22 June 2026 – All eyes on Switzerland and Roro has some very strong words for Vance on The Israel Brief.
23 June 2026 – Is Iran contradicting everything the US says? What is going on? Your top stories on The Israel Brief.
24 June 2026 – Brave former hostage takes on the UN Special Rapporteur for Violence against Women and Children for denial of SGBV on 7/10 and more on The Israel Brief.
25 June 2026 – Israel prepares aid delegations to Venezuela and your top stories on The Israel Brief.
While the mission of Lay of the Land (LotL) is to provide a wide and diverse perspective of affairs in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world, the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by its various writers are not necessarily ones of the owners and management of LOTL but of the writers themselves. LotL endeavours to the best of its ability to credit the use of all known photographs to the photographer and/or owner of such photographs (0&EO).
Perhaps one of the emotional challenges of Jewish life in difficult times is not only learning how to survive what is happening around us but learning how to live with what we cannot control within it.
By Bev Moss-Reilly
When Control Slips Away
It would be unfair and far too simplistic to say that all Jews are the same. No people are. And yet, within Jewish life, there is often a recognisable thread: a deep need to be prepared, to think ahead, to solve, to organise, to lead, to hold things together, and to find a way forward even in difficult times. This is not about arrogance or dominance. It is often about responsibility. It is about survival. It is about history. It is about generations of people who learned that if they did not stay alert, adaptable, resourceful, and mentally engaged, the consequences could be devastating.
Always Alert. Always needing to be alert for danger, Israelis take cover on the side of a road as a siren warns of incoming ballistic missiles fired from Iran into Israel, near Rosh HaAyin, February 28, 2026. (Photo: Yossi Aloni/Flash90)
Jews have had to stand up repeatedly throughout history. They have had to rebuild, reimagine, and remain resilient in the face of displacement, persecution, exclusion, and uncertainty. Out of that has come an extraordinary tradition of leadership, innovation, scholarship, creativity, commerce, medicine, science, technology, law, and the arts. Not because life was easy, but often because difficulty demanded courage, discipline, and determination. There is a long-standing instinct in Jewish life not merely to endure, but to contribute, to guide, to repair, and to give meaning.
That is why losing control can feel so profoundly unsettling.
When a person is used to being capable, informed, proactive, and emotionally braced, uncertainty can feel like the rug has been pulled out from under them. It can leave them anxious, vulnerable, exposed, and even ashamed of how fragile they suddenly feel. The very people who are often looked to for strength may find themselves inwardly rattled when they cannot fix, plan, protect, or anticipate what comes next.
Calm in Class. Israel’s teachers report anxiety, depression as war takes mental toll.
There is a close relationship between anxiety and control. They are, in a sense, “Mishpocha” (Family). When life feels unsafe or unpredictable, the urge to control becomes stronger. One tries to organise more, think more, prepare more, check more, manage more. Sometimes this is helpful. It can create structure, purpose, and a sense of agency. But when circumstances become bigger than what any one person can manage, control starts to slip, and that is where mental health can take a knock. Sleep suffers. Thoughts race. The body stays tense. Patience thins. Small decisions feel overwhelming. A person may become irritable, tearful, withdrawn, hypervigilant, or emotionally exhausted.
This is especially true in Jewish communities living with threat, antisemitism, war, instability, or communal fear. When uncertainty grows, it does not only disturb practical life. It disturbs the inner life. A parent may feel distressed because they cannot guarantee a child’s safety. A teacher may feel shaken because she cannot promise normality. A spouse may feel deeply unsettled because no amount of planning can remove the danger facing a loved one. A community leader may look calm on the outside while inwardly carrying enormous strain because so much feels beyond their control.
For many Jews, this loss of control is not experienced in a vacuum. It can stir something older. Historical memory, inherited vigilance, and intergenerational trauma can all intensify the feeling that uncertainty is dangerous. When life becomes unpredictable, it may touch not only present anxiety, but also a much deeper communal memory of what happens when security becomes fragile. That does not mean every Jewish person experiences uncertainty in the same way. But it does help to explain why loss of control can feel especially loaded.
The Norm in an Abnormal Situation. Anxiously on their phones checking the news or being in touch with loved ones, Israelis take cover in a public bomb shelter in Tel Aviv as siren warn of incoming missiles fired from Iran, June 20, 2025. (Photo: Yehoshua Yosef/Flash90)
There is also a painful paradox here. The stronger and more competent a person usually is, the harder it can be to admit when they are struggling. People who are used to leading, coping, and carrying others often feel deeply uncomfortable being the one who is frightened, needy, or emotionally unhinged. They may judge themselves harshly. They may keep functioning while quietly falling apart inside. They may tell themselves they should be stronger, calmer, more grateful, more composed. Mental strain does not disappear because a person is intelligent, accomplished, resilient, or capable. Sometimes those very qualities make it harder to recognise when support is needed.
This is where compassion becomes essential. Not pity. Not pathologising. Compassion. The kind that says it makes sense that you are struggling when so much feels uncertain. It makes sense that loss of control unsettles you. It makes sense that a people shaped by responsibility, resilience, and leadership would find helplessness especially painful.
The answer is not to shame the need for control. The answer is to understand what sits underneath it. Very often, underneath the need for control is a longing for safety. A longing for dignity. A longing to protect those that one loves. A longing not to be caught unprepared by pain. Seen in that light, the need for control is not something to mock. It is something to approach gently.
Community Coalesces. The anxiety of Jews in the UK is captured in this photo at an antisemitism rally in Whitehall, central London, following a series of arson attacks and two people being stabbed in Golders Green, north-west London on April 29. (Photo: Lucy North/PA Images via Getty Images)
Mental health support can help people learn the difference between healthy agency and impossible responsibility. It can help them recognise what is theirs to hold and what is too heavy to carry alone. It can help them calm a nervous system that has become overburdened by vigilance. It can help families and communities talk more honestly about fear, uncertainty, and emotional overload without seeing these as signs of weakness.
Jewish life has always honoured strength, but true strength is not only found in taking charge. Sometimes it is found in acknowledging vulnerability. Sometimes it is found in saying this is hard for me. Sometimes it is found in allowing support, in loosening the grip just enough to breathe, and in accepting that even the most resilient people cannot control everything.
Despair Down Under. Once considered one of the safest havens for Jews throughout the world, no more as attested by this graffiti in a Jewish area in Melbourne, Australia applauding Hitler. ( Photo: Executive Council of Australian Jewry )
Perhaps that is one of the quiet emotional challenges of Jewish life in difficult times. Not only learning how to survive what is happening around us but learning how to live with what we cannot control within it. That loss of control has consequences, yes. It can leave people anxious, frayed, and emotionally depleted. But with insight, support, and compassionate understanding, it does not have to define them.
It can instead become an invitation to soften, to share the burden, and to remember that being strong has never meant being untouched.
About the writer:
Bev Moss-Reilly is a Jewish freelance content writer living in South Africa with a deep and heartfelt focus on mental health, emotional wellbeing, trauma, grief, and the unseen struggles people carry every day. Through her writing and her Mental Health Packs, she aims to bring comfort, awareness, compassion, and practical support to individuals, families, workplaces, and communities. Her work is rooted in empathy, dignity, and the belief that nobody should feel alone in their pain, especially in times of crisis.
While the mission of Lay of the Land (LotL) is to provide a wide and diverse perspective of affairs in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world, the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by its various writers are not necessarily ones of the owners and management of LOTL but of the writers themselves. LotL endeavours to the best of its ability to credit the use of all known photographs to the photographer and/or owner of such photographs (0&EO).
Beset by internal social strife, South Africa indulges in cheap scