Visa exemptions as foreign policy: South Africa’s Palestinian test case
Read the full opinion by our CEO, Claudia Pizzocri, as published on Business Day here. Some extracts below.
South Africans often treat the “Green Mamba” as a kind of mobility scorecard. The number of countries a South African passport holder can walk into without a visa has become a proxy for how much the world “trusts” them.
Far less attention is given to the other side of that equation: how South Africa’s own visitor-visa exemptions work, who they favour, and how quickly they can be reconfigured when security, foreign policy and domestic politics collide – as the weekend withdrawal of the 90-day exemption for ordinary Palestinian passport holders has just shown.
The legal starting point is that foreign nationals may only be admitted if they hold a visa or qualify for a short-stay exemption that can be processed at a port of entry.
The most recent stress test for this system arrived on 13 November 2025, when a chartered flight carrying 153 Palestinian travellers landed at OR Tambo International Airport from Nairobi. Officials had noticed missing departure stamps in some passports, the absence of return tickets and the lack of confirmed accommodation details for a number of passengers.
On 7 December 2025, the Department of Home Affairs confirmed that it has withdrawn South Africa’s 90-day visa exemption for ordinary Palestinian passport holders. The department did so after investigations by national intelligence structures and consultations within the Security Cluster concluded that the exemption was being subjected to “deliberate and ongoing abuse”.
Visa exemptions should be understood and communicated as privileges with conditions attached. Even at the most practical level, they are always “subject to security and verification procedures”. Visa policy is never only about migration management. It is a signalling instrument…
The ability to step off a plane and receive a 90-day stamp is not a neutral technicality of border control. It is a political privilege. That privilege is not afforded equally, and it can be withdrawn.
The harder task for government is to prevent South African territory being instrumentalised in ways that contradict its stated position on Gaza and international law, while resisting the temptation to reproduce, the very hierarchies of mobility and dignity that it criticises elsewhere.
by Claudia Pizzocri, CEO at Eisenberg & Associates Inc.