South Africa’s Quest to Retake the Moral High Ground

To many around the world, South Africa’s choice to take Israel to the International Court of Justice (ICJ), accusing it of genocide, came as a surprise. It seemed odd to them that a faraway African country would try to intervene in Israel’s military operations in the Gaza Strip. Israeli leaders poured contempt on the country, repeatedly suggesting that the only explanation for its decision was that the ruling party, the African National Congress (ANC), had been hired by Hamas to act as the militant group’s shadowy “legal arm.” Picking up on that claim, Western leaders condemned the case as baseless or baffling: U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken called it legally “meritless,” and the German government declared its intention to intervene on Israel’s behalf. Reprimanding South Africa, French Foreign Minister Stéphane Séjourné attempted an elementary language lesson, informing the country that words such as genocide “have meaning.”

The ICJ, however, did not agree that South Africa misunderstood international law or the meaning of “genocide.” Voting nearly unanimously on January 26, the court’s 17 judges—presided over by an American chief judge—found that the case should proceed and imposed provisional measures ordering Israel to do everything it can to prevent acts of genocide and ensure Palestinians in Gaza can access humanitarian aid.

In fact, South Africa’s decision to take Israel to the ICJ—and its success in doing so—was always much more predictable than it seemed. But it also reflects a change in the way the country’s government sees itself and its role in the world. Long-standing, deep ties connect the ANC and Palestinian political leadership. South Africa’s first democratically elected president, Nelson Mandela, observed in 1997 that the freedom of South Africans would be “incomplete without the freedom of Palestinians”—a remark that South African leaders and ordinary citizens have often cited over the past three decades, and particularly since Israel began bombing Gaza after Hamas’s October 7 attack. Well before the current war in Gaza broke out, ANC politicians often wore kaffiyehs while going about their daily tasks. Regular listeners to the South African president’s annual State of the Nation address know by now that the speech is winding to a close when it reaches its obligatory expression of support for the Palestinian people and for a two-state solution.

But bringing the case to the ICJ also represents a change in South Africa’s attitudes. Since 1994, when South Africa became a democracy after 35 years of apartheid, South Africa has generally pursued an opportunistic foreign policy that amounted to little more than an almost always unsuccessful attempt to please everyone. The liberation movement that had inspired the world with its moral stances—against segregation and, then, for its calls for forgiveness and reconciliation—became highly transactional in its foreign affairs.

The ICJ case, however, breaks this template. For the South African government, the case represented a return to its identity—a decision to finally incorporate the best, most distinctive elements of South Africa’s post-apartheid political culture into its approach to the rest of the world. South Africa’s challenge now is to make the ideas that drove its ICJ case a general policy—one which places principle above a desire to please. This could attract initial resistance by the world’s power-brokers. But in the long term, it is the policy that will win the country the most respect—and influence.

TIES THAT BIND

The bond between the ANC and the Palestinians was formed more than half a century ago, during the ANC’s fight against apartheid. The ANC, South Africa’s leading Black liberation organization battling segregationist rule, and the Palestine Liberation Organization perceived strong parallels between their constituents’ plights. Both saw that their people were denied rights because of their race or religion.

This bond was strengthened by Israel’s support for apartheid South Africa—a dark history that still is not widely known. By the mid-1970s, the Israeli and South African governments had developed a close relationship; both felt isolated in their regions. In 1976, a South African government document framed the two countries’ bond as unique, claiming that “Israel and South Africa have one thing above all else in common: they are both situated in a predominantly hostile world inhabited by dark peoples.” Israel sent strategists to help the South African military. And Israeli scientists helped South Africa develop a nuclear bomb, which the country’s white government destroyed in part because it did not want it to fall into the hands of a Black-majority regime.

But the ANC’s support for Palestinians never translated into hostility toward Jews. Race has always been South Africa’s fault line; whether you are white or Black matters much more than faith. And Jews were strongly overrepresented in the small group of white South Africans who joined the ANC. Anti-Semitism, in fact, was widespread among apartheid’s architects.

