Deputy minister accuses Israel of exploiting pandemic

The deputy minister of the department of international relations and cooperation, Alvin Botes, this week accused Israel of “exploiting” the COVID-19 pandemic by escalating and accelerating settlement expansion in the West Bank.

Botes said that with the international community focusing on mitigating the severe effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, “Israel is exploiting the situation to escalate its violation in accelerating its settlement colonisation and annexation schemes”.

Botes was delivering a keynote address to mark the United Nations (UN) International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People in Pretoria on 30 November at an event hosted by the Palestinian Embassy.

He also bemoaned the “radical shift” by Arab nations in recent months to normalise relations with Israel, which he alleged “had fragmented the Arab Peace Initiative”.

He said South Africa would use the little time it had left as an elected member of the UN Security Council to “intensify lobbying”. As chair of the African Union (AU), South Africa would also use its position to try to “ensure that Israel doesn’t acquire an observer seat in the AU”.

Botes told the gathering that South Africans were “unyielding in their solidarity” with Palestine, and he renewed South Africa’s commitment to a just and lasting solution to the “question of Palestine”.

He said the country would continue to work with “like-minded” countries to support international efforts aimed at the establishment of a viable Palestinian state existing side by side in peace with Israel.

The event was attended by a handful of ambassadors and members of the diplomatic corps, as well as Pro-Palestinian supporters and those opposed to Israel.

Botes claimed that Israel this year had “continued to demolish and confiscate Palestinian-owned structures and homes in the West Bank and East Jerusalem” thereby “further entrenching its military occupation”.

He said new housing units were being built in the occupied West Bank, pointing out that “this marks 2020 as the year for the highest settlement expansion since 2012”.

Rowan Polovin, the national chairperson of the South African Zionist Federation, told the SA Jewish Report that Botes continued his “roadshow of international partisanship, siding with anti-democratic governments along the way while pursuing his tired and distorted anti-Israel worldview”.

“South Africa has a dubious foreign policy record,” Polovin said, “supporting dictators and human-rights abusers, and instead of fixing it and gaining international support, Botes dilutes South Africa’s relevance in foreign affairs and against the changing landscape of the Middle East.”

Botes lamented the fact that the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Sudan had taken steps to normalise relations with Israel.

“The prevailing formula as outlined by the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative was that normalisation would be granted to Israel only in return for making meaningful political compromises vis-à-vis the Palestinians,” he said.

“These accords replace the equation of ‘peace for land’ with the Netanyahu-coined ‘peace for peace’ approach, in which normalisation is given almost unconditionally,” he said.

“Most remarkable, these diplomatic gifts were lavished on Israel without negotiating anything tangible in return for the Palestinians,” Botes told the audience.

Polovin said South Africa’s “knee-jerk approach to anti-Israelism” and its “copy-paste support” for the Palestinians was at the expense of important matters on the African continent and the world stage.

“Our country should celebrate agreements such as Israel’s normalisation deal with Sudan that will benefit this continent’s people on the path towards democracy and economic growth. South Africa should be at the forefront of support for African states trying to improve their human-rights record and do so on the basis of improved economic ties, investment, bilateral relations, and joint projects. Pretoria should take side with Africans, and work towards the reduction of suffering of the people of Africa instead of using its international voice solely to bash Israel.”

Botes criticised Israel for continuing to violate UN Security Council resolutions and international law, while the Palestinian people continued to suffer.

“This denial of their most basic of rights should be an affront to the conscience of the world and a spur to action,” he said. He called on the nations of the world to engage in constructive acts of solidarity, saying, “It’s time for concrete measures to be enacted.”

He said as South Africa was nearing the end of its tenure on the security council, it wouldn’t miss the opportunity to intensify lobbying to “strengthen international law, pass critical resolutions, and craft new conversations around the Palestinian struggle”.

South Africa’s role in the AU was conceivably more crucial, Botes said, “as Israel is vociferously lobbying various African states to support its bid for observer status”.

“An emboldened South Africa in the AU is more important than ever to ensure that Israel doesn’t acquire an observer seat in the AU,” he said.

Botes said there was a “growing and justifiable sense” that certain African and Arab nations no longer saw the liberation of Palestine as a common objective.

“Israel with the support of America has driven a wedge between these countries,” he said. “If Israel continues to score political victories while facing little resistance, it could also eventually dominate Africa.” He pointed out that the issue of solidarity with Palestine and “the pressing need to block Israeli scourges in Africa” were intrinsically linked.

He called for added pressure to be placed on Israel, calling for the creation of an Africa-wide solidarity network.

South Africa, he said, called on the newly-elected American leadership and the international community “to open the door to a different diplomacy approach” in resolving the Israeli-Palestine conflict.

Polovin said the days of pressuring Israel to negotiate with the Palestine Liberation Organisation leadership, “who aren’t interested in dialogue and reject all peace efforts by Israel”, have been surpassed by events in the Middle East.

“We encourage South African government policy makers to update their focus towards the changing world, and implore Pretoria to play an active role in pursuing peace as opposed to hostility,” he said.