How South Africa quietly powers Israel’s war on Gaza, by Thomas Karat
As Gaza is destroyed under relentless Israeli bombardment, a constant stream of ships depart South Africa’s Richards Bay brimming with coal. Their destination: Hadera, Israel.
And there were many. As headlines screamed of war crimes, famine, and bombed hospitals, bulk carriers quietly steamed northward, carrying the fuel that would power Israel’s military infrastructure.
At the very moment South Africa’s legal team accused Israel of genocide at The Hague, its privately owned terminals were exporting the resources that kept Israeli drone stations, radar networks, and weapons factories running. The contradiction was not symbolic—it was structural.
This is not a story of diplomatic oversight. It is a blueprint of state-level duplicity: how liberationist rhetoric and extractive capitalism converge to sustain the very violence they claim to oppose.
Distinct Professor Patrick Bond discusses the dubious relation between Israel and South Africa in this interview.
https://youtu.be/Kay1FgQCNTM?si=fr24pbWezr8H-aZj
Apartheid’s Echo: From Uranium to Coal
This relationship isn’t new. During the 1980s, apartheid South Africa and Israel were partners in secrecy. The two pariah states—one condemned for its racial regime, the other increasingly isolated post-1967—traded arms, intelligence, and energy. Both regimes were under international pressure: South Africa due to its racialized dictatorship, Israel due to its occupation of Palestinian territories.
In 1979, a U.S. surveillance satellite detected a mysterious double flash over the South Atlantic—a suspected nuclear test jointly conducted by South Africa and Israel. While denied, declassified documents suggest deep nuclear cooperation. South Africa enriched uranium at Pelindaba; Israel supplied weapons design. The two shared not just ideology but infrastructure, operating in what was effectively a strategic alliance of outcasts.
This nuclear pact included uranium shipments, joint missile tests, and, according to sources like Sasha Polakow-Suransky, even discussion of Israeli warhead sales. The Vela Incident over the South Atlantic may well have been the culmination of this arrangement. As recently as 1986, when Israeli nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu leaked details about the Dimona reactor, further indirect evidence of South African collaboration emerged.
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In 2024, this legacy took a new form. The same Richards Bay port that once shipped uranium oxide now shipped coal, bound for Israeli plants like Orot Rabin and Rutenberg—powering the software, servers, and satellite systems used in one of the most destructive campaigns in Gaza’s history.
This is not irony. It is historical recursion. The same corridors of complicity, repackaged for a new era.
The Power Grid of War
In wartimes like now, Israel’s offshore gas fields—Tamar and Leviathan—are too exposed. Coal-fired stations become critical redundancies. Orot Rabin in Hadera and Rutenberg in Ashkelon together provided over 4,800 megawatts—electricity essential to the seamless operation of war.
Coal does not teleport. It moves in massive quantities via global logistics networks: from South African mines, to Richards Bay, to intermediary traders, to Israeli ports. This flow was uninterrupted throughout the siege of Gaza. It was pre-arranged, commodified, and concealed within standard commercial practice.
These weren’t just power plants. They were operational platforms. They powered drone command hubs, AI targeting systems, real-time strike coordination. And their fuel came, in part, from a state accusing Israel of apartheid.
Energy security in Israel is synonymous with military resilience. The electricity fed not only civilian grids but also hardened bunkers, cyberwarfare nodes, and missile shield networks. To sustain its war-fighting capacity, Israel needed uninterrupted power. South African coal helped guarantee that.
Take Orot Rabin: the plant’s high-capacity turbines fed power directly into the national grid used to support surveillance and strike operations in southern Israel. Technicians working in underground bunkers relied on uninterrupted flow to process thousands of hours of UAV footage. Servers running facial recognition algorithms used to track Gazan civilians drew from this energy. The war may have been fought with precision, but its precision was powered by foreign fuel.
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And this wasn’t a one-off glitch in policy. It was a logistical norm. The vessels that departed Richards Bay were not clandestine; they were registered, documented, and insured. The contracts were legal, binding, and continuous.
Theatrics Abroad, Silence at Home
Pretoria moved aggressively on the diplomatic front—recalling ambassadors, filing legal briefs, declaring Israel’s actions genocidal. South Africa rebranded itself as the conscience of the Global South, drawing parallels between Gaza and apartheid-era townships.
But behind the scenes, no emergency trade halt was issued. No export controls. Not even a symbolic moratorium.
This wasn’t an oversight. It was calculated duality.
The ANC needed Gaza for electoral credibility, but it needed coal for fiscal stability. The party’s post-liberation mythos required moral outrage; its survival demanded quiet extraction. The performance in The Hague was for the world. The fuel contracts were for Glencore, ARM, and the donors who bankroll ANC politics.
The contradiction was not between foreign policy and commerce. It was between performance and principle. Public virtue ran parallel to private interest, with no plans for them to intersect.
Who Got Paid?
President Cyril Ramaphosa, before politics, was a mining mogul. His former company, Shanduka, co-owned coal assets with Glencore. Though divested in 2014, family networks endured. His brother-in-law, Patrice Motsepe, chairs ARM—joint venture partner with Glencore in ARM Coal, a key exporter through Richards Bay.
