South Africa leads efforts to eject Israel from African Union
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa is leading a
continental campaign to cancel Israeli regime’s status as an accredited
observer at the African Union (AU) this weekend.
African leaders will decide on Sunday if the apartheid regime
of Israel should continue as an observer at the African Union.
The usurper Israeli regime was accepted as
an observer to the AU by the chairperson of the African Union Commission Moussa
Faki Mahamat in August last year.
The Israeli apartheid
regime’s admission followed wooing of Africa using unorthodox means
particularly by the regime’s former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
According to the
dailymaverick website, South Africa in particular, leading the Southern African
Development Community (SADC) and Algeria, leading some African members of the
League of Arab States, objected to Faki’s decision.
International Relations
and Cooperation Minister Naledi Pandor complained then that the AU Commission
had taken this “unjust and unwarranted decision… unilaterally without
consultation with its member states.”
The decision was
inexplicable as the AU had already strenuously objected to Israel’s illegal
occupation of Palestine, which “offends the letter and spirit of the Charter of
the AU… especially on issues relating to self-determination and
decolonization,” she wrote in The
Star.
“The world continues to
witness some of the most horrific scenes of brutality and violence exercised
against Palestinians living in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.”
Faki defended his
decision on the grounds that AU rules give him the right to admit observers,
but South Africa has pointed out that he was also obliged to take into account
the views of member states.
And so Pandor and others
formally objected to the decision at a meeting of the AU’s Executive Council —
of foreign ministers — in Addis Ababa last October. But the foreign ministers
couldn’t resolve the issue and referred it to the heads of state to deal with
at the AU’s ordinary summit this weekend, also in Addis Ababa.
Analysts say the
decision is threatening to break it up this Pan-African body. The AU generally
prefers to decide by consensus, but the Israeli issue is too divisive for
consensus and so will be decided by a vote, says Shewit Woldemichael, a
researcher with the Institute for Security Studies (ISS) in Addis Ababa.
She told an ISS seminar
this week that between 21 and 26 of the AU’s 55 member states seemed to be
aligned with South Africa and Algeria in pushing for a reversal of Faki’s
decision to admit the Israeli regime.
The outcome could depend
on technicalities. Woldemichael said if the AU heads of state and government
decide to treat the issue as procedural — i.e. as a matter of overturning
Faki’s decision because he went about it the wrong way — then it will take a
simple majority either way to decide.
But if the leaders deem
it as a substantive issue, it will require a two-thirds majority vote to get
the Israeli regime admitted, a far higher bar to surmount for the pro-Zionist
regime lobby.
Israeli regime’s bid for
admission to the AU comes amid the publication this week of an Amnesty
International Report entitled; Israel’s
Apartheid Against Palestinians; Cruel System of Domination and Crime Against
Humanity.”
It says; “The
organization has concluded that Israel has perpetrated the international wrong
of apartheid, as a human rights violation and a violation of public
international law…
