How to Lose Allies and Block Assistance

For all of its moral posturing, the ANC has lost all right to lecture anyone else about their conduct, but as this once great organisation itself becomes the ultimate persona non grata...

On 30 January, DIRCO declared Ariel Seidman, Israel’s chargé d’affaires to South Africa, persona non grata and gave him 72 hours to leave the country. This was inevitably met with your usual mix of consternation, apathy and support – based, of course, on one’s level of sympathy towards the State of Israel. It was also met by the Israeli government with the swift decision to do the same to South Africa’s ambassador to Palestine, Shaun Edward Byneveldt, who may deal primarily with the Palestinian Authority, but whose offices are in Tel Aviv.

The primary reason given by DIRCO for its decision to expel Seidman from the country was a) “the repeated use of official Israeli social media platforms to launch insulting attacks against His Excellency President Cyril Ramaphosa,” and b) “a deliberate failure to inform DIRCO of purported visits by senior Israeli officials”. And, to be fair, these charges aren’t entirely baseless.

Diplomatic Failures – But By Who?

Though I struggle to find any posts on social media that directly attack Ramaphosa - and DIRCO never actually listed any such posts - it’s unquestionably true that Seidman, the Israeli Embassy and Israelis in general have been critical on social media and elsewhere of the ANC’s anti-Israel bias since 7 October 2023, and especially for launching the ICJ case against the Jewish State. This is neither new nor has he said anything that the Israeli government hasn’t said explicitly in public.

DIRCO’s second point, though, is rather more complicated. Shortly before DIRCO issued its ultimatum, there was controversy around Seidman’s welcoming Israeli officials to the Eastern Cape, including Israeli diplomat David Saranga, where they met with King Buyelekhaya Dalindyebo to discuss providing some of Israel’s ground-breaking agricultural and irrigation technologies to a province suffering from a major lack of water, and whose economy is based primarily on agriculture. Also discussed was the possibility of building new hospitals in a province infamous for its poor healthcare facilities.

King Dalindyebo had recently visited Israel to discuss the Eastern Cape’s woes and some of those he met with visited South Africa in turn, though less as government officials than as members of various NGOs who have had significant success helping with droughts in other water-poor territories across the world. This drew the ire of Eastern Cape premier, Lubabalo Oscar Mabuyane, who released a statement saying, “rejects the sinister deal between the king and Israel, and views these actions as an attempt by the Israeli government to undermine the sovereign right of the Republic of South Africa to manage its international affairs.”

Indeed, even if you know nothing about diplomatic norms, it’s hard not to see this as a break with said norms. Tribal kings do not have much political power and protocol may well demand that such a visit goes through DIRCO and the office of the Eastern Cape premier. It’s also hard not to see this as a gross over-reaction, though.

This wasn’t an official diplomatic visit, but a humanitarian mission, carried out by those in a country that the ANC government has been hostile towards for years, and whose hostility grew exponentially worse in the immediate aftermath of an unimaginably barbaric attack on the civilians of that country by radical Islamist terrorists. That Seidman circumnavigated the usual government channels in order to actively help the people of South Africa and engaged instead with someone who wouldn’t immediately reject Israel’s help as the ANC has officially done on exactly this matter in the past.

Honestly, though, this whole ordeal hasn’t really been about the expelling of a diplomat or even whether that decision was justified. It’s no small matter when something like this happens and it does signal growing tensions between countries, but it’s hardly unheard of. Just last year, President Trump did much the same thing to South Africa’s ambassador to the United States, Ibrahim Rasool.

What this is really about is how the ANC and DIRCO (the one government agency fully captured by the ruling party) have constantly acted against the best interests of the people of South Africa by cozying up to rogue states, thereby alienating the liberal-democratic, “Western” world with whom South Africa – and the ANC! - actually shares most of its values. There have already been at least three such gaffs in 2026, and we’ve only barely gotten out of January!

An Embarrassing Response

The first of these gaffs (read: international embarrassments) occurred right at the start of the year with the ANC’s just flat-out embarrassing response to what was happening in Iran at the time. What started out as fairly small, contained protests against the ruling regime in Iran, the Islamic Republic, by those gravely affected by the terrible economic conditions imposed on them by their leaders’ costly obsession with the destruction Israel, quickly grew into a nationwide protest movement to overthrow the entire regime, and ended with tends of thousands of innocent, unarmed Iranians butchered by the regime’s military, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). While the exact details remain hazy thanks to the Islamic Republic’s crackdown on information going out of Iran, it seems like something in the vicinity of 30,000 to 45,000 Iranian civilians were massacred over just two days.

