With the end of Apartheid in South Africa came the dream of new beginnings, a “Rainbow Nation” that would make racial division a thing of the past. In the famous phrasing of President Nelson Mandela’s 1994 Inaugural Address: “Each of us is as intimately attached to the soil of this beautiful country as are the famous jacaranda trees of Pretoria and the mimosa trees of the bushveld – a rainbow nation at peace with itself and the world.” The 2009 film “Invictus” helped many international audiences appreciate for the first time how South Africans of all backgrounds came together around the new flag and the new system out of common love of country during the 1995 Rugby Cup.
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Unfortunately, the current leadership of the nation has abandoned Mandela’s dream in favor of democratic backsliding, antagonistic rhetoric and policies against minority groups, a troubling alignment with the world’s most vicious human rights abusers, and increasing levels of antisemitic scapegoating. Nowhere does this toxic stew of policies come together more noxiously than with South Africa’s case against Israel at the International Criminal Court (ICC). The Trump Administration has rightly targeted the ICC for dangerously perverting its intended role as it targets democracies executing self-defense rather than genuine aggressors and perpetrators of atrocities. It is also time to trace the problem back to its source and demand change from the originator of the ugly ICC case against Israel – South Africa.
South Africa’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, has sought to distract from his domestic abuses by accusing Israel of “Apartheid.” But Apartheid is an Afrikaans term unique to South Africa that describes an ugly system similar to segregation, whereby that country treated people differently based on their race, even prohibiting romantic relationships between people of different races. In Israel, in contrast, citizens of all races and religions have had full civil, social, and political rights since the country’s independence.
Actually, it is modern South Africa, not Israel, that is aggressively reducing the rights of minority citizens. South Africa’s Expropriation Act, signed into law by Ramaphosa on January 23, 2025, allows the South African parliament, as well as all local, provincial, and national authorities, to seize land from private citizens without any compensation if that is considered “just and reasonable.” Ramaphose claims to be acting against “white privilege” and backs up these policies with inciteful rhetoric like, “Don’t fear white people, their time has passed, and they no longer have power.”
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Ramaphosa has also threatened the Jewish community by using the genocidal slogan “From the River to the Sea,” which calls for the end of the Israeli state, and by using meetings with the Jewish community leadership about surging domestic antisemitism to double down on attacking Israel.
South Africa has tried to shield itself from any backlash from these abuses by the Free World by moving away from its traditional Western alignment towards cooperation with Russia, China, and Iran. South Africa and Iran have engaged in vigorous naval cooperation, including allowing Iranian ships to dock at South African ports. South Africa’s new ambassador to Washington, D.C., Ebrahim Rasool, is a vigorous supporter of the terrorist group Hamas. He has met with senior Hamas operatives, bragged about receiving a signed scarf from former Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, and described Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin as “one of the greatest inspirations to Muslims.”
Nowhere are the perverse values of the new South Africa more apparent than the country’s case against Israel before the International Criminal Court (ICC), baselessly accusing Israel of war crimes in its defensive response to the Hamas invasion of October 7, 2023, which slaughtered over 1,200 innocents in the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. The case, which relies entirely on non-credible statistics and evidence provided by Hamas, is being politically and financially directed by Iran and Qatar, states with deep ties to that terrorist group. The ICC’s disturbing issuance of arrest warrants against the Israeli Prime Minister and other senior government officials based on the South African case brings into question any state’s ability to defend itself from violence, and has prompted the United States to seek sanctions against the ICC.
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President Trump’s declared intention to pursue economic action against South Africa for its pursuit of undemocratic land expropriation from minority groups is an important first step. After all, it was international economic pressure that brought down the last regime in South Africa opposed to Western values, the Apartheid state. Today, the South African government has become a “polite” political, financial, and legal front for rogue states and international terrorism. The Trump Administration and its international partners must use the same policy and economic toolkit that brought about the peaceful end of Apartheid to force the South African government to change course on its antisemitic, racist, and pro-terroristic course – or face the full fury of the consequences that Washington can bring to bear.
Ryan Fournier is the Executive Director of Radical Alert and served as the Chairman of Students for Trump.
