Shut down the Israeli Embassy: SA’s moral duty in face of covert Palestinian transfer

THE scenes at OR Tambo International Airport in recent weeks should haunt this country.

- PROFESSOR YUSUF CHIKTE

Palestinians stepping off covert flights, dehydrated, exhausted, stripped of their belongings, and clutching nothing but a passport and the clothes on their backs, are arriving from a genocide manufactured with cold, industrial precision.

Their journey carries an eerie echo: the Jewish refugees who fled Nazi Germany with nothing but their lives. But this time, the persecutor is not a fascist regime confined to the history books. It is the Israeli state and the global network of Zionist organisations that enable, defend and operationalise its crimes.

Together, they appear to be engineering the forced removal of Palestinians from Gaza under the guise of “humanitarian evacuation”.

This is ethnic cleansing by stealth, and South Africa can no longer allow the Israeli Embassy or versions of it to operate as a node in this machinery of dispossession.

These flights set a precedent for coerced transfers and operationalise a drive towards the mass expulsion of Palestinians.

In February 2025, Israel and the US proposed forcibly removing Palestinians from Gaza. Arab states rejected calls to take them in, and rights groups labelled it ethnic cleansing.

A disturbing flight path

On October 28, the first group of 176 Palestinians arrived in Johannesburg without Israeli exit stamps, B/2 forms, return tickets, confirmed accommodation, or any of the documentation normally required for international travel. Immigration officials processed them and granted the standard 90-day visa exemption.

When a second group of 160 arrived on November 14, however, everything changed.

The Border Management Authority (BMA) detained them on the aircraft for almost 12 hours. Infants cried in the heat. Water and food were delayed for hours. Several passengers required medical attention. Only after President Cyril Ramaphosa intervened were they allowed to enter.