MARIAM JOOMA ÇARIKCI

The notion of South Africa as a “rainbow nation” was first articulated by Archbishop Desmond Tutu in the euphoric years following the 1994 democratic transition. It was embraced as a poetic affirmation of unity—an image of a country where racial wounds could be healed under a shared national identity. Yet, as decades of persistent inequality, land dispossession, and racialised poverty make clear, this metaphor has proved wholly inadequate in explaining the chasm between South Africans’ lived realities. Far from dismantling structural privilege, “rainbow nation” discourse has often served as a comforting veneer for those insulated by apartheid’s legacies. In recent years, its selective deployment by South African Zionist actors has revealed a darker continuity: a willingness to invoke the language of harmony and coexistence to obscure the fundamentally apartheid nature of Zionism. That rhetorical sleight of hand is no accident—it draws on a long-standing historical relationship between apartheid South Africa and Israel, where both ideologies have sought legitimacy through narratives of civilisation, security, and shared “Western” identity.

This is why the news—breaking via the Good Party’s Brett Harron—of a clandestine joint Democratic Alliance (DA) and Patriotic Alliance (PA) delegation to Israel lands with such clarity. It comes at a moment when relations between members of the fragile Government of National Unity (GNU) are already strained. And it is a trip to the very state that the South African government has taken to the International Court of Justice (ICJ)—a state now presiding over a declared famine in Gaza and, as of 30 July 2025, responsible for the killing of over 63,000 people^{[1]61,805 Palestinians[4] and 1,983 Israelis[C]) have been reported killed in the Gaza war according to the Gaza Health Ministry (GHM) and Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs. See also 1) mail&gardian 2) Source: presstv for further estimates of the death count.} of whom 83% innocent civilians, including at least 250 journalists. This figure is conservative in my estimation as there are thousands under the rubble and now dying from famine. The ICJ has found that Israel’s actions plausibly amount to genocide and reaffirmed that its occupation of Palestinian territories is illegal under international law.

To see why this trip is not an aberration but part of a longer political lineage, we must recall that South Africa’s white political establishment has long found common cause with Zionism. Milton Shain’s study on antisemitism in South Africa details how, in the 1930s, the Aliens Act (1937) restricted Jewish immigration amid fears of “Semitic over-representation” in commerce and the professions. But after World War II, Prime Minister D.F. Malan abandoned anti-Semitic rhetoric when it became politically counterproductive, forging a strategic alliance with the Jewish community.

When the National Party extended the vote to Jews, it was not merely a gesture of demographic convenience—it was a calculated manoeuvre to consolidate white power, neutralise dissent within white society, and co-opt economically influential minorities. This cemented Jewishness as securely “white” and South African, on the condition of accepting the logic of exclusion and white supremacy. As Gideon Shimoni explains in Community and Conscience: The Jews in Apartheid South Africa (2003):

“Despite being socially suspect, Jews were fully enfranchised as whites in terms of political rights… By the time apartheid laws were passed in the 1950s, Jews were firmly incorporated into the white political class.”

This incorporation carried geopolitical implications. Israel became a crucial partner to apartheid South Africa—selling billions in arms, from missile boats to radar systems, and entering into secret military agreements by 1975. By 1979, both were jointly developing nuclear-capable missiles, with declassified reports confirming Israeli assistance in South Africa’s nuclear weapons programme.

These arrangements were not just military—they were ideological. In both cases, the state’s survival was framed as the defence of a “civilised,” embattled minority against a hostile majority. The same logic that justified white minority rule in Pretoria also underpinned Zionist apartheid in Jerusalem. And just as the apartheid state incorporated Jews into the white bloc, Zionism has relied on white liberal and conservative allies worldwide to launder its image.

In South Africa, this meant a political shift: Jewish voting patterns moved from support for more progressive parties towards the National Party. Data from Jewish-heavy constituencies such as Hillbrow, Berea, and Sea Point show significant NP gains, illustrating how racial inclusion—on apartheid’s terms—translated into political loyalty. This alliance came at a moral cost, one that Jewish anti-apartheid activists like Dennis Goldberg and Joe Slovo refused to pay, choosing instead to stand on the side of universal human equality.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) could have challenged this complicity but ultimately offered only a fig leaf of moral reckoning. By allowing perpetrators to verbalise regret without providing structural redress, it helped soothe the conscience of apartheid’s beneficiaries while leaving their privilege intact. For institutions like the South African Jewish Board of Deputies, political “neutrality” during apartheid was a cover for maintaining influence within the white bloc—while using Holocaust memory to deflect criticism of complicity.

Seen in this light, the DA and PA’s 2025 trip to Israel—undertaken in the midst of famine and mass death—is less a break from their past than its logical continuation.

It echoes DA leader John Steenhuisen’s 2021 visit, also justified as “engagement with both sides,” though no Palestinian leadership was met.

Rainbow Nation discourse must therefore be shunned for what it is: a Disneyfied fantasy of happy coexistence for those cushioned by privilege, desperately clinging to it even at the expense of universal human rights. The DA and PA’s Israel visit rips away the illusion, revealing the long-standing ideological partnership between apartheid South Africa and Zionism—an alliance in which the rhetoric of reconciliation has always been a mask for the preservation of power.

In a moment when famine stalks Gaza’s children and 100,000 lives have already been extinguished, “both-sides” rhetoric is not diplomacy—it is moral bankruptcy. It is the language of those who cannot, or will not, confront the reality that neutrality in the face of mass atrocity is a choice that history will judge as complicity.