Last Thursday, as the Christian world merrily made preparations for the Easter festivities, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague issued an order to Israel for the belligerents to ensure that basic food supplies reach the Gaza Strip where famine is spreading, threatening the lives missed by the guns of genocide. 

Food is weaponised in the basest of wars, as reports from the Sudan are suggesting. At least civilians in Kiev still have access to food. The West will not let famine descend on Ukraine, not on its watch.

The world is confronted with gory images of emaciated children reminiscent of the 1985 famine in Ethiopia.

At least in the 1980s, one could count on the world to stand up in aid of famine relief efforts. In Gaza today, the children dying of hunger can raise no such hope. Mothers will watch as their babies sigh their last, with not a morsel to feed them and keep them alive.

Washington is not the only culprit treating Benjamin Netanyahu with kid gloves and thereby throwing Palestinians under the proverbial bus.

Writing in The New York Times a few years ago, Thomas Friedman said: “If the Volunteers for Israel programme had travel brochures, they might read, 'Come to Israel, meet the people, see the land and learn how to repair the engine of a tank or wash dishes for 1,000 soldiers'.

“Since its inception in early 1983, the programme has allowed about 6,000 foreigners to spend a month or more working on an Israeli army base performing civilian duties. The volunteers, who come mainly from the US, France, Canada, Britain and SA, apply through the programme’s offices abroad.

"Approved applicants pay between R1,500 and R1,760 to cover round-trip airfare and some field trips. They get assigned to an army base and are issued an army uniform. They live in a regular army barracks, get all the food they can eat and all the Hebrew and Israeli culture they can soak up.”

US, France, Canada, Britain and, yes, SA. Read that again. For every scrap of food that should have kept a Palestinian child alive, a South African sympathetic to the Zionist cause grows fat.

These people live among us. We brush past them in the malls of Sandton, Menlyn, Hyde Park and the Cape Town Waterfront.

They get their panties in a knot when international relations minister Naledi Pandor pleads the Palestinian cause in The Hague. They say SA should hang her head in shame for supporting Hamas. Truth is, the shame is theirs, actually.

In his book Soul Mandate, published last year, property mogul Lew Geffen shouts from the rooftops about being Jewish and going to Israel. He writes that this was after “the Zionist Federation in Johannesburg sent out recruitment messages for young Jewish South African men to go to Israel”.

Geffen says: “The ZF was looking for volunteers to take up certain jobs while the soldiers were called up to protect Israel”.

This is aiding and abetting the war machine against the innocent women and children of Palestine.

Geffen writes: “We arrived at Lod Airport and were transported to Green Beach near Natanya, where we spent the night. I was with a group of 40 South African boys and girls.

“The schedule for the day worked like this: you would work in the orchards from 4am till 7am, and then you would be brought back to eat breakfast – boiled eggs, tomatoes and cucumber on bread with labneh, all very basic.

"Dinner was basically the same. After breakfast, it was back to the orchards until 12.30pm when lunch was served. This was the main meal of the day: chicken schnitzel and veg. After lunch, it was free time.”

He mentions many South Africans he encountered in the kibbutz, some of them were from Johannesburg.

He played chess in Tel Aviv, lazed about the swimming pool, played incessant poker to pass the time, “cavorted with Argentinian girls and went to the beach with an Uzi in hand”, a life Palestinians think is only possible in their wildest fantasies about Hollywood.

Guessing the political home of those like Geffen, the ZF (if it has not morphed into the modern-day Jewish Board of Deputies) and large parts of South African Jewry is a no brainer. Their blood is blue and white.

In a report headlined “Israel-Palestine stance haunts DA in KwaZulu-Natal”, the sub-text of the Sunday World article claims that “Fence-sitting might hurt them at polls”.

The DA may be guilty of many political crimes but fence-sitting insofar as the Middle East conflict goes is not one of them. They stand four-square behind apartheid Israel, genocidaires.

• Makatile publishes The Sentinel