By Glen Retief
I’m a dual citizen of South Africa and the United States, having relocated here as a young adult three decades ago. Like many immigrants, I love both my adoptive and birth countries.
For most of my time here, South Africa and the US have been close friends. Both nations are freedom-loving, multicultural democracies. Both are working hard to overcome horrifying racial histories.
With its progressive constitution, its entrepreneurial culture, and its sophisticated universities, scientists, and businesses, South Africa has been the US’s pre-eminent partner in Africa since apartheid ended in 1994.
Nowadays, though, the relationship between my two parent countries is looking strained.
First came BRICS, the alliance of leading emerging economies—Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—a group formed to counterbalance American and Western economic power.
Then Russia invaded Ukraine. Like India, another Global South democracy gravitating toward China and Russia, South Africa initially prevaricated, before eventually condemning Russia’s invasion.
This was a time when my adoptive country, the United States, made me proud. The United States rallied NATO. It helped Ukraine defend itself. It led a commanding majority of UN member states to vote to unequivocally condemn Russia’s aggression.
By contrast, South Africa’s response was embarrassing. South Africa abstained in the UN vote, complaining, in the words of President Cyril Ramaphosa, that the resolution “did not foreground the call for meaningful engagement.”
This statement made me wonder at the scorn Ramaphosa would have heaped on a country that, say in the 1980s, abstained on a resolution condemning apartheid, on the grounds that it did not call vigorously enough for dialogue between the regime and the liberation movements.
Then, on October 7, Hamas brutally attacked Israel, which retaliated by bombing a captive Gaza into an uninhabitable moonscape, deliberately cutting off water, food, and electricity to 2.2 million civilians, and killing at least 24 000 people, most of them women and children.
Last week, South Africa pressed charges of genocide against Israel for this military response. South Africa did not dispute that Israel had a right to defend itself against Hamas.
Rather, it argued that the combination of genocidal statements by leading Israeli officials, along with military tactics that have left millions homeless, starving, injured, and without medical care, amounted to an effort to “destroy a people.”
Implicit, though unspoken, was the claim that the United States, as Israel’s key military and diplomatic supporter, was complicit in a crime against humanity.
No wonder, perhaps, that America furiously dismissed South Africa’s arguments.
“Meritless,” fumed Secretary of State Anthony Blinken. “Counterproductive and without basis,” said National Security Adviser John Kirby.
This time round, I found myself in the exactly the reverse situation from March 2022. Now, it was my native country that made me proud. Meanwhile, it was the US government that disconcerted me, by, as Bernie Sanders put it, apparently writing a blank check for Israel to commit what almost all human rights organizations agree are grave war crimes.
The International Court of Justice will rule on whether all of this constitutes “genocide.” Nevertheless, to me and most of my fellow South Africans, whatever the correct legal terminology, it is clear that South Africa is on the right side of history here, and the United States conversely on the side of oppression.
After South Africa’s presentation in the Hague, South Africans overwhelmingly rallied to support our government. This included, significantly, many Jewish South Africans: in November, a list of 700, including artist William Kentridge, published an open letter calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.
It is true that the United States and South Africa are almost perfectly positioned to be at odds over Israel and Palestine. The United States has historically been, with Israel, a global center for Jewish emancipation.
Many Jewish Americans lost ancestors in the Nazi Holocaust. Images of Jewish youth slaughtered at music concerts and grandmothers kidnapped from their homes naturally inspire intense sympathy for Israel.
Meanwhile, Black and progressive South Africans link Palestinians’ struggles for self-determination to our own battles against apartheid. As no less than Nelson Mandela put it, in 1997, “[O]ur freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.”
Where does this leave me? As a South African American, I still have to shake myself, sometimes, watching my two home countries apparently drift to opposite sides of the global community.
Both of our nations cherish liberty. We both oppose occupations, whether in Ukraine or Palestine. Both of us back self-defense.
If, despite all this, my two countries do become bitter enemies, where will I belong?
Like a child watching his parents divorce, intellectually, I may understand the reasons. Emotionally, though, the rift saddens me.
Glen Retief’s The Jack Bank: A Memoir of a South African Childhood won a Lambda Literary Award. He writes an occasional column for the South African Daily Maverick; teaches Creative Nonfiction at Susquehanna University; and served a 2021-22 Fulbright US Scholar in Mamelodi, South Africa. He writes here in his personal capacity.
