Galloway carries Jaffa family's exile story to Cape Town

In Yellowknife, a remote city in Canada’s northwest, George Galloway met a Palestinian family from Jaffa. Their home lay far away. For Galloway, that distance said everything about the scale of Palestinian displacement: generations scattered into refugee camps and exile, far from the land they came from. It was that story of dispersal he carried with him to Cape Town this week, where he told a room of journalists and campaigners that South Africa’s genocide case against Israel had opened what he called a second age of the country’s greatness.

Galloway, a former British MP, was speaking at a media breakfast at the Bo-Kaap Cultural Hub alongside British journalist and author Yvonne Ridley. The event formed part of their People Power Tour, which focuses on Palestine and broader human rights questions. The conversation ranged across South Africa’s international role, the destruction in Gaza, colonialism and the duties of journalists, but it kept returning to the case South Africa has brought before the International Court of Justice.

For Galloway, that case was the point of the morning. South Africa’s first age of greatness, he argued, was its own liberation from apartheid; the second was its role in seeking to liberate Palestine. He credited the country’s legal team and its government for pursuing the case, saying the contribution to humanity made by taking Israel to the world court should not be underestimated by South Africans themselves.

He was candid, though, about his expectations of the court. “I’m not expecting anything very much from the ICJ,” he said. For him, the case functions as political theatre, and political theatre, in his view, is powerful and important: it focuses attention on Palestine and on the responsibility of other countries. The proceedings dominated much of the breakfast discussion, he noted, and are being debated around the world.

The facts of the case are stark. South Africa brought it under the Genocide Convention. The ICJ has issued three binding provisional-measures orders intended to protect Palestinians in Gaza, but it has not delivered a final judgment on whether Israel has committed genocide. Israel denies committing genocide. In August, South Africa submitted a further dossier alleging that Israel had failed to comply with the provisional orders; the international relations department said the submission reaffirmed the country’s commitment to international law and multilateral institutions.

Asked why he used the word genocide, Galloway pointed not to the scale of destruction alone but to what he described as intention: the aim, as he saw it, of removing Palestinians from their land. He drew a contrast with apartheid South Africa, where the white minority needed black South Africans as a labour force and a consumer base. In Palestine, he argued, the objective was to possess the country while excluding its people. “They intend to deport or destroy all of the Palestinians,” he said. Whether the evidence establishes the specific intent required under the Genocide Convention remains before the court.

Meanwhile, Galloway framed American pressure on South Africa as punishment for its stance. Washington’s support for Israel, he argued, had made the two countries effectively one, so closely aligned that debating which was the other’s proxy no longer captured the relationship. He placed South Africa’s court action within a wider struggle over whether countries in the Global South can hold powerful states and their allies to account.

Ridley turned the discussion towards journalism itself. Having entered the profession 50 years ago, she argued that Palestine had exposed failures in Western reporting, particularly in the language used for death and destruction. Describing Palestinians as “losing” their children or their lives, she said, obscured the violence responsible. “Impartiality is a myth in journalism,” she said, arguing that the profession’s core task is giving a voice to oppressed people, and that what reporting needs is context and balance. Asked how words connect to action, she said journalists must understand their influence: reporting can mobilise people, but misleading language can direct them towards the wrong target. “Words, I think, are the tinder towards a fire,” she said.

Both speakers urged sustained public pressure while the legal process runs its course. When Ridley was asked what campaigners should do if their efforts seemed insufficient, she reached for South Africa’s own history: “You have to keep on going.” International solidarity during apartheid, she argued, had sometimes been greater than people inside the country could see through mainstream reporting, and digital communication now lets campaigners connect across borders more immediately.

Galloway, for his part, recalled his own anti-apartheid years, when Jewish activists in Cape Town housed and supported him during visits in the 1980s. He warned against stretching accusations of terrorism and anti-Semitism so broadly that the terms lose their meaning, insisting that hatred of Jews is real but that support for Palestinian rights should not automatically attract the charge. Governments sympathetic to Palestine, he said, have a duty to use the powers available to them.

His closing prediction echoed the arc of South Africa’s own history: support for Palestinian freedom would one day become widely accepted, as opposition to apartheid did. “If not me, my children will live in a time where everyone will claim that they had been on our side all along,” he said.