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The South African Zionist Federation (SAZF) has condemned the latest developments in South Africa's case against Israel at the International Court of Justice as the final unmasking of a political stunt that was never about the law, never about facts, and never about saving a single life.

By the Presidency's own admission this week, South Africa has secured a timetable that will see written pleadings drag on until at least May 2029, with Pretoria itself only obliged to file its Reply in November 2027. A case launched two years ago amid breathless claims of "urgent", "imminent" and "irreparable" harm has now been quietly stretched out over the better part of a decade, at South Africa's own request.

The contradiction is total. You cannot stand before the world and insist that a genocide is unfolding before our eyes, demanding emergency measures within weeks, and then turn around and plead for an extraordinary eighteen-month extension to put your arguments on paper. Either the matter is the gravest emergency in international law, or it is something the South African government is content to leave parked at The Hague until 2029. It cannot be both.

The Presidency's statement of 2 June, insisting that a second round of pleadings is "common", is spin of the most transparent kind. It is an attempt to dress up a delay that South Africa itself sought as a routine procedural footnote, in the hope that the public will not notice who asked for the extra time. South Africans should notice. The "urgency" that justified this entire campaign has evaporated into a request to buy time, and the government is now hoping nobody draws the obvious conclusion.

That conclusion is simple. This was always a propaganda exercise dressed up as a legal process, a campaign waged on behalf of Hamas in the chambers of an international court rather than in service of any South African interest. It has done nothing for the people of Gaza, nothing for the South African citizens in whose name it is supposedly pursued, and nothing to free the hostages Hamas seized on 7 October, every one of whom is now home in spite of this case, not because of it.

The Presidency's slogan that "self-defence is not a defence to genocide" is a rhetorical trick that assumes the very thing South Africa has spent two years failing to prove. There is no genocide. There is a sovereign state defending its citizens against Hamas, an internationally designated terrorist organisation that massacred, raped and abducted them on 7 October, that embeds itself among civilians, and that has sworn to repeat its atrocities. South Africa's government has had nothing to say about any of this. Its moral compass points in one direction only, and it is not towards justice.

Craig Pantanowitz, National Chairman of the SAZF, said: "The mask has slipped. A government that claimed the world's most urgent humanitarian emergency has just asked for years to argue about it. And it is asking South Africans to keep paying for the privilege. More than R130 million of taxpayers' money has already been poured into this case, with tens, if not hundreds, of millions more to come now that the proceedings have been stretched out to 2029. The South African people are entitled to ask why their leaders can find that kind of money, and that kind of energy, for a multi-year vanity case at The Hague, while having no answer for the crime, unemployment and collapsing services that South Africans face every single day. This case was never about Gaza. It was about politics, about service to the ANC's international friends and allies, and about distracting from a record of failure at home."

The SAZF calls on the South African government to abandon this discredited campaign, to stop acting as the diplomatic arm of Hamas, and to redirect its considerable energy towards the South Africans who actually elected it. The collapse of this case at the ICJ is not a setback for the government. It is an opportunity to come to its senses.

Issued by South African Zionist Federation