There are occasions when state power reveals its insecurities with embarrassing transparency. The United States’ revocation of Dr Naledi Pandor’s visa—executed without reason, without process, and without even the courtesy of bureaucratic finesse—is one such moment. It is not a matter of administrative procedure. It is a symptom. A tremor of anxiety running through an empire confronted by a woman whose authority is
rooted not in might but in moral clarity.

Pandor, a former minister of international relations, a distinguished academic, and one of the most respected voices in the global struggle for Palestinian liberation, is hardly the kind of figure whose movements need to be policed. She commands no militias, stirs no insurrections, and threatens no borders. Her influence derives from something far more subversive: coherence, principle, and the audacity to insist that international law should apply universally rather than selectively.

Her central “offense,” of course, was South Africa’s decision—under her stewardship—to bring a genocide case against Israel before the International Court of Justice. It was a move that shook the architecture of impunity, interrupting a decades-long assumption that
Western-backed states remain immune to the world’s highest judicial mechanisms. The ICJ case galvanized the Global South and infuriated those invested in shielding Israel from accountability. Once South Africa shattered the taboo, global dialogue shifted, and Pandor became both symbol and strategist of this recalibration.

Against this background, the visa revocation appears not as an isolated gesture but as part of a broader retaliatory pattern. From the bizarre American political fantasies of a “white genocide” in South Africa, to the vile........

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