Examining the DA's moral abdication in the face of Gaza's crisis
Opinion
DA's Helen Zille’s dodge is no personal quirk. It is a symptom of the DA’s very character.
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HELEN ZILLE has never been short of words. Yet when Newzroom Afrika posed the simplest of moral questions, echoed by the findings of leading human rights organisations and independent investigators, whether she believes a genocide is unfolding in Gaza, she suddenly discovered the virtue of silence.
First, she dodged with the evasion that genocide is a big word. She further replied that she has not visited Gaza and that the DA has not discussed this. It was an answer at once cowardly and revealing: cowardly in its refusal to confront reality, revealing in the way it exposed the DA’s deepest instincts.
South Africa has placed its moral capital on the line by hauling Israel before the International Court of Justice (ICJ). In a world often numbed to Palestinian suffering, Pretoria has reminded humanity that law can still be a vessel of conscience.
Yet the DA, a party now ensconced in the Government of National Unity (GNU), cannot even bring itself to utter the word genocide. What explains this? It is the DA’s long record of racial myopia, its connections to influential Zionist donors, and its alignment with neo-colonial interests.
The DA likes to advertise itself as the party of efficiency, of technocratic order. Its faithful invoke the myth that it governs municipalities better, that it is a modern, pragmatic antidote to ANC corruption. But this myth dissolves the moment one looks closely.
Take the Tafelberg school debacle in Cape Town, which is now before the Constitutional Court, where the DA government sought to sell off a public asset to a private Jewish school rather than use it for desperately needed low-income housing.
The message was clear: the comfort of privilege mattered more than the dignity of the poor. It was also a signal to the DA’s Zionist donors that their interests outweighed the desperate need for social redress. Their supposed efficiency has also failed the people of the Western Cape.
Despite years of DA rule, Cape Town has some of the highest levels of violent crime in the country. Gang violence continues to ravage communities with little serious intervention. In the black squatter settlements, where citizens live without proper sanitation, water, or safe housing, the DA’s efficiency is conspicuous only in its absence.
This is the DA’s efficiency. The DA’s efficiency appears to prioritise the interests of privileged groups, reflecting a perceived bias. It is the efficiency of white minority arrogance, polished with the bureaucratic language of good governance.
Zille’s evasions on Gaza are not an aberration. They fit seamlessly with her earlier claim that colonialism was not all bad. That remark reflected a particular worldview. To excuse the most violent system of dispossession in history as having some redeeming features is to reveal an indifference to suffering when the sufferers are not white.
And so, when the bombs rain on Gaza, when hospitals and schools are reduced to rubble, when children die under the rubble of collapsed homes, the DA cannot quite bring itself to call this genocide. The DA has hesitated to use the term genocide, despite the suffering of Palestinians.
South Africa’s black majority can read this silence for what it is. The DA postures as the guardian of liberal democracy, but its liberalism is selective and deeply colonial. It is liberalism for those with property, not for those who have only their humanity. It is liberalism that treats Gaza’s mass graves as a debating point rather than a moral catastrophe.
The party’s donors reportedly discourage the use of the term genocide. And so, the DA tiptoes, hedges, equivocates. That is why Zille finds genocide to be a big word. Indeed, it is a big word, because it threatens the DA’s donor base and unsettles its ideological comfort zone.
When DA MP Ghaleb Cachalia broke ranks to call Israel’s savagery by its proper name genocide, he was removed from his post and left the party under contested circumstances, proof that the DA does not merely avert its gaze from genocide, it punishes those who dare to see it.
At moments of historic trial, political parties are measured not by their efficiency at collecting rates or repairing potholes, but by their willingness to stand for principle. The ANC, for all its failures, has recognised that history will remember where South Africa stood when Gaza was in ruins. The DA has shown that it will be remembered for something else: its refusal to answer a moral question, its preference for ambiguity over justice.
Zille’s dodge is no personal quirk. It is a symptom of the DA’s very character. This is a party that dresses up racial privilege as administrative competence, which treats colonialism as a tolerable blemish, and that cannot summon moral clarity when confronted with the extermination of a people.
Its instincts are also revealed in repression at home. Under DA governments, there have been allegations of heavy-handed policing, particularly during protests by disadvantaged communities. Even anti-genocide demonstrators have felt its hostility. It is perverse to claim the DA has not engaged the question of genocide; in Bo Kaap, it has zealously policed street art honouring Palestinian resistance to genocide.
The DA may continue to win applause in certain white suburban areas and among some foreign investors aligned with a neo-colonial perspective. But the country’s majority will not forget who flinched when asked to name a genocide, nor who unleashed the police against the powerless. Nor, in the long run, will history.
In Gaza, lives are extinguished daily. In South Africa, a party entrusted with power cannot summon even the courage to utter the word. Silence in the face of atrocity is complicity. South Africa has stood before the world and credibly accused Israel of genocide at the ICJ.
Zille and the DA have shrunken from even acknowledging the question. History will record that while the nation took its stand for justice at The Hague, the DA opted for silence and cautious calculation.
* Ziyad Motala, Professor of Law, Howard Law School
** The views expressed in this article are necessarily those of The African, IOL or Independent Media.