There has always been a special bond between the liberation struggles in South Africa and Palestine, rooted in their shared experience of brutal settler colonial oppression.
Israel is a state that is willing to bury the truth in blood to preserve impunity and shield itself from accountability
This is not hyperbole. I know what it means to live under a regime that buries truth beneath bloodied soil. I was born in Pimville, Soweto, under the shadow of PW Botha’s brutal apartheid regime. I spent my formative years witnessing a government weaponise its power against its own citizens, whose only crime was to fight for the total liberation of African people.
Like many black South Africans, my past is etched with the pain of losing loved ones to the viciousness of the apartheid machinery. I have relatives who had to abandon their homes in KwaZulu-Natal in the dead of night, carrying nothing but the clothes on their backs, because the black-on-black violence which was engineered to fracture our communities, turned neighbour against neighbour, ripping apart the very fabric of our existence.
That history lives in my bones. It shapes how I see Gaza, not as a distant tragedy, but as a mirror reflecting my own past.
Having trained as a journalist, I was taught that objectivity is sacred and that our role is to observe, not to intervene. But Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s words echo louder than any newsroom dogma: “If you are neutral in the face of suffering, you are on the side of the oppressor.”
This is why the genocide unfolding in Gaza is not a matter for debate. It is a matter of conscience. Israeli human rights organisations have confirmed what many have tried to deny: starvation is being used as a weapon of war.
Recently, the almost two-year parade of livestreamed atrocities committed by the Israeli regime against Palestinian civilians reached two more gory milestones. First, two Israeli-based human rights organisations, B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights declared that Israel is committing genocide. Second, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), a global food security monitor, confirmed that “the worst-case scenario of famine is currently playing out in the Gaza Strip”.
These revelations should come as no surprise. Various agencies have gone to great lengths to expose Israel’s atrocities. So far, Israel has murdered more than 60,000 people, including at least 50,000 children killed or wounded in Gaza. Palestinians have been subjected to “unimaginable horrors”, according to the United Nations Children’s Fund’s (Unicef’s) regional director for the Middle East, Edouard Beigbeder.
“These children — that should never be reduced to numbers — are now part of a long, harrowing list of unimaginable horrors: the grave violations against children, the blockade of aid, the starvation, the constant forced displacement, and the destruction of hospitals, water systems, schools, and homes. In essence, the destruction of life itself in the Gaza Strip,” he said
Since 7 October, Israel has dropped more than 100,000 tonnes of bombs on Gaza, a city only slightly larger than Johannesburg. This is not war. It is genocide.
Holocaust and genocide scholar Professor Raz Segal has highlighted the tactic of mass starvation, noting: “At a certain point of these long processes of starvation, perpetrators cannot anymore deny that they don’t know and understand the consequences of their actions; that they have created conditions calculated to bring about the physical destruction of the group in whole or in part.”
It is therefore not an exaggeration to describe this as a modern-day Holocaust with all the hallmarks of the atrocities committed by Hitler and the Nazis against six million Jews from 1941 to 1945.
South Africa is vindicated. Its brave act of filing a case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to expose Israel’s systematic and deliberate mass murder of Palestinians has been confirmed.
Instead of sticking to the facts so ably argued by South African lawyers, defenders of the Israeli state have resorted to lies and propaganda. Some claimed South Africa had no business getting involved. Others accused Pretoria of supporting Hamas. The conspiracy machine even alleged that Iran paid South Africa’s legal fees at the ICJ. This has been thoroughly debunked. In response to parliamentary questions, the presidency assured the standing committee on appropriations that South Africa received no funding from Iran. Legal services were procured by multiple departments and appropriately accounted for.
Our moral stance on Palestine is the reason the depraved state of Israel continuously churns out bald-faced lies to justify what is clearly the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. This is why it is crucial for all of us, especially those who love humanity and wish to see it free of suffering, to continue exposing the truth about Israel.
Among the lies repeated by Israel is that Hamas uses women and children as human shields, so it can justify the relentless murder of innocents. Israel’s use of disinformation reveals a disturbing willingness to manipulate truth to defend the indefensible. Fabricated claims like the infamous “beheaded babies” narrative were used to manufacture consent for mass violence. This is a regime that drowns truth in blood to preserve impunity. Their lies are being used to mobilise the US against South Africa through the threat of sanctions through a Bill introduced by Republican Ronny Jackson.
These responses point to a deeper issue: There is an attempt to undermine South Africa’s sovereignty and its non-aligned posture on the global stage. South Africa, as a sovereign state, reserves the right to choose its alliances. Any attempt to dictate its friendships only betrays imperialistic ambition.
The working class has always been the backbone of liberation. In South Africa, it was the organised might of trade unions, community movements, and township resistance, and even churches that helped dismantle apartheid. Metal workers union Numsa, trade union federation Cosatu and countless other progressive formations refused to be neutral. They shut down factories, marched in defiance, and made the country ungovernable. Their solidarity with the liberation movement was not symbolic, it was strategic and material.
Today, that same spirit must rise again. The genocide in Gaza demands more than outrage, it demands action. Workers across the globe must recognise that imperialism is not just foreign policy, it is class war waged against the poor, the dispossessed, and the colonised. The Palestinian struggle is a workers’ struggle. And just as South African workers helped bring down apartheid, so too can global labour solidarity help end Israeli apartheid.
Boycotts, divestment and sanctions are important but more must be done. We must go further by refusing to handle Israeli goods in our workplaces, and build international alliances that make genocide unprofitable. Numsa recently resolved at its national executive committee meeting that it will participate in a campaign against Glencore, to prevent it from exporting coal to Israel because that coal is being used to wipe out Palestinians. We must refuse to use our labour to advance a genocide because we have the power to grind the machinery of oppression to a halt.
The words of the Protestant pastor, Martin Niemöller, who spent seven years in a concentration camp for opposing Hitler, remind us of the cost of silence:
“First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out, because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out, because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me.”
I speak not just as a journalist or unionist, but as someone who has seen the cost of silence. Gaza is not far away, it is Soweto. And just as we rose then, we must rise now. The blood of our past demands it. The future of humanity depends on it.
Phakamile Hlubi-Majola is a journalist and communicator. She is the national spokesperson for the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa.