Faced with an upsurge in xenophobic sentiment and having seen the country on tenterhooks over last week’s March and March demonstrations, Minister of Justice and Constitutional Development Mmamoloko Kubayi has warned darkly that this is part of a foreign destabilisation campaign.

In an interview, the minister linked the protests to South Africa’s case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) – although treading carefully in not directly accusing Israel of doing so. “Israel fights,” she nevertheless said. “That court case is huge on their shoulders. And they will fight back in a manner that seeks to show South Africa is not a country with moral authority to advocate for human rights.”

Kubayi provided no concrete evidence of this, stating: “I can’t discuss that in public. Let me be generic.”

This echoed claims by Minister of International Relations and Cooperation Ronald Lamola a month ago that “with South Africa’s role in the international space, including our case at the ICJ, you cannot exclude state and non-state actors trying to erode the human rights standing of South Africa.”

Similar allegations have been put to The Common Sense but not in a manner which would allow anything to be verified.

Allegations of a surreptitious Israeli hand behind March and March have been circulating for weeks, and have been seized on by social media users and by some public commentators. One Facebook user commented that since both Ghana and Nigeria maintain cooperative relations with Israel, their condemnation of South African xenophobia could be understood as an effort to isolate South Africa from the continent to benefit Israel.

No evidence of this has been produced. March and March founder Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma told a media briefing that she only knew about Israel from the Bible, and that the assertion that foreign powers were funding the movement was built on racist assumptions about what motivated black people.

These sentiments echo a long-standing history by the South African government and the African National Congress (ANC) of attributing to foreign influence what is more readily explained by South Africa’s internal dynamics. As far back as the ANC’s Mafikeng Conference in 1997, then-President Nelson Mandela launched a full-blown attack on civil society groups for accepting funding from abroad, implying they were serving the political agendas of foreign governments. This point has been made on several occasions subsequently. (It is also deeply ironic, given that the ANC was a major recipient of foreign funding, even once in office, and Mandela had been active in soliciting it. There remains speculation about the extent of its current funding from abroad.)

Xenophobia, meanwhile, has been a stubborn feature of South African political life for decades. Given South Africa’s presumptive leadership of the continent, it has also been a deeply embarrassing one.

Localised outbreaks of xenophobic agitation and violence have been reported since the 1990s. Xenophobia was highlighted as a significant challenge in the 2007 report on South Africa by the African Peer Review Mechanism, a pan-African governance monitoring programme linked to the African Union. The government at the time hotly disputed this finding.

However, in 2008, sixty-two people were killed in widespread riots directed at foreigners in South Africa. These included a number of people who were naturalised citizens of the country.

Since then, the issue has recurred regularly, in occasional attacks on foreigners, in public mobilisation, and in rhetoric from public figures. This includes from senior incumbents in politics and government. For example, in 2015, then-Water and Sanitation Minister Nomvula Mokonyane objected to the “subtle takeover” of the economy of South Africa’s townships.

In recent years, an anti-migration social movement and political party, Operation Dudula, has gained considerable traction.

Meanwhile, the South African government has gone to considerable lengths to undermine its own standing on human rights (through selective condemnation, and tolerance of the abuses perpetrated by regimes to which it is sympathetic), as well as its foreign relations with the West.

The reality is that hostility to migrants resonates with many South Africans. A report by the Human Sciences Research Council found that in 2025, some 42% of South Africans opposed all immigration. This is a full ten percentage points above the level in 2003. A survey by the Inclusive Society Institute in 2025 found that 73% of South Africans expressed distrust towards migrants from elsewhere in the continent. A poll by Afrobarometer in 2025 found that close to 48% would dislike having foreigners as neighbours.

Coupled with a bleak economic outlook and largescale failures of governance, it is hardly surprising that political entrepreneurs have mobilised on this issue.

This newspaper has also previously warned that the reckless scapegoating of particular groups – whites, farmers, Indians, homosexuals, migrants – invariably spills onto others. It fosters divisions and misdirects public attention from solutions to genuine concerns. This has often been driven by people and parties within the government.