It is also important to point out that the ANC’s ally is Fatah, the party of the Palestinian leader Yassir Arafat. Fatah currently leads the Palestinian Authority, the body the United States wants to take over Gaza. On the day South Africa presented its case to the ICJ, a pro–South African rally was held in Ramallah, the West Bank’s capital, and was attended by a South African diplomat. Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh addressed the rally, a clear sign that the ANC-Fatah alliance remains in place. Far from being evidence of any affiliation with Hamas, as Israel suggested, South Africa’s case was a testament to the enduring relationship between the ANC and the party that the West sees as Hamas’s best alternative.

SPLIT DECISIONS

This history alone, however, does not explain South Africa’s choice to bring the case to the ICJ. The case also signals a shift. When South Africa’s white regime fell and the ANC took power in 1994, it seemed poised to start charting a unique foreign-policy course, built on the country’s traditions as well as its new strengths. In 1998, Mandela indignantly told the West that it had no business asking the ANC to end its friendship with Cuba and Libya.

The new South Africa had little reason to ally itself uncritically with the United States and Europe. Western governments, with the notable exception of the Scandinavian countries, had long abetted apartheid by trading with the white regime and secretly funneling weapons to it; they were indifferent or hostile to the ANC. The former Soviet Union had helped the ANC, and the fight against apartheid benefited from the support of the “Afro-Asian bloc,” the newly independent states of Africa and Asia. 

At the same time, the ANC government had taken over a diverse country, one in which centuries of segregation had ensured that white South Africans owned virtually all the capital. ANC leaders knew that most white South Africans saw the West as their role model. And they knew, too, that many Black South Africans, especially in the cities, had embraced American movies, music, clothes, and cars and identified with and admired African Americans. To simply renounce the West would have triggered huge domestic resistance.

These conflicting pressures could have prompted South Africa’s new government to chart a unique course. They did not. On the domestic front, the ANC—despite some rhetoric to the contrary—primarily focused on turning South Africa into what South African elites believed a Western country was. One of the ANC’s key aims was to prove wrong the racism that held that Black people could not govern successful countries. Ironically, this desire prompted ANC leaders to strive to show they were good at delivering what they believed the West valued, whether or not these things were what the country needed. They nurtured an abiding desire to become “world class”—South African code for “like rich Western countries.”

FOREIGN EXCHANGE

Beyond South Africa’s borders, the government’s conflicting goals—to reflect some ANC activists’ deeply rooted suspicion of the West and to show the West that South Africa was worthy of admiration—produced a foreign policy that never attracted respect at home or abroad. After 1994, many South Africans expected their country to make a unique contribution to international relations. During the fight against apartheid, the ANC had developed a reputation for competent diplomacy, because applying international pressure was a key tool in the struggle against the apartheid regime. Before 1994, the ANC had a diplomatic presence in more countries than the government it was fighting.

Just after apartheid ended, South Africa did play a key role in a nuclear nonproliferation initiative. Its current president, Cyril Ramaphosa—who led the ANC team that negotiated the end of apartheid—was an important influence on the Irish peace process. But for the most part, the ANC’s post-apartheid diplomacy became focused not on what South Africa could do for the world but on what the world could do for South Africa. This, in fact, should have been expected: as a liberation movement, the ANC’s foreign policy had to prioritize persuading the world to support it. In 1990, Mandela even told Ted Koppel, the Nightline anchor, that a democratic South Africa would judge other countries by their willingness to support it.

After 1994, many South Africans expected their country to make a unique contribution to international relations.

That emphasis carried over into the country’s foreign dealings after 1994, producing a foreign policy that sought only to extract gains from other countries. South Africa refused to take sides, for instance, in the long-running conflict between Iran and the West in order to continue using Iranian oil. South African citizens have consistently attacked the ANC government for choosing expediency over supporting human rights. Prime examples are the way it supported Robert Mugabe, the repressive dictator who devastated neighboring Zimbabwe, and repeatedly denied the Dalai Lama a South African visa—presumably because that was what China wanted.

