In this 6 March clip from his speech to the South African National Assembly, revolutionary Julius Malema asserted that South Africa will not bend to the will of the US despite its bullying tactics, such as aid cuts and threats of sanctions. Instead, South Africans would continue standing in solidarity with the Palestinians.
The US and South Africa have been embroiled in geopolitical tensions since Cape Town announced a new law that seeks to address the uneven distribution of land in a country where white settlers, who comprise less than 8 per cent of the population, hold over 70 per cent of private farmland. European colonialists and the apartheid regime dispossessed Black South Africans of their lands for decades.
Malema (@julius.malema.sello on IG, @julius_s_malema on X), president of the Pan-African political party, Economic Freedom Fighters (@effsouthafrica), argued that the Trump administration’s outrage over alleged ‘racial discrimination’ against white settlers and the unfounded claim of ‘white gnocide’ in South Africa has little to do with the land expropriation law. He said these claims obscure that the US has been lobbying and threatening on behalf of its ally, Israel, over South Africa’s case claiming Israel violated the UN Gnocide Convention in Gaza.
The US has bankrolled $22.7 billion for Israel’s onslaught of Palestinians since 7 October 2023. According to the Lancet medical journal, Israel had k*lled as many as 186,000 people by early July 2024.
Video credit: @parliamentofRSA (X)
Sources
https://dirco.gov.za/south-africa-delivers-evidence-of-israel-genocide-to-icj/
https://pepfarwatch.org/pepfar-funding-freeze/
https://www.gov.za/sites/default/files/gcis_document/201802/landauditreport13feb2018.pdf
https://www.cfr.org/article/us-aid-israel-four-charts
https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/papers/2024/USspendingIsrael