improve, resulting in the renewal of some diplomatic ties.

But as Goldstein is of course aware, relations between Israel and his own country have worsened. Once one of Israel’s most significant partners on the continent, South Africa has gradually come out as one of its most vituperative critics, calling Israel an “apartheid state” and accusing it of “ethnic cleansing” and now, finally, also of genocide.

It is the nadir of a relationship that had survived some inherent challenges, largely thanks to the leadership of Nelson Mandela, who in 1994 became South Africa’s first president after apartheid.

Mandela supported Israeli territorial concessions and was close to the Palestinian cause, but he was also supportive of Israel, which he’d visited and where he’d received an honorary doctorate. His viewpoint was that Israel had the right to exist.

Today South Africa strongly backs the Palestinian cause, with formal diplomatic relations established in 1995, a year after the end of apartheid. It downgraded its embassy in Tel Aviv to a liaison office in 2019.

After the war in Gaza broke out, South Africa took Israel to the U.N.’s International Court of Justice on genocide charges, cementing itself as one of the most outspoken countries against Israel in the world. South Africa also recalled its ambassador to Israel and suspended diplomatic relations. The Israeli airline El Al is planning to cancel its Tel Aviv to Johannesburg route, given a steep drop in demand.

The issue of whether Israel should be granted observer status in the African Union (AU) has been subject to heated debate. In February, Israel thwarted an effort by South Africa and Algeria to deprive it of observer status in the AU. The two countries had also planned to urge the 55 member states to cut off relations with Israel. Nevertheless, leaders at the AU summit in Addis Ababa still condemned Israel’s offensive in Gaza.

Both the pro-Israel and pro-Palestine movements in South Africa are large. The groups are openly hostile towards each other, especially since last Oct. 7, when the Hamas-Israel war started. Pro-Palestine marches bringing together up to 200,000 people.

The South African Jewish community numbers some 75,000, making it the twelfth largest Jewish community in the world. Goldstein gave a fiery speech condemning the South African government at a pro-Israel rally the week after the Hamas attack.

Gabriella Farber-Cohen, former spokesperson for the African National Congress Women’s League in Gauteng, resigned from the party in mid-October. She called South Africa accusing Israel of genocide against the Palestinians a “slap in the face for all Jews in South Africa.”

Following threats by South Africa’s government to prosecute citizens who served in Israel’s army, leaders of South African Jewry in February organized a ceremony in Israel for members of their community who were killed or wounded defending the Jewish state.

 

Is a New Black African-Jewish Alliance Emerging in the United States?

   By Henry Srebrnik, [Winnipeg] Jewish Post 

As we know, the historic Black American-Jewish alliance in the United States, so prominent during the civil rights movement of the 1940s-1960s, has frayed in recent decades. Many Black American organizations have become anti-Zionist.

Black Lives Matter, for example, has even defended Hamas and sees an affinity between American Blacks and Palestinians, considering both ethnic groups as people of colour oppressed by a white society that includes Jews.

The historic Black American community comprises the descendants of the people from the west coast of Africa who were brought to and enslaved in the United States. The Atlantic slave trade was outlawed in the early 19th century, but slavery remained legal until the American Civil War that ended in 1865.

However, in recent decades, thanks to liberalized immigration laws, there are increasing numbers of new Africans in the U.S., who have come as immigrants to the country, from nations such as Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, and South Sudan.

They remain concerned with slavery – but as it currently exists on the African continent. And most of it is carried on by Arabs. Along the east coast of Africa, this has been the case for centuries. Exports of slaves to the Muslim world from the Indian Ocean coast began after traders won control of the coast and sea routes during the ninth century.

The island of Zanzibar was an Omani-ruled sultanate that served as a notorious entrepot for slaves sent to the Arab Middle East. (A recent BBC report found women workers from Malawi abused in near slavery in Oman itself today.) And across the Sahel, particularly in Sudan, raids to capture Black African people were routine.

According to the NGO Walk Free, an international human rights group focused on the eradication of modern slavery, an estimated seven million men, women, and children are living in modern slavery in Africa. Contemporary reports of slavery exist in Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Chad, and Sudan, where people, often from minority ethnic groups, are born into slavery and bought, traded, and sold.

Poverty and economic inequality drive vulnerability in the Africa region. About 35 per cent of people in Sub-Saharan Africa live in poverty. Perpetrators of slavery-related abuses were largely members of armed groups who deliberately exploit populations displaced by conflict.

Boko Haram in northern Nigeria periodically kidnap Christian schoolgirls for ransom or to become sex slaves. In early March, over 280 students were abducted in an assault on a school. More than 4,000 Christians were murdered in Nigeria last year. Africans are sold in slave markets in Libya and Mauritania. There are an estimated 47,000 enslaved Africans in the former and 149,000 in the latter.

Most North Americans know little of this. But maybe this is now changing. Some in the American Jewish community are forging ties with African Blacks, to create a new Black-Jewish alliance. Created this past February in Washington, a coalition of groups came together to educate the public about the mass murder, kidnapping, and enslavement of Africans, and to campaign for their liberation.

The members of this African-Jewish Alliance (AJA) represent victims, along with their allies and champions. One prominent activist, Simon Deng, is a former slave from South Sudan, who works to raise awareness of Khartoum’s jihad, which killed more than three million Black Africans, mostly Christians, between 1955 and 2005. While South Sudan is now a sovereign country, an estimated 35,000 enslaved Africans remain in the north of Sudan.

The alliance includes the Damanga Coalition for Freedom and Democracy, which supports Black Muslims from Darfur in Sudan, whom Arab Muslims have victimized through rape, massacre, and slavery. The world has acknowledged this as a genocide.

The International Committee on Nigeria (ICON) educates and advocates for the victims of Boko Haram raids in Nigeria where Christian villagers are attacked and women and children abducted. Many Americans were first alerted to terrorist attacks on Nigerian villages in 2014 by Michelle Obama, who briefly led the well-advertised “#BringBackOurGirls” campaign. ICON is now reviving the hashtag.

Also focused on Nigeria are the LEAH (Leadership Empowerment Advocacy and Humanitarian) Institute, which advocates for the freedom of Leah Sharibu and other Nigerian women and girls held in captivity, and American Veterans of Igbo Descent (AVIDUSA). The Igbo of southeastern Nigeria are a largely Christian people.

The Institute for Black Solidarity with Israel (IBSI), under Pastor Dumisani Washington, condemns the “Zionism is racism” ideology; defends Israel’s right to live in peace with its Arab neighbors; and seeks to help cultivate a mutually beneficial Israel-Africa alliance.

Finally, the alliance includes the American Anti-Slavery Group (AASG), and the Jewish Leadership Project (JLP). All these groups make it clear that what happened in Israel last Oct. 7 is in some parts of Africa an almost daily occurrence.

The AJA, following meetings with government officials in Washington, launched its first public campaign on March 1, with jumbotron truck messages bearing graphics about attacks against Africans. They drove along a major thoroughfare in Cambridge, Massachusetts, from Harvard Square to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Various newspapers have featured stories about the alliance, and a Jewish News Service (JNS) podcast hosted an interview in February with activists Ben Posner and Charles Jacobs of the AASG about the new coalition, entitled “Why the World Cares About Gaza and Not About Africa.” Awareness about this issue is finally spreading.