Sovereignty as a Fig Leaf for Hating on the Jews

What played out with Israel in the Eastern Cape last week was not a breach of diplomatic protocol or an affront to the republic – it was something far more familiar and far less defensible: political hostility toward Israel, dressed up as concern for state authority.

Israeli officials did not arrive in the Eastern Cape to dictate policy, extract resources, or undermine the constitutional order. They arrived to offer clean drinking water, medical assistance, and agricultural support to some of the poorest communities in one of South Africa’s most chronically misgoverned provinces. They engaged openly with traditional leaders and local communities facing daily realities of water shortages, unsafe sanitation, and preventable disease.

The response by the African National Congress (ANC) was not gratitude or even neutrality. It was outrage. The Eastern Cape premier denounced the initiative as “sinister”, complained of “interference”, and invoked sovereignty. Within days, South Africa expelled Israel’s senior diplomat.

This posture would carry more weight if it were accompanied by competence. It is not. The same provincial government crying foul presides over a water system in which only 70% of households have access to piped water, nearly 40% experience regular interruptions, and almost half still rely on pit latrines. E. coli contamination, cholera cases, and beach closures are not foreign impositions; they are the consequences of decades of corruption, collapse, and neglect.

Sovereignty is not violated when outsiders help people whom the state has failed. It is violated when the state uses its monopoly on authority to block lifesaving assistance in order to protect political narratives. The ANC’s true fear was that Israel’s work in the Eastern Cape would expose that the entire edifice of its policy towards the Jewish state was fraudulent. Israelis helping poor black South Africans, outside party structures and without ideological choreography, punctured the image, so carefully cultivated in South Africa’s foreign ministry, of cruel and corrupt Jews spewing their hate and poison around the world.

The expulsion was therefore not about law or protocol. It was about ideology and optics. Jew hatred, for the better part of a decade embedded in the ANC’s foreign policy posture, was being afforded a convenient legal pretext.