A DA casualty of the Israel-Hamas war

The expulsion of DA MP Ghaleb Cachalia from the party’s shadow cabinet has yielded an unlikely casualty of the Israel-Hamas conflict. The war may be far from South Africa, but it has deeply divided public opinion here — as it has around the world.

Cachalia was fired after posting a tweet condemning Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. “I will not be silenced. Israel is committing genocide,” he wrote.

The DA said Cachalia had been removed from his role because, among other reasons, he had gone against a caucus decision that its shadow minister for international affairs would be the only spokesperson on the conflict. As a voluntary organisation, the DA obviously has the right to set the rules of behaviour for members and prescribe the sanctions that go with those rules. The party would, therefore, be within its rights to act against Cachalia or any other member found to have flouted rules.

Be that as it may, Cachalia’s sanction raises questions over the imperative to preserve party discipline and unity; specifically the limits of the right to freedom of expression for individual members, particularly on what can be viewed as controversial or moral issues.

In this case, the war has seen the deaths of thousands of people, the majority being casualties of Israel’s bombing campaign of Gaza in retaliation for Hamas’s October 7 attack which claimed about 1,400 Israeli lives. Israel’s campaign, in turn, has killed an estimated 9,000 Gazans, nearly 40% of whom were children.

In the face of such carnage, might party members not be justified in exercising their right to express moral outrage, irrespective of which side the casualties come from? Or in cases where they deemed the national interest to be in jeopardy?

The irony in this instance is that the DA, a party that espouses the rights of individuals in a democracy, should be the one that appears to shut down freedom of speech. The subtext — the gap in public opinion between those who support Israel and those sympathetic to the Palestinian cause — will not be lost on many observers. Nor will the fact that the DA previously urged members of other parties, such as the ANC, to vote “with their consciences ”— when that suited it.