From South Africa to Palestine: Trump's war to defend apartheid
US President Donald Trump’s executive order suspending aid to South Africa was framed as a righteous intervention. He positioned himself as the defender of an embattled minority, wielding sanctions to punish a government he accused of racial discrimination.
His target? A land-reform policy aimed at dismantling the entrenched economic and structural inequalities left by apartheid.
To his supporters, the story was simple: white farmers under siege, land confiscated without cause, another battle in the so-called war on western civilisation.
But the truth is far more insidious. This is not about justice. It is about shielding the last remnants of apartheid, propping up settler-colonialism, and preserving a world order built on racial and territorial supremacy.
Trump did not act alone. Behind him stood two powerful forces: a network of libertarian billionaires with ties to apartheid-era South Africa, and the pro-Israel lobby, both long invested in maintaining systems of racial and territorial dominance.
Elon Musk looms largest among them. More than just the billionaire face of Tesla and SpaceX, he is a key figure in the so-called “PayPal Mafia”, a tight-knit circle of ultra-wealthy libertarians, many from South Africa’s white elite.
Peter Thiel, one of Trump’s most influential backers, was educated in a southern African city where Hitler was still openly venerated. He champions the supremacy of economic power over democracy, and has even questioned whether women should have been granted the right to vote.
David Sacks, another major figure in Musk’s inner circle, was born in Cape Town and raised in the privileged world of the white South African diaspora. Roelof Botha, the former CFO of PayPal, has an even more direct connection to apartheid’s old guard: his grandfather, Pik Botha, was the last foreign minister of South Africa’s apartheid regime.
Colonial project
These men are not outliers. They are the modern heirs of a colonial project that was never truly dismantled. Raised within a system that treated racial and economic hierarchy as natural law, they now wield their wealth and influence to protect its legacy.
Their opposition to South Africa’s land reforms has nothing to do with fairness. It is about safeguarding a status quo where land remains in white hands, long after apartheid’s official demise.
Ironically, Musk’s public embrace of antisemitic conspiracy theories and Nazi imagery has done little to dent his standing among pro-Israel elites. When he appeared to give a Nazi salute during a speech in Washington last month, outrage erupted - but instead of condemnation, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) defended him.
Netanyahu called Musk “a great friend of Israel”, while the ADL - usually quick to brand pro-Palestinian activists as antisemitic - downplayed the incident as merely an “awkward gesture”.
This selective outrage is no accident. Musk may flirt with Nazi imagery, but as long as he supports Israeli apartheid, he remains politically useful.
Standing alongside this billionaire class is Miriam Adelson, Trump’s largest financial backer and one of the architects of his pro-Israel policies. She has poured more than $100m into his campaign, more than any other donor, and made her expectations clear.
In a recent interview, she spoke of Trump’s “unfinished business” in Israel, openly advocating for the annexation of the West Bank. For her, Trump is the key to fulfilling a vision of Israeli expansionism that has been decades in the making.
It is no coincidence that these two forces - libertarian billionaires with South African roots and the pro-Israel lobby - have aligned behind Trump’s apartheid-reinforcing policies. Their alliance is not new; it is deeply entrenched in history.
Shared ideology
For decades, Israel and apartheid South Africa were bound by a shared ideology and mutual interests. When the world turned its back on South Africa, Israel remained its most loyal ally.
In 1976, Israel’s prime minister at the time, Yitzhak Rabin, toasted his South African counterpart, John Vorster, a former Nazi sympathiser and leader of a pro-Hitler militia, declaring that the two nations faced a common struggle against “foreign-inspired instability”.
Behind the scenes, their relationship ran even deeper. Israel helped build South Africa’s arms industry, providing technology in exchange for funding.
Together, they developed military systems, intelligence networks, and most damningly, South Africa’s nuclear programme. It was an open secret: Israel supplied the know-how, South Africa supplied the money.
The ideological bond was just as explicit. South Africa’s apartheid government made no effort to disguise its worldview, stating in an official publication that “Israel and South Africa have one thing above all else in common: they are both situated in a predominantly hostile world inhabited by dark peoples”.
