South Africa's president rehearsed genocide charge against Israel in meeting with Jewish leaders

• Published date: 20 April 2024
• Author: RON KAMPEAS/JTA
• Publication title: Jerusalem Post, The: Web Edition Articles (Israel)

The meeting took place in December, and the course it took surprised the South African Jewish Board of Deputies: Instead of discussing the safety concerns of his Jewish constituents, the board's leader said, Ramaphosa spent most of the meeting attacking Israel, which he accused of committing genocide. He later cited the meeting when South Africa charged Israel with genocide at the International Court of Justice

"It was a complete betrayal of the community," Wendy Kahn, the Board of Deputies' director, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in an interview this week.

Ramaphosa had scheduled the meeting for December 13, after the launch of the country's summer holidays, so a number of the seven Jewish officials who attended had to cut into summer travel plans to make the meeting in the capital city of Pretoria.

The inconvenience seemed worth it, Kahn said. Antisemitism had spiked in South Africa and the parliament's overwhelming vote to cut diplomatic ties to Israel and shutter its embassy was creating problems for the South Africans with family in Israel.

Yet instead of focusing on those issues, according to Ramaphosa's office, the South African president used the meeting to accuse Israel of genocide. His statement following the meeting does mention his government's "denunciation of anti-Semitic behavior towards Jewish people in South Africa, including the boycott of Jewish owned businesses, and Islamophobia."

Surprising critique

But most of the statement concerns South Africa's criticism of Israel's military campaign in Gaza. It says Ramaphosa explained that his government "condemns the genocide that is being inflicted against the people of Palestine, including women and children, through collective punishment and ongoing bombardment of Gaza."

Kahn said the Jewish leaders were taken aback by the turn the meeting took.

"We told him about antisemitism, we told him about the boycotts," she said. But in the president's response, Kahn recalled, "He suddenly comes up with all this information about genocide, the genocide that Israel is committing, because, you know, he had to tell us that there was this genocide."

Why Ramaphosa felt the need to bring up the genocide accusation wasn't clear to Kahn's organization until weeks later, when South Africa submitted its complaint to the International Court of Justice charging Israel with genocide.

In the document's 13th section where South Africa was asked to show that "Israel has been made fully aware of the grave...