African leaders will decide if Israel apartheid regime should continue as an observer at African Union

AhlulBayt News Agency (ABNA): South African President Cyril Ramaphosa is leading a continental campaign to cancel Israeli regime’s status as an accredited observer at the African Union (AU) this weekend.

African leaders will decide on Sunday if the apartheid regime of Israel should continue as an observer at the African Union.

The usurper Israeli regime was accepted as an observer to the AU by the chairperson of the African Union Commission Moussa Faki Mahamat in August last year.

The Israeli apartheid regime’s admission followed wooing of Africa using unorthodox means particularly by the regime’s former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

According to the dailymaverick website, South Africa in particular, leading the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and Algeria, leading some African members of the League of Arab States, objected to Faki’s decision.

International Relations and Cooperation Minister Naledi Pandor complained then that the AU Commission had taken this “unjust and unwarranted decision… unilaterally without consultation with its member states.”

The decision was inexplicable as the AU had already strenuously objected to Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine, which “offends the letter and spirit of the Charter of the AU… especially on issues relating to self-determination and decolonization,” she wrote in The Star.

“The world continues to witness some of the most horrific scenes of brutality and violence exercised against Palestinians living in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.”

Faki defended his decision on the grounds that AU rules give him the right to admit observers, but South Africa has pointed out that he was also obliged to take into account the views of member states.

And so Pandor and others formally objected to the decision at a meeting of the AU’s Executive Council — of foreign ministers — in Addis Ababa last October. But the foreign ministers couldn’t resolve the issue and referred it to the heads of state to deal with at the AU’s ordinary summit this weekend, also in Addis Ababa.

Analysts say the decision is threatening to break it up this Pan-African body. The AU generally prefers to decide by consensus, but the Israeli issue is too divisive for consensus and so will be decided by a vote, says Shewit Woldemichael, a researcher with the Institute for Security Studies (ISS) in Addis Ababa.

She told an ISS seminar this week that between 21 and 26 of the AU’s 55 member states seemed to be aligned with South Africa and Algeria in pushing for a reversal of Faki’s decision to admit the Israeli regime.

The outcome could depend on technicalities. Woldemichael said if the AU heads of state and government decide to treat the issue as procedural — i.e. as a matter of overturning Faki’s decision because he went about it the wrong way — then it will take a simple majority either way to decide.

But if the leaders deem it as a substantive issue, it will require a two-thirds majority vote to get the Israeli regime admitted, a far higher bar to surmount for the pro-Zionist regime lobby.

Israeli regime’s bid for admission to the AU comes amid the publication this week of an Amnesty International Report entitled; Israel’s Apartheid Against Palestinians; Cruel System of Domination and Crime Against Humanity.”

It says; “The organization has concluded that Israel has perpetrated the international wrong of apartheid, as a human rights violation and a violation of public international law…

“Amnesty International has also concluded that the patterns of proscribed acts perpetuated by Israel both inside Israel and in the Occupied Palestinian Territories form part of a systematic as well as widespread attack directed against the Palestinian population, and that the inhuman or inhumane acts committed within the context of this attack have been committed with the intention to maintain this system and amount to the crime against humanity of apartheid under both the Apartheid Convention and the Rome Statute.”



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