South African President Cyril Ramaphosa attacked U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday in an article in which he criticized the U.S. for its sanctions on the International Criminal Court (ICC), and also viciously attacked Israel.
Trump restored sanctions on the ICC earlier this month, which had been reversed by President Joe Biden. Trump had sanctioned the ICC in his first term for “illegitimate assertions of jurisdiction over personnel of the United States and certain of its allies.” His concern was that the ICC would seek to arrest and prosecute Americans over alleged “war crimes” committed in Afghanistan, even though the U.S. is not party to the Rome Statute that establishes the ICC.
Biden revoked Trump’s sanctions while stating that the U.S. “continues to object to the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) assertions of jurisdiction over personnel of such non-States Parties as the United States and its allies.”
Trump slapped the sanctions back into place earlier this month, citing “illegitimate and baseless actions targeting America and our close ally Israel.”
The ICC issued arrest warrants in November for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant over supposed “war crimes” in Gaza after Israel responded to the massive terror attack of October 7, 2023, in which Hamas murdered 1,200 Israelis and abducted 250 more.
In a joint article in Foreign Policy, Ramaphosa, together with the leaders of Malaysia and Columbia, and the director of the newly-formed, anti-Israel “Hague Group” (which includes Cuba, and claims to uphold human rights). wrote:
For more than 500 days, Israel, enabled by powerful nations providing diplomatic cover, military hardware, and political support, has systematically violated international law in Gaza. This complicity has dealt a devastating blow to the integrity of the United Nations Charter and its foundational principles of human rights, sovereign equality, and the prohibition of genocide.
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Yet, despite these rulings [by the International Court of Justice and the ICC], the violations persist, enabled by nations that brazenly challenge the world’s top courts—with sanctions on officials, employees, and agents of the ICC and open defiance of the court’s orders.
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Our governments will comply with the warrants issued by the ICC against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, emphasizing appropriate, fair, and independent investigations and prosecutions at the national or international level; we will prevent vessels carrying military supplies to Israel from using our ports; and we will prevent all arms transfers that risk enabling further violations of humanitarian law.
The article does not mention Hamas, or terror, once, and portrays the Gaza conflict as if Israel has been the aggressor, attacking without provocation.
Ramaphosa is listed as the lead author.
The article comes less than two weeks after Trump issued an executive order in which he cut off aid to South Africa, and offered asylum to Afrikaner farmers, listing among the reasons: the fact that “South Africa has taken aggressive positions towards the United States and its allies, including accusing Israel, not Hamas, of genocide in the International Court of Justice.”
Ramaphosa’s article is a direct violation of South Africa’s obligations under the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), a trade deal under which the U.S. gives preferential access to its markets to certain African countries.
The text of AGOA states:
The President is authorized to designate a sub-Saharan African country as an eligible sub-Saharan African country if the President determines that the country … does not engage in activities that undermine United States national security or foreign policy interests; and… does not engage in gross violations of internationally recognized human rights or provide support for acts of international terrorism and cooperates in international efforts to eliminate human rights violations and terrorist activities.
AGOA expires at the end of the fiscal year in September, and there is a risk that it will not be renewed or that South Africa will be excluded.
In 2023, a bipartisan group of legislators in Congress, representing leaders within the House and Senate foreign affairs committees, wrote to then-President Joe Biden to ask him to consider excluding South Africa because of its government’s apparent support for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
South African leaders had been scrambling for a way to respond to Trump’s criticisms, with several delegations to the U.S. already under way.
Ramaphosa appears to have decided on confrontation with Trump, rather than compromise.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days, available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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