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. 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.

New reporting from the Palestine Chronicle and Haaretz has exposed Al-Majd, the dodgy organisation at the centre of these operations. It markets itself as a humanitarian agency that “rescues Muslim communities from conflict zones.” But its website is barely three years old, registered to a non-existent German address, and - according to Haaretz - run by an Israeli-Estonian citizen, Tomer Yanar Lind.

Na’eem Jeenah, a South African scholar, is reported as saying that Al-Majd is linked to Israeli interests and possibly to the Shabak (Israel’s internal security service). The organisation’s methods bear the hallmarks of coercive control:

- Gaza residents pay between $1 500 and $5 000 for evacuation.

- They receive late-night calls ordering them to report the next morning with only a small rucksack.

- At the Kerem Shalom crossing, Israeli personnel confiscate their bags, leaving them with only a passport, cell phone, money and the clothes on their backs.

- They are bused to the Israeli Ramon Airport, placed on unmarked charter flights, and never informed of their final destination.

- Passengers have been given decoy hotel vouchers for Kuala Lumpur and Mumbai, only to end up in South Africa.

This is not “humanitarian rescue.” It is the machinery of ethnic cleansing in a system designed to depopulate Gaza and scatter Palestinians across the world, disconnected from each other, with no pathway home.

A journey born of genocide

The Palestinians arriving in South Africa are survivors fleeing a genocide: a deliberate campaign that has killed tens of thousands, starved children to death, destroyed hospitals, flattened neighbourhoods, poisoned water supplies and blocked humanitarian aid. It is deliberate Israeli policy with a strategy to make Gaza unliveable and to force Palestinians to leave.

Senior Israeli officials speak openly of "facilitating transfers", “encouraging voluntary migration” and ensuring there will be “no return to Gaza.”

When people are starved, bombed, traumatised and then pushed through crossings controlled by the very army that has slaughtered their families, it is not voluntary migration. It is forced transfer and illegal under international law and a crime under the Rome Statute. The stripping of belongings is not incidental. It is calculated. A Palestinian without luggage, documents or proof of residence can later be denied re-entry, as Israel routinely does despite international law giving the refugees a right to return. Israel can say: They left voluntarily. This is ethnic cleansing, not only by bomb, but now also by airplane.

Global Aviation

At the heart of this saga are basic questions Global Aviation, the airline company reported operating the chartered plane transporting the Palestinians, has yet to answer: who first approached them to transport Palestinian passengers to South Africa, under what mandate, and on whose behalf?

The public still does not know the identity of the contracting party, whether it was an individual, a private company, or an entity linked, directly or indirectly, to Israeli agencies operating internationally. Nor is it clear what Global Aviation was actually contracted to do, whether this was framed as a humanitarian mission or a private charter, or whether the company was asked to perform immigration-related tasks beyond normal flight operations. Equally troubling is the absence of transparency around documentation and compliance: who verified passengers’ travel papers, who liaised with South African authorities, and whether any irregularities emerged.

Even the basic logistics, the point of departure, the route flown, and the authorities notified along the way, remain unanswered. These are not technicalities; they go to the core of accountability in what increasingly appears to be a highly coordinated operation executed in the shadows.

South Africa is being used as a destination for ethnic cleansing

South Africa’s liberal visa regime and symbolic moral standing make it a convenient endpoint for Israel’s displacement project. The question is not whether Israel knows this is happening. The question is: to what extent is it orchestrating it?

The evidence is mounting:

- Al-Majd is reportedly linked to Israeli intelligence structures.

- Israel’s Ministry of Defence referred the organisation to COGAT, the military authority administering the occupation.

- Refugees arrive without exit stamps, B/2 forms, or return tickets.

- Routes are concealed and belongings deliberately confiscated.

All of this points to a coordinated system: a low-visibility mechanism to depopulate Gaza while Israel wages high-visibility exterminatory violence on the ground.

Local Zionist networks are the foot soldiers of this project

Civil society and humanitarian groups in South Africa worked tirelessly in  assisting the Palestinians. Dr Imtiaz Sooliman, Founder and Chairman of Gift of the Givers, worked around the clock to offer humanitarian assistance. No displacement project happens in isolation.

In South Africa, a powerful ecosystem of Zionist organisations, an assortment of communal bodies, lobby groups, media hacks, business elites with IDF links, and well-funded foundations that has long defended Israeli policy, attacked critics, and attempted to silence civil society. But now their complicity is more direct. While South African civil society mobilised lawyers, doctors, food and emergency support for the arriving Palestinians, these Zionist bodies remained conspicuously silent. Their silence is political. It is a form of participation in the crime.

Some have aligned themselves with Israeli officials and have helped launder the narrative that these arrivals were “irregular travellers” rather than survivors of genocide seeking protection. Others maintain close ties to Israeli intelligence networks, helping to normalise and obscure Israel’s role in these covert transfers. This ecosystem is not neutral. It is an extension of Israel’s foreign policy and are unregistered, unaccountable, and operating with impunity.

The Israeli Embassy must be shut down

An embassy is an expression of the state it represents. And Israel is not a normal state. It is a state committing genocide, violating binding orders of the International Court of Justice, bombing refugee camps, enforcing starvation and implementing an apartheid system that international law forbids. Allowing Israel to operate on South African soil means hosting the political, economic, diplomatic command centre of an apartheid regime that is actively engaged in ethnic cleansing.

Boycott, divestments and sanctions by the international community played a significant role in dismantling apartheid in South Africa. A full boycott, divestment and sanctions policy against Israel will end Israeli immunity and accelerate the dismantling of Israeli apartheid. President Cyril Ramaphosa should sign into law a 2023 parliamentary resolution to sever diplomatic ties with Israel and shut down its embassy in Pretoria. Shutting down the Israeli Embassy is not symbolic. It is the minimum ethical act required of a nation like South Africa that endured its own crimes against humanity and pledged “Never Again” for anyone.

South Africa must refuse to be a backdoor for a New Nakba

We cannot allow:

- Private airlines to participate in covert transfers;

- Israeli-linked operators to manipulate passengers through our borders;

- Embassy officials to breach diplomatic make and make a mockery of our sovereignty;

- Local Zionist networks to act as de facto foreign agents;

- or our immigration authorities to become instruments of ethnic cleansing.

South Africa must launch a full public investigation into these flights, hold accountable any officials who violated refugee law, guarantee protection for Palestinians already here, and ensure that our territory is never again used as a dumping ground for a coloniser’s unwanted population.

Our moral responsibility

When Palestinians fleeing extermination land at OR Tambo, dehydrated, terrified and stripped of their belongings, they are not merely travellers. They are survivors of a genocide. South Africa owes them dignity, protection and solidarity. But we also owe it to ourselves, to our own displaced communities, to ensure that ethnic cleansing does not pass through our borders disguised as humanitarian evacuation.

Professor Yusuf Chikte is the coordinator of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, in Cape Town

** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media. 

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