Former South African Cabinet minister Ronnie Kasrils exuberantly praised the Hamas terror attack of October 7, in which roughy 1,200 Israelis were murdered, calling it “brilliant, spectacular,” and “damned good.”
Video of Kasrils’s rant at a public lecture was posted online:
October 7 “brilliant, spectacular… will go down in the annals of guerrilla warfare and resistance”. – Ronnie Kasrils, former South African minister of intelligence and deputy minister of defence, and former commander in Mkonto we Sizwe. pic.twitter.com/LX2cl9qQiZ
— na’eem jeenah (@NaeemJeenah) November 26, 2023
The attack — brilliant, spectacular, guerrilla warfare attack, which will go down in the annals of guerrilla warfare and resistance, along with the Vietnamese and others, they surprised the Israeli Gaza division, that has locked them in [sic], that controls the beleaguered Gaza, and has been responsible for killing, murdering, maiming, Gaza people in five previous all-out wars [sic], where so many children and women died, and you know about that. They swept on them, and they killed them, and damned good! I was so pleased. And people who support resistance applauded, absolutely. If we had been able to spring a surprise on the Boers, and knock down 100 of them, the people would have been rejoicing to the rooftops. It’s the struggle, the armed struggle, and in international law, the occupied law, agreed, accepted international law, that they have the right to that kind of resistance.
Kasrils, who is a communist but plays on his Jewish ancestry in opposing Israel, is wrong on the facts and the law. Israel no longer occupied Gaza after 2005 and did not “lock in” the population; it allowed limited numbers of Gazans to work in Israel.
There have not been five “all-out” wars; Israel largely refrained from ground invasions in recent conflicts, all of which were started by Hamas and other terror organizations, which have launched rockets at Israel in an effort to kill Israeli civilians.
Kasrils is wrong about a so-called “right’ to resist occupation violently. In fact, the Hamas attack was a brazen violation of international law, and targeted civilians — including children, women, and the elderly. Roughly 240 were taken hostage.
Notably, Kasrils tried to stage a violent uprising in South Africa after being allowed back into the country in the early 1990s. He led dozens of people to their deaths in what became known as the Bisho massacre, nearly upending negotiations to end apartheid.
South Africa and Israel have seen a deterioration of relations since October 7. The South African government took a position sympathetic to Hamas even before Israel had responded. Though Kasrils is out of office, his views on Israel are widely shared by the South African government and the ruling party, the African National Congress (ANC). Though the general South African population is not vehemently anti-Israel, the country’s left-wing elites are.
The South African constitution bars hate speech.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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