Trump cuts aid to South Africa over its ICJ case against Israel, Iran ties

South Africa is “undermining” US foreign policy and thus “poses national security threats” to America and its allies, said the executive order.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Friday cutting American aid to South Africa, citing, among other reasons, the country’s legal case against Israel in the Hague and South Africa’s ties to Iran.

“South Africa has taken aggressive positions towards the United States and its allies, including accusing Israel, not Hamas, of genocide in the ICJ, and reinvigorating its relations with Iran to develop commercial, military, and nuclear arrangements,” the order noted.

Pretoria, a harsh critic of Israel for many years, led the charge last year to accuse the Jewish state in the ICJ of committing genocide in the Gaza Strip in its defensive war against Hamas after the terror organization massacred 1,200 people in shootings, beheadings, burnings, and mass rapes during its October 7th, 2023 invasion.

Israel has robustly defended its actions in the Strip to the Court, including by citing its low ratio of two noncombatants’ deaths to every terrorist killed, which is unheard-of in military conflicts. Much of its success in limiting civilian casualties was due to warning civilians out of battle zones ahead of time and forming humanitarian corridors so they could leave safely, although this lost the IDF the element of surprise.

Trump’s order also sharply criticized the South African government of “disregard of its citizens’ rights” in enacting an Expropriation Act that would make it easy to confiscate land from white Afrikaners without compensation, maintaining “countless” policies that would reduce equal rights, and engaging in actions “fueling disproportionate violence against racially disfavored landowners.”

White Afrikaners own some 75% of the freehold farmland in the country.

“The United States cannot support the government of South Africa’s commission of rights violations in its country or its undermining United States foreign policy,” the order declared, “which poses national security threats to our Nation, our allies, our African partners, and our interests.”

All American agencies, including the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), were ordered to halt their assistance to Pretoria.

A back door was left open by the caveat that an agency head could permit provision of aid if the head deems it “necessary or appropriate.”

The order also introduced a policy of “promot[ing] the resettlement of Afrikaner refugees escaping government-sponsored, race-based discrimination.”

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa responded by saying that his country “will not be bullied” by the United States.

The government’s Department of International Relations and Cooperation put out a statement charging that the “foundational premise” of the order “lacks factual accuracy” and was the seeming result of a “campaign of misinformation and propaganda.”

It ignored the foreign policy aspect of the order, only calling it “ironic” that it “makes provision for refugee status in the US for a group in South Africa that remains among the most economically privileged, while vulnerable people in the US from other parts of the world are being deported and denied asylum despite real hardship.”