On October 5, 2024 Sheikh Riad Fataar declared, “We are all Hamas.”

Fataar — who is the president of the Muslim Judicial Council (MJC), a large Muslim organization in South Africa — delivered this message at a rally in Cape Town. Fataar’s comments and other actions coming out of South Africa reflect an open embrace of Hamas, the terrorist group that massacred 1,200 Israelis and kidnapped another 250 people last year on October 7.

In South Africa, support for Hamas and hostility for Israel isn’t limited to Muslim clerics.

President Cyril Ramaphosa described October 7, 2023, as “the start of an onslaught against the Palestinian people” rather than a murderous and antisemitic attack on Jews.

Ramaphosa also invoked past grievances to justify Hamas atrocities. The week after the October 7 massacre, he cast the event as a consequence of the “occupation of Palestine,” as if killing women and children and raping girls at a music festival is the inevitable outcome of disputes over land.

Ramaphosa also compared Israelis snatched out of their beds and held in dungeons in Gaza to Palestinians imprisoned in Israeli jails for plotting, supporting, or carrying out terror attacks against Israelis.

But this support for Hamas isn’t new.

The South African government’s friendship with Hamas extends back to at least 2006, when it was one of the few countries to recognize the terrorist group’s victory in Palestinian parliamentary elections.

Pretoria’s ruling party affirmed this relationship by hosting Hamas delegations in 2015, 2018, and even during the current war.

Then, in December 2023, the South African government established itself as Hamas’ lawyer on the global stage by initiating an International Court of Justice (ICJ) case accusing Israel of committing genocide.

Though US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and others have described the case as “meritless,” the proceedings have nevertheless helped normalize the outlandish charge of Israeli “genocide,” and increased political pressure against Israel. By doing so, South Africa has rewarded Hamas’ strategy of endangering Palestinian civilians for political gain.

The government’s open support for Hamas helps explain Sheikh Fataar’s declaration of allegiance to Hamas. Fataar similarly said in September 2024 that the whole world was praising Hamas and bragged about the meetings that his organization has held with Hamas leaders, including Khaled Meshaal and the late Ismail Haniyeh.

The October 5 rally at which Fataar spoke featured large pictures of leaders from Hamas, Hezbollah, and other terrorist groups. Signs declaring “Death to Zionism,” “Death to Israel,” “We are Hamas,” and praise for the “Al-Aqsa Flood” — Hamas’s name for the October 7 attack — dominated the procession of thousands.

Al Jama-ah Party chief Ganief Hendricks, who is a member of South Africa’s cabinet, clarified how he worked to bring about “Death to Zionism.”

Hendricks said, “I call the Parliament in South Africa to arm the resistance in Palestine. I invited Hamas to Parliament. I’m not sure whether they got the weapons, but soon after my call, they came to parliament.” Hendricks went on to say that he went to Iran and “asked Iran to give weapons,” and that Israel “needs to be wiped off the face of the Earth.”

Hendricks is hardly the only member of his party openly embracing Hamas. In November 2023, Thapelo Amad, a Johannesburg city councilor from the Al-Jama-ah Party, posted a picture of himself holding an assault rifle with the caption, “We stand with Hamas.” 

In his rally speech, Imtiaz Sooliman, director of Gift of the Givers, a humanitarian organization, crossed the line between violent anti-Zionism and rank antisemitism. Sooliman declared that “Zionists … run the world with fear. They control the world with money.”

Seemingly aware of the anti-Jewish stereotypes he employed, Sooliman continued, “And every time you say something, they terrify you and they say you’re antisemitic.” Gift of the Givers and the MJC were part of the Union of Good, according to the union’s website in the early 2000s. The United States sanctioned the union in 2008 for funding Hamas.

President Joe Biden or his successor should determine if the South African government has disqualified itself from receiving trade and investment benefits under the African Growth and Opportunity Act by supporting Hamas’ political objectives and engaging “in activities that undermine United States national security or foreign policy interests.”

And the US Department of the Treasury should investigate — and possibly sanction, depending on the results of those investigations — South African leaders who declare or demonstrate that they “are all Hamas.”

David May is a research manager and senior research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy. Follow David on X @DavidSamuelMay. Follow FDD on X @FDD.

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