As Israeli demand surged, these firms profited. Shipping volumes spiked. Futures contracts soared. ANC donor disclosures revealed coal-linked entities funneling millions into party coffers. This wasn’t shadowy corruption—it was institutionalized patronage.
In Israel, coal imports were handled through multi-jurisdictional firms—shells in Singapore, Cyprus, Dubai—earning profits on markups and delivery contracts. Utility operators like the Israel Electric Corporation routed funds to local contractors tied to defense-linked conglomerates. The profits circulated through trusts, pension funds, and portfolios linked to Israel’s political and business elite.
Even companies involved in unrelated sectors—such as construction or chemicals—saw share price stability because of their indirect role in maintaining the state’s wartime infrastructure.
Some of these profits traveled full circle. Analysts tracking commodity trades and political funding have pointed to donations from mining-linked trusts reentering the South African political bloodstream—via lobbying, media buys, and campaign infrastructure.
The Architecture of Impunity
How did all this escape scrutiny? Through design.
Coal passed from South African mines to offshore traders, to shipping firms flying flags of convenience. Legal ownership was layered through nominee directors and offshore trusts in Mauritius, Gibraltar, and Zug. No single entity bore responsibility. Everyone touched the chain. No one owned the war.
Investigations into the ownership chains behind coal exports reveal a dense matrix of trusts, shells, and holding firms. One typical route:
– Mined in Mpumalanga
– Sold to Glencore Singapore
– Re-invoiced by a Dubai-based affiliate
– Transported by a Panama-flagged vessel
– Delivered in Hadera
– Profits routed to a trust in Jersey or Zug
This is not corruption in the traditional sense. It is engineered opacity. And it is how modern warfare is financed: through asset distancing, regulatory fragmentation, and the insulation of elites behind commercial infrastructure.
No declarations of war. No sanctions. No audits. Just spreadsheets, manifests, and the silence of bureaucracies built to forget.
Exporting Apartheid 2.0
The bitterest irony lies in the moral vocabulary Pretoria invoked at the ICJ—apartheid, ethnic cleansing, settler colonialism—while fueling the infrastructure that sustained it.
The ANC once led a liberation struggle against a regime upheld by global complicity: British financiers, American oil firms, European arms dealers. It now mirrors their posture—profiting from injustice, while pretending to oppose it.
In Gaza, Israel imposes checkpoints, walls, movement restrictions, and rationed utilities. These are the very tools once used in Soweto and Sharpeville—now digitized, militarized, and electrified. Biometric surveillance at Erez echoes the passbook laws. Gaza’s electricity rationing mirrors the punitive blackouts once enforced by Pretoria.
To export fuel to an apartheid state while invoking the memory of apartheid is not hypocrisy. It is betrayal.
Global Mirror: The New Normal
South Africa’s duplicity is not unique. Western democracies condemn Saudi Arabia’s airstrikes while selling it weapons. The U.S. sanctions Russia while continuing fossil fuel trades that benefit domestic multinationals. Turkey attacks Israel in speeches while maintaining $9 billion in bilateral trade.
These aren’t contradictions. They’re policy architectures—built to sustain dual-track governance: moral signaling above, transactional complicity below. The energy sector is their preferred terrain because electrons, unlike ethics, cannot be embargoed by speech.
Power stations don’t run on declarations. Drones don’t fly on values. Wars are not powered by conscience. They run on fuel.
South Africa’s legal case at the ICJ was a tool of symbolic resistance. But its failure to follow through with economic action revealed the structural gap between public performance and real policy.
Silence as Strategy
By early 2024, journalists, analysts, and activists had raised red flags. Trade data was public. The coal shipments were traceable. The destination known. The end use clear.
Yet no minister addressed the issue. No parliamentary review was called. The ANC’s executive committee issued no statement. Silence wasn’t negligence—it was consensus.
The party’s donors were energy tycoons. Its internal power brokers were ex-mining executives. Its institutional reflex was inaction. South Africa’s foreign policy may have spoken of justice. Its energy policy spoke a different language.
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And Israel understood perfectly. It made no diplomatic move against Pretoria. It issued no rebuttals. It didn’t need to. The fuel kept coming.
This is how plausible deniability works in modern warfare: everyone in the chain points elsewhere. Traders say they don’t control end-use. Shippers say they just carry cargo. Ports say they follow regulations. Utilities say they purchase legally. And governments say there was no embargo, so nothing illegal occurred.
Conclusion: Complicity by Design
South African coal did not simply keep the lights on in Israeli cities. It lit up targeting consoles, powered war factories, and enabled a siege that Pretoria called a genocide. That is not symbolic complicity. It is material participation.
No embargo. No divestment. No consequences.
This is the new frontier of war profiteering: efficient, distributed, invisible. Executed not through backroom deals but standard commercial flows. Normalized through legal abstraction and public silence.
Pretoria’s outrage was real. So were its shipments. And in a world governed by dual-use economics, that is the only measure that counts.
The war in Gaza ran, in part, on South African coal. And the profits ran all the way to the top.
To denounce war crimes while fueling them. To perform justice while exporting impunity. To cry genocide while greasing the grid of destruction. To frame neutrality as moral clarity while profiting from siege.
That is not failure. That is policy. That is the future. That is complicity—by design.
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