Global march to Gaza becomes farce as SA activists hit Egyptian wall of reality - Tim Flack

Key topics:

• SA activists detained in Egypt for attempting Gaza entry without clearance

• Mandla Mandela & far-left groups accused of grandstanding, not diplomacy

• Activism likened to cosplay, ignoring regional context and legal realities

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By Tim Flack

By Someone Who Still Respects Borders

There's something exquisitely tragicomic about the South African activist class. They're a curious cocktail of inherited struggle credentials, identity politics, and terminal ignorance. This week, they brought their circus to Cairo, decked out in keffiyehs and delusions of grandeur, hoping to march into Gaza as if they were crossing from Sea Point to Woodstock.

At the heart of this travelling pantomime were Mandla Mandela ( the grandson, not the legacy, the one barred from the UK for taking selfies with Ismail Haniyeh) and Haroon Orie, a name familiar to anyone who's studied Pagad or South African radical chic ( because nothing says ‘peace delegation’ like a group once better known for pipe bombs than press briefings). These gallant revolutionaries, alongside a clutch of far-left NGOs and the ever-indignant SA Jews for Jiha... I mean Palestine, thought it wise to test Egyptian border security in the middle of a regional war.

It did not go well.

Egyptian authorities, having little patience for foreign agitators who confuse humanitarian grandstanding with foreign policy, detained them almost immediately. Evidently, Cairo missed the memo that being from Cape Town entitles you to skip customs, rewrite immigration law, and conduct guerrilla diplomacy via Instagram Stories.

But what did they expect? That General el-Sisi, who crushed the Muslim Brotherhood and whose secret police make no distinction between Western activists and Qatari proxies, would say, "Of course, comrade, the border is that way. Do enjoy your march into the world's most militarised flashpoint"?

These people are not diplomats. They are tourists of trauma. They flew across continents not to help Palestinians, but to help themselves feel righteous. It's activism as cosplay. Solidarity as virtue-signalling. International law, border control, and local context are all minor inconveniences when your boarding pass says Moral Superiority Class.

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Take SA Jews for Palestine, an organisation that claims to speak for a Jewish moral conscience while aligning itself with highly controversial causes. They frequently present themselves as the Jewish voice of dissent, yet their actions often serve to provide cover for groups hostile to Israel's existence. Their presence in Egypt was more about political messaging than tangible peace efforts. One has to ask whether they understand the nature of the groups they march alongside, or if the symbolism has simply replaced substance.

But that's par for the course in South Africa's activist-industrial complex. They view global conflicts through an inherited lens of apartheid-era analogies. Gaza is recast as Soweto. Hamas becomes the ANC. And every immigration check becomes Sharpeville, never mind the vastly different legal, historical, and geographic realities. In their narrative, Israel is branded an apartheid state, a comparison as politically convenient as it is historically disputed, deployed not for clarity but for emotional leverage.

In the end, the Global March to Gaza became something far more revealing: a Global Farce of Narcissism. These activists didn't reach Rafah. Some barely passed the luggage carousel. But they did achieve one thing-clarity. Clarity about who they are, what they believe, and just how unfit they are to speak for anyone but themselves.

Because in the real world, border crossings are not revolution rallies, Hamas is not a liberation movement, and Egypt, for all its faults, still has more common sense than half of Cape Town's activist WhatsApp groups combined.

In the end, the Global March to Gaza became a Global Uber to the Departure Lounge.

The real blockade isn't just at Rafah. It's in the heads of the delusional, where ideology trumps reality and martyrdom is a passport stamp.