Will the U.S. consulate in Johannesburg sit at 1 Leila Khaled Drive? The Johannesburg Municipality announced last week the proposed renaming of the iconic Sandton Drive, home to the U.S. consulate, after a Palestinian terrorist and hijacker. This celebration of terrorism caps the South African leadership’s multi-year embrace of the Iran-backed terrorist group Hamas.
Leila Khaled gained international notoriety as a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), now a U.S.-designated terrorist group. She participated in hijackings in 1969 and 1970, pulling the pins out of two grenades in the latter attack.
Johannesburg Councilor Thapelo Amad proposed the name change measure in 2018, which passed with support from the African National Congress (ANC), the country’s ruling party. Amad reportedly chose Sandton Drive specifically because it hosts the U.S. consulate.
Amad made headlines in November 2023—weeks after Hamas butchered 1,200 people in southern Israel—when he posted a picture of himself holding an assault rifle with the caption, “We stand with Hamas.”
Fortunately, the Johannesburg Municipality never implemented the 2018 Leila Khaled Drive proposal. But in November 2023, the ANC revived the initiative. The ANC’s national secretary general even picketed on behalf of the campaign.
Within South Africa, many have criticized the proposal as a waste of time and resources that could be devoted to the myriad problems plaguing the city. Others have argued that the city should not name a street after a terrorist who is not South African and has made no major impact in the country. While this is true, Khaled has spoken in South Africa on many occasions, including a keynote address she delivered to South Africa’s largest trade union eleven days after the Hamas killing spree.
Khaled is not the only Palestinian terrorist welcomed on South African soil. South Africa hosted Hamas delegations in 2015, 2018, and even during the current Hamas-initiated war in 2023 and 2024. Pretoria again demonstrated its inverted conception of morality on October 7 by blaming Israel for Hamas’s attack, even while Hamas terror squads still roamed the kibbutzim and towns of southern Israel. Ten days later, South Africa’s then foreign minister, who hails from the ANC, called Hamas’s politburo chief to “facilitat[e] dialogue.”
During Hamas’s 2015 mission to South Africa, the ANC joined the Muslim Judicial Council (MJC) and the Al-Quds Foundation of South Africa (AQFSA) in hosting a welcome rally for then Hamas politburo chief Khaled Meshaal. MJC and AQFSA are part of a network of South African Muslim organizations controlled by or connected to Imam Ebrahim Gabriels. Gabriels was reportedly Hamas leader Mousa Abu Marzouk’s gateway to South Africa’s Muslim community. The United States has sanctioned several Gabriels-connected groups or their umbrella organizations for funding Hamas.
Beyond serving as a fertile ground for Hamas activism and fundraising, Pretoria has effectively become Hamas’s lawyer on the international stage. The lawfare that South Africa is waging against Israel plays directly into Hamas’s cynical strategy of causing maximum suffering to the Palestinian people to put political pressure on Israel. The pressure, in turn, restricts Israel’s ability to respond to Hamas aggression.
The South African government launched its opening lawfare salvo against the Jewish state at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in December 2023, accusing Israel of committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. Pretoria’s “meritless”—according to U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken—case relies on distortions, decontextualized quotes from Israeli leaders, and ignoring the great lengths to which Israel has gone to avoid civilian casualties. It also omits the threat posed to Israel by Hamas.
Though Hamas launched this war with an orgy of murder, mutilation, torture, and rape—in the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust—the South African government painted Israel’s self-defense as genocide. Throughout the war, Hamas has operated within civilian areas and infrastructure, guaranteeing that Israeli retaliations would harm Palestinians, and has stolen aid that Israel helped deliver to Gaza’s suffering civilians.
The South African government’s moral inversions belong in an Orwell novel, not at the world’s highest court. Johannesburg’s proposal to rename a busy thoroughfare after a terrorist hijacker confuses good and evil, as does Pretoria’s decision to attack Israel for defending itself against the genocidal Hamas terrorist group.
David May is a research manager and senior research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy. Follow David on X @DavidSamuelMay. Follow FDD on X @FDD.
Image: Bas van den Heuvel / Shutterstock.com.
