South Africa’s President, Cyril Ramaphosa, has been touring many countries in a bid to persuade potential investment into our country which is currently facing economic hardships. We have a large number of young people who are without jobs, while others are likely to be retrenched from their current jobs.
The Boycott, Divestment & Sanctions (BDS) movement have been working very hard to ensure that South Africans distance themselves from anything to do with Israel. We were previously told that we should not purchase at one of the largest stores, Woolworths. This campaign was never successful, as the very same people leading the campaign are the ones who consume products from Woolworths.
We are now told that the Israeli company, Central Bottling Company (CBC), should not take over one of the biggest South African dairy company’s, Clover. The reasons, justification, and rationale furnished to prevent the transaction between CBC and Clover are absurd. The reality is that we need foreign direct investment to be able to address unemployment, poverty and inequality issues. Pretoria cannot allow a group of people to regress its achievement by their subjectivity.
There is no single country in the world which has a perfect political system that is consistently stable. Even the biggest democracies, such as London and Washington, are currently facing some kind of political instability. Israel and Palestine have seen each other as enemies for many years. Many attempts have been made by key stakeholders such as the United Nations (UN), UK, USA, and many Arab countries, however, none of them were successful.
Israel is not the only country in the world which has an occupation situation to deal with. We have China which has occupied Tibet for many years (since 1948) yet, Pretoria is trading with China. There is a sad case of the occupation of Western Sahara by Morocco, yet Pretoria has never been hostile to Morocco (one of the African states). Moscow has used its military to occupy the Crimean Peninsula from 2014 until to date.
Our country is deliberately being misled by the BDS-SA with regards to the Israel-Palestine status quo. They are propagating hatred against the Israeli state. In any conflict situation, there are no good or bad guys, everyone is a victim. The BDS is working hard to win the support of South Africans against the Israelis, and it is clear that they are advocating for the extermination of Israel & Israelis.
We should all acknowledge that there is political tension between Israel-Palestine, however, we should all work towards finding peace and stability for the people of Israel & Palestine rather than fuelling violence between the Israel Defence Force (IDF) and the armed Hamas group.
As stated earlier, the Pretoria administration has previously been trading with other countries which have conducted themselves in untoward behaviour. But we have only seen South Africa acting against Israel, while they do not say a word when the U.S Army, under George Bush militarily, occupied Iraq for many years.
Our foreign policy direction should not be guided by emotions, we should be guided by the interests of our people. Our people are without jobs, many cannot afford tertiary education, however, the BDS has the guts to chase potential investors away!
There are unions (workers association) which have been politicised to an extent that they have been told that Israelis are “bad guys”. Sadly, these unions do not first think of their own constituency (workers). We must always put our country and its people first.
