GOOD Statement by Brett Herron,
GOOD Secretary-General
15 May 2025
Nakba Day, today, commemorates the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from what was previously known as British Palestine – “the catastrophe” – to create the State of Israel on 14 May 1948. A few weeks later, thousands of kilometers away, the National Party, with its policy of apartheid, was voted into power by the White South African electorate, on 4 June 1948. Both Israel and South Africa enacted policies that stripped indigenous people of their land rights and dignity, conferring second class status on those allowed to remain and herding the rest into ethnic enclaves.
The struggles against apartheid in Israel and South Africa were thus born in lockstep. It is this shared history that led former President Nelson Mandela to declare that South Africans couldn’t be free until Palestinians were free, too. And it is in the context of the two nations shared bitter experiences that South Africa sought relief at the International Court of Justice, on behalf of Palestinians, to stop Israel’s now-19-month genocide in Gaza.
Israel’s response has been to sharpen its brutality. More than 50 000 Palestinians have been killed and virtually all of Gaza’s infrastructure destroyed in ongoing aerial and ground assaults – to which Israel in March added the imminent threat of famine by implementing a blockade of goods and services essential for human life. Another catastrophe loading. A disproportionate number of women, children, medical workers, humanitarian workers and journalists are already included in the number of dead. Now, children are particularly vulnerable to malnutrition. The implementation of what are essentially starvation tactics directly contradicts a United Nations Security Council resolution unanimously approved in 2018. But those with the power to stop Israel are sitting on their hands.
These events are not Muslim or Jewish issues, or about Islamophobia or Anti-Semitism, or anti-Americanism, or any other identity prejudice; they are about human rights and international law.
The GOOD Party commends the South African State for its consistent advocacy for justice in Palestine. Its advocacy has adversely affected what has been an important economic relationship for South Africa with the US – and hopefully will be, again. Relationships can be mended. When they are, South Africa’s values as a non-racial constitutional democracy will stand the country in good stead.