Last week, the South African foreign minister announced that her country’s ambassador to the Jewish state, recalled last year over Israeli efforts to contain riots in Gaza, would not be returning, and that a liaison office in Tel Aviv with “no political mandate [and] no trade mandate” would serve in lieu of an embassy. Such a move demonstrates the extent to which the preferences of the boycott, divest, and sanction movement (BDS) have become policy in Pretoria. Ben Cohen explains how this came to be:

From March to May, a series of small-scale terrorist attacks claimed the lives of some twenty Israelis, and raised fears that jihadist murder would again become a fact of everyday life in the Jewish state. Hillel Frisch details how a swift campaign waged by the IDF and Shin Bet, employing deliberate and discriminate force, succeeded in restoring the peace: