SA reverts to rights-based foreign policy

Spotlight

THIS week I felt proud to be a South African. Our Minister of International Relations, Lindiwe Sisulu, told me in an interview that human rights remains the basis of our foreign policy, and is what will drive us when we intervene on issues.

Finally, our foreign policy is returning to what Madiba envisaged, where human rights are “the light that guides our foreign policy”. I have renewed hope that South Africa will again become the moral compass in the world – which is exactly what Sisulu wants and said so specifically in her budget speech on Wednesday.

To those pundits who have already called her remarks “empty”, I say to them that this week Sisulu put her words into action in a decisive and brave way.

South Africa was one of only three countries – Turkey and Ireland – to recall their ambassadors from Israel and stand up to the country in the face of its massacre of Palestinians in Gaza.

This was not an easy decision to make, as the pressure from lobby groups is immense, but it was a stand taken on principle, that South Africa will not allow Israel to flagrantly violate human rights with impunity.

This bravery likely comes from the fact that Sisulu was one of those in the trenches, part of umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) in exile in Swaziland, risking her life at a time when ANC cadres where being bombed and kidnapped in the 1980s.

She understands what the liberation Struggle is all about, and in those years she expected governments of principle to stand up to the apartheid regime and take tough decisions to isolate it in its onslaught on the liberation movements.

For the government to do any differently now would be hypocrisy.

Our government has chosen which way it wants to go and has chosen to stand on the right side of history. The government has started the process of implementing the resolutions taken by the 54th ANC national conference, and there is little doubt that the were met with slaughter.

The irony this week was that the slaughter of almost as many unarmed Palestinians in Gaza, protesting against 70 years of brutal occupation, has only renewed the commitment of Palestinians to peaceful rolling protests, Gandhian style.

The question is: How many more Palestinians will go to their graves, and how many more children will they bury before they return to armed struggle?

Many right-wing Israelis love to perpetuate the narrative that the demonstrating Palestinians are nothing but terrorists, Hamas supporters who want to drive the Israelis out and establish a Palestinian state from river to sea.

That sounds so familiar. I remember growing up under apartheid and hearing racist white South Africans saying that the people demonstrating against apartheid were nothing but terrorists, ANC supporters who wanted to drive white South Africans into the sea.

Actually, Hamas is not a terrorist group; it is only labelled so by Israel and the US, just as the US labelled the ANC a terrorist group and not a liberation movement.

According to the UN, Hamas has every right to resist occupation, and that is what it has been doing by sending useless rockets into Israel that rarely land on their targets.

Hamas may have had a charter which wanted all of historic Palestine back for the Palestinians, but on

May 1 last year released a new document accepting a two-state solution along the 1967 borders, giving up a claim to 78% of historic Palestine.

Since the protests against Israeli occupation began seven weeks ago, Israeli forces have killed 111 demonstrators and seriously injured 12 733. Not one member of the Israeli security forces has been killed and only one was slightly wounded.

This is an asymmetric struggle, and we will say so, because in South Africa the truth has a tongue.