The government advocated for negotiated solutions to every world conflict, even when negotiation seemed impossible. These calls were rarely pursued with much vigor, and they came to sound like an excuse for seeking to derive benefits from states such as China while not alienating the West. Overall, avoiding taking sides has become the South African foreign policy norm.

This approach was most recently reflected in South Africa’s refusal to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. There may have been a principled reason to pursue neutrality: while Western countries denounced the mayhem unleashed by Russia, they had supported the same behavior by the Russians in Syria. It was possible to remain nonaligned while strongly criticizing Russia’s actions. But South Africa’s position seemed more like a mere attempt to offend neither China nor the West so that trade and aid would continue to flow.

COURSE CORRECTION

South Africa’s decision to approach the ICJ, however, breaks the mold of its past 30 years. It took the initiative to defend a principle, even if that offended powerful countries. It challenged the consensus among Western governments but in terms that drew on the themes that are meant to guide the West: respect for the rule of law and human rights and a preference for settling disputes by way of political and legal processes, not by war.

Using legal processes to resolve political disputes, and even violent conflict, is a crucial part of South Africa’s culture. Under apartheid, segregation’s opponents used the very limited latitude the law allowed them in order to challenge racially discriminatory laws. Their small but important victories set the stage for the use of legal processes to dismantle apartheid itself. During the constitutional negotiations that ended apartheid, lawyers played a key role, helping to shape the new constitution.

In South Africa’s democratic era, a consensus has emerged that court judgments must be respected. The courts are often used to settle disputes between citizens and the government or conflicts among and within political parties. This reflects core principles that have shaped South African democracy: the principle that negotiation, not violence, can and should be used to end deep-seated conflicts and the principle that all affected parties, no matter their size or political stance, must be included in a negotiation.

Using legal processes to resolve conflict is a crucial part of South Africa’s political culture.

With its ICJ case, South Africa finally incorporated these principles into its foreign policy. Those who listened to South Africa’s presentations in The Hague would have strained to find revolutionary rhetoric or contempt for Western values. On the contrary: its case could be seen as a homage to those values, but with an insistence that the West practice what it preaches—that the law is for everyone, not only for Westerners. South Africa’s government representatives also made clear they viewed the case as part of a wider project, an attempt to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through a negotiated settlement that would end not only the violence but the occupation that has inflamed it.

The case suggests that the country could adopt a different—and more effective—foreign policy going forward. It could model a genuinely nonaligned stance that incorporates a willingness to take positions that the West, China, and Russia may dislike, if principle dictates, while keeping lines of communication open to these countries. It could advocate abroad for the strategies that made its dangerous transition from the end of white rule a success: respect for human rights, a strong faith in negotiation’s potential, a rejection of cultural and racial biases, and a firm insistence that international law must reign—and must be applied equally to all states and people.

This new approach would require South Africa to more vigorously challenge its African and Asian allies when those allies violate its guiding principles. It is not a certainty, however, that South Africa is ready to apply these principles to other international disputes. The ICJ case also channeled the ANC’s sentiments about a very particular conflict. It seems likely that South Africa approached the ICJ in part because its current foreign minister, Naledi Pandor, is particularly committed to supporting Palestine.

The ANC now faces a difficult reelection. If it loses the South African presidency, the commitments it showed at The Hague could shift again. Even if it does win, it is not clear whether the principles that underpinned its ICJ case will drive its overall foreign policy.

But they should. South Africa’s choice to challenge Israel legally was domestically popular. And holding other countries to a moral standard is precisely the sort of contribution South Africa is best placed to make: it flows naturally from the concerns and values that ensured a peaceful, negotiated end to apartheid. South Africa can, however, only make this contribution to world affairs if the approach that produced the ICJ case becomes a set of guiding principles and not a one-off response.