The official reaction by DIRCO and our government’s leading party was the very definition of tepid. And tardy. On 15 January, Ramaphosa released a statement on “behalf of” the government saying that, “The reports of unrest and the subsequent loss of life are concerning, and South Africa urges all parties to exercise maximum restraint.” He followed this with some wishy-washy sentiments about “ensuring civilians their right to protest in peace”, but that one sentence was enough. “All parties” should “exercise restraint”? This is Ramaphosa, DIRCO and the ANC’s response to the massacre of civilians by their government?

And, just so we’re clear, this certainly wasn’t the sentiment of the whole government. The DA, in particular, said that, “the Iranian uprisings echo South Africa’s own struggle for freedom” and urged the ANC to report the Islamic Republic to the United Nations Human Right Council. It didn’t.

Contrast this to the ANC’s response to Hamas’ massacre on 7 October 2023. In the immediate aftermath of these attacks – indeed, even as Israel was still pushing back thousands of terrorists from its borders”, the ANC effectively justified the massacre as resistance, while then head of DIRCO, Naledi Pandor, phoned Hamas leadership to commemorate. It immediately called Israel an “Apartheid state” and almost immediately started accusing Israel of genocide, climaxing, of course, with official charges of genocide laid at the International Court of Justice within less than two months of Hamas starting the war. The ANC, of course, barely acknowledged Hamas, let alone its massacre on October 7^th or the hostages it had taken, or how it embedded itself within Gaza’s civilian population, or that it was a designated terror organisation.

Compare this to its delayed, shameful, “all sides” response to the Islamic Republic’s intentional massacre of its own civilians. In the war between radical Islamist barbarism and the liberal, democratic freedom that it itself fought so hard for, the ANC has chosen the former, putting South Africa itself on the wrong side of history and on the wrong side of all that is good and decent.

And then, true to form, it doubled down on this.

Manoeuvres with Monsters

At around the same time that the uprising in Iran was happening, just off the coast of Kalk Bay, the South African navy had joined counterparts from Putin’s Russia and the Islamic Republic of Iran in conducting China-led naval exercises – hilariously dubbed “the will for peace”. These military exercises took place between 9 and 16 January – or right in the immediate aftermath of when the two-day massacre of Iranian civilians is believed to have taken place. Credit to Ramaphosa, I suppose, for his insisting that Iran only act as observers, but a distinct lack of credit to him when his own navy defied his orders and allowed Iran to directly participate in its tawdry, tone-deaf display.

The “R” and “C” of BRICS have long been problematic, and that was before adding countries like Iran or Saudi Arabia to the mix, but as long as the relationship between these assortment of countries is purely economic, it’s an alliance that can be justified. Indeed, having the likes of China and Brazil as close trading partners, is a huge boon to South Africa, and forming an economic pact with various “Global South” countries makes plenty of sense.

Naval exercises or any other sort of military co-operation, however, is another matter entirely. Russia and Iran are actively waging war against the liberal-democratic world and are ruled by draconian, oppressive regimes. China, meanwhile, is actively engaging in a genocide against its Yughur population. Trading with such governments is morally murky, if probably necessary; siding with them militarily, even only tacitly, is reprehensible, unforgivable, and deeply... ill advised, shall we say. Say what you want about Donald Trump, but in the wake of such actions, his cautiousness around South Africa and outright mistrust of the ANC are sadly entirely earned.

None of this, to say the least, is remotely good for South Africa.

Cutting Off Your Nose...

Which neatly brings us back to the events of the last week. The ANC destroying South Africa’s standing on the world stage is unforgivable, but its effects are less pronounced and direct on the day-to-day lives of your average South African. The ANC blocking the help of the world’s leading experts on desalination, drip irrigation and, effectively, drawing water from a stone, though, is something else when large parts of our country are suffering deeply from the effects of water scarcity. Especially since the ANC’s gross mismanagement of the water supply in even water-rich provinces causes water outages for as much as days at a time.

And you can talk about this being the ANC taking a “moral stand” against the “genocidal, apartheid Zionist entity” for days, but it has shown repeatedly that the ANC no longer has a moral backbone to speak of. Certainly, you can be guaranteed, that if Ariel Seidman was the ambassador of the Islamic Republic who approached South Africa with the possibility of solving its water crisis for free, he would be – well, whatever the opposite of persona non grata is. Even if he bypassed official channels completely and even if he arrived in the middle of his government’s wholesale slaughter of Iranian civilians. Of course, the Islamic Republic of Iran is too obsessed with destruction and death to ever be able to offer something that saves lives, but the point still stands:

For all of its moral posturing, the ANC has lost all right to lecture anyone else about their conduct, but as this once great organisation itself becomes the ultimate persona non grata on the (liberal-democratic) world stage, it is we, the people of South Africa, that will continue to pay the price.

Ilan Preskovsky is a Johannesburg-based freelance writer, who has covered everything from international politics to Jewish culture/ religion to film and TV reviews. His work has been featured online on the likes of News24, Popverse and BizNews, and in print in Business Day, Jewish Life Magazine and the Star, among others.