This alliance collapsed only when apartheid officially ended. But the underlying ideology - the belief in racial superiority, the right of a select group to seize land and rule over others - did not vanish. It evolved, found new champions, and gained new political patrons.
Cast as victims
Trump’s attack on South Africa has nothing to do with economic freedom or justice. It is about defending the consequences of apartheid.
At the heart of his executive order is South Africa’s Expropriation Act, a law designed to correct centuries of racialised land dispossession.
For generations, Black South Africans were systematically driven from their land, forced into barren “homelands”, while white settlers claimed the country’s most fertile soil. Even today, three decades after apartheid’s fall, around 75 percent of South Africa’s private farmland remains in white hands, despite white South Africans making up only seven percent of the population.
The Expropriation Act does not mandate mass land seizures. It simply establishes a legal framework to reclaim abandoned land or land acquired through racial privilege, under strict conditions.
Trump’s response? Sanctions. South Africa must be punished for attempting to right historical wrongs. White landowners must be cast as victims.
Yet this same Trump, who condemns land redistribution in South Africa, has spent his political career endorsing and legitimising Israeli land grabs in Palestine.
His hypocrisy does not end there. He denies South Africa the right to decide how to deal with land within its own borders, while pushing for US control over land beyond its own. He has floated the idea of buying Greenland from Denmark, entertained seizing Canada, discussed taking over the Panama Canal, and now unabashedly rants about owning Gaza.
Extreme ambitions
Trump has aligned himself with Israel’s most extreme territorial ambitions, declaring that Israel is a “tiny little spot” in the Middle East and should be enlarged.
He stands alongside Israeli extremists like Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who has openly called for Israel’s expansion from the Nile to the Euphrates, and settlers likeDaniella Weiss, who envisions annexing parts of Saudi Arabia. The same man who insists that South Africa must not alter its colonial land ownership patterns is eager to redraw maps to suit his own imperial ambitions.
In Israel, far-right leaders speak openly about expanding beyond the West Bank - into Jordan, Egypt, and even Saudi Arabia. These are not fringe ideas. They are mainstream.
Recent polls show that around 80 percent of Israelis support the forced transfer of Gaza’s population, while only three percent of Israeli Jews believe it to be immoral.
Trump is not just complicit in these policies. He is their champion.
He claims to protect white landowners in South Africa while emboldening illegal settlers in Israel. He offers asylum to Afrikaners, while blocking Palestinians from entering the United States.
The irony was not lost on South Africa’s foreign ministry, which responded with biting sarcasm: “It is ironic that the executive order makes provision for refugee status in the U.S. for a group in South Africa that remains amongst the most economically privileged, while vulnerable people in the U.S. from other parts of the world are being deported and denied asylum despite real hardship.”
Act of resistance
It was no accident that South Africa took the lead in bringing Israel before the International Court of Justice, accusing it of genocide in Gaza. More than just a legal battle, the case is a defiant act of resistance - one that underscores South Africa’s unwavering commitment to dismantling oppression, and highlights the deep, inextricable ties between the struggles against apartheid and colonialism.
But for this act of courage, it now faces retribution. Trump and the Israel lobby are determined to make it pay.
South Africans know apartheid when they see it.
John Dugard, a renowned South African lawyer and former UN human rights monitor, drew a stark parallel: “Apartheid was all about land.” It was about reserving the best parts of the country for whites, while relegating Black South Africans to the most barren, least habitable areas. The same dispossession has been unfolding in Palestine, he noted.
Ronnie Kasrils, a Jewish South African and former cabinet minister, was even more direct: “Apartheid was an extension of the colonial project to dispossess people of their land.” That is precisely what has happened in Israel and the occupied territories - the systematic use of force and legal manipulation to facilitate dispossession. “That is what apartheid and Israel have in common.”
Nelson Mandela, who understood the common roots of colonial subjugation, left no room for doubt. His words remain a rallying cry for justice: “Our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.”
The question before the world is not merely whether South Africa will be sanctioned for daring to challenge apartheid’s persistence, nor whether Israel will be granted full sovereignty over occupied land. The real question is whether the world will once again allow colonialism, racism and apartheid to dictate its moral order.
Because from Johannesburg to Gaza, from Pretoria to the West Bank, the struggle is one.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.