By Elize Soer
Since South Africa accused Israel of carrying out a genocide in Gaza more than a year and a half ago, the situation has only grown more catastrophic. In a surreal twist, South Africa now finds itself accused of “white genocide” by far-right voices. Its moral stand is thus reflected back at it in grotesque parody. We can think about this absurd situation as a product of what Naomi Klein calls the “mirror world,” where powerful groups co-opt the rhetoric and aura of resistance to oppression while inflicting atrocities on others.
More than eighteen months have passed since South Africa accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza at the International Court of Justice (ICJ). At the time, as a response to an attack by Hamas on 7 October, Israel had already launched a bombing campaign of breathtaking scale and cruelty, destroying hospitals and water infrastructure and flattening entire neighborhoods. Since then, the situation in Gaza has deteriorated further: In addition to the thousands of Palestinians killed in bombing campaigns, the Israeli blockade of humanitarian aid has engineered “a silent catastrophe” of famine. The provisional measures ordered by the ICJ to prevent genocide have thus clearly gone unheeded.
The case nonetheless carries a powerful symbolic value. South Africa is an icon of both the devastation wrought by colonialism and the dream of its transcendence. The leaders of the anti-apartheid movement, particularly Nelson Mandela, are seen as embodiments of moral clarity in the face of imperial persecution. Israel has been described as an apartheid state by various human rights organizations, including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, and South Africa’s solidarity with the Palestinians lends further moral weight to these claims.
Indeed, there are deep-rooted historical ties between the South African anti-apartheid movement and the Palestinian liberation struggle—not only because of shared experiences of oppression, but also because of the mutually beneficial relationship between the apartheid regime and Israel. Apartheid was inaugurated in 1948—the same year Israel was founded after the Palestinian Nakba or catastrophe. The military collaboration between Israel and apartheid South Africa, particularly in the realm of nuclear enrichment, was accompanied by a peculiar kind of ideological affinity. Although many apartheid supporters were antisemitic, they echoed the Israeli belief that they were God’s chosen people and had a biblically ordained right to the land they occupied.
The continued support of the United States (U.S.) and most of Western Europe for Israel should be contextualized within the longer history of Western colonialism. Some early Zionists were self-described colonists and did not hesitate to compare their occupation of Palestine to British settler colonialism. For example, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the founder of the Revisionist Zionist Party, stated that “Zionist colonization” must be “carried out in defiance of the will of the native population. This colonization can, therefore, continue and develop only under the protection of a force independent of the local population– an iron wall which the native population cannot break through.” Although Jabotinsky was not necessarily representative of Zionists at the time, many contemporary members of the Israeli government are followers of his thought. Moreover, key Western powers provided support for the apartheid regime in the name of fighting communism in southern Africa, just as they provide support for Israel under the guise of fighting terrorism. It is therefore not coincidental that South Africa is leading the ICJ case against Israel and that most Global South countries have endorsed it.
Summarily, the ICJ case is imbued with the weight of history and has become a totem of anti-colonial efforts in a supposedly postcolonial world.
Even as the U.S. continues to provide unconditional support for Israel’s genocide, President Donald Trump accused South Africa of committing genocide against its historically privileged white minority. These accusations have, thankfully, not made it into a formal setting like the ICJ, but they are taken seriously in far-right circles that wield disproportionate influence on policy. While I previously reflected on the fiction of white genocide and its symbolic value for the global right, a parallel consideration of South Africa’s factual genocide case in the ICJ and the fictional white genocide can provide insight into our contemporary political landscape and the weaponization of victimhood.
The Mirror World
In the “mirror world”, the rhetoric and aura of political resistance became co-opted by right-wing political figures. Particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic, these figures warped legitimate skepticism of Big Pharma into anti-vaccine conspiracies. The trend continues with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the new U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services, channeling frustration with the food system into harmful health misinformation. White supremacists are not simply positioning themselves as the “real victims” of racial discrimination, but are also using the language of the Civil Rights Movement to do so, even citing Martin Luther King Jr.
Of course, there is a long history of white people positioning themselves as uniquely at risk, which the literature on “white victimhood” and “white fragility” discusses so well. Yet, the co-optation of discourses from Black liberation movements is particularly striking. Analogously, men’s rights groups are claiming that men are oppressed and use language that could have been copied from feminist manifestos to make their case. For example, the Sydney Men’s Network writes about the “systematic social mistreatment of men” and insists that “to achieve our liberation, men need to be recognized as an oppressed group.” They actively compare their oppression to the mistreatment of “people of color”. Trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs) do not simply victimize transgender people; they do so in the name of women’s liberation, again positioning themselves as the “true victims.” We can make sense of each of these developments by speaking of white fragility or male entitlement, but the notion of the “mirror world” strings them together and positions them in a particular zeitgeist.
The white genocide myth in South Africa is thus an extreme iteration of a broader pattern: white Americans who claim to be oppressed by affirmative action, right-wing Europeans who accuse immigrants of replacing them, and right-wing Zionists who argue that any critique of Israel is inherently antisemitic and existentially threatening.
In each case, those with power frame themselves as under attack, adopting the language of suffering in an attempt to shield themselves from accountability and even increase their dominance.
This is not to discount variation—the white genocide in South Africa is mythical, while antisemitism and the horrors of the Holocaust are very real. Yet, the memory of the Holocaust and the awful history of Jewish persecution are being mobilized to immunize the Israeli state from critique, as many Jewish groups have pointed out. These examples are also permeated by the paranoia and post-truth inflection so characteristic of the mirror world.
The South African Stance
It is rather unsurprising that the vast majority of South Africans express solidarity with Palestinians. In addition to the ICJ case brought by the ruling African National Congress (ANC), other political parties, such as the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), hold regular marches and have called for boycotts of Israeli-linked companies. Various civil society groups like Healthcare Workers 4 Palestine and the campus-based BDS Coalition likewise support the Palestinian struggle for self-determination. There are nonetheless divisions. Most significantly, the Democratic Alliance (DA), South Africa’s second-largest political party and a member of the governing coalition, claims to hold a “neutral” position and does not support the ICJ case.
Few groups actively support Israel, with notable exceptions such as the right-wing Freedom Front Plus (FF Plus). After the 1994 election that ended apartheid, the FF negotiated with the ANC to create a Volkstaat, or white homeland, for Afrikaners. Although the Volkstaat did not come to fruition (with the possible exception of Orania), the FF Plus still aims to make the Cape an independent state for Afrikaans-speaking people, including people historically classified as Colored. The FF Plus has recently begun pandering to other minority groups to increase its electoral support, which currently stands at 1.36 percent of the vote, but it remains fundamentally a white supremacist and Afrikaner nationalist party. Yet it uses the language of self-determination developed by anti-colonial movements to promote its cause. It is thus no coincidence that the Party couches its support for Israel in the language of self-determination and sees Israel as an ally.
The Solidarity Movement, which comprises various far-right Afrikaner nationalist organizations, is at least partly responsible for disseminating the fiction of a white genocide in South Africa. It also supports Israel and has spoken against the ICJ case. It thus co-opts the language of condemning genocide and human rights abuses, even as it supports a very real genocide, serving as a prime example of how dominant groups can adopt claims of victimhood and wield them as a form of power.
The factual and fictional genocide cases South Africa has become embroiled in offer an apt illustration of the bizarre logic of the mirror world. The very language South Africa uses to speak about the plight of Palestinians—dispossession, apartheid, genocide—is reflected back at it, grotesquely distorted, to accuse it of the crimes it denounces. The irony is even sharper when one recalls that many of these terms stem from the experiences of Black South Africans.
Breaking the Mirror
Across continents, groups in privileged positions claim to be the most aggrieved. They weaponize the rhetoric of fighting injustice and the aura of resistance for oppressive ends. In many cases, they project their own colonial crimes onto others and imagine themselves as at risk of extermination. In the U.S. and South African cases, the fear of a “great replacement” or white genocide is clearly a fiction. In contrast, Jewish people, who should not be conflated with the Israeli state, carry a traumatic history that cannot be forgotten. However, this history must serve as a teacher, not a shield or excuse to carry out unspeakable atrocities. We must insist that “never again” means “never again” for everyone, including Palestinians.
Breaking the logic of the mirror world requires clarity about who holds power, who suffers, and who benefits from the status quo. It also entails dismantling the infrastructures of perception that value white lives more highly and allow dominant groups to appropriate the language of oppression. Finally, amid all the distractions and fictions of the mirror world, it is important to keep our gaze firmly fixed on the real victims in Gaza. Even if South Africa’s ICJ case has not ended the genocide, it holds up a different kind of mirror that more accurately reflects the moral emptiness of the world’s most powerful states.
Elizabeth Soer is a South African currently working as a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies (MPIfG) in Cologne, Germany. Her research focuses on socio-economic imaginaries in the Global South, particularly in southern Africa.
This article is published under the sole responsibility of the author, with editorial oversight. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the editorial team or the CEU Democracy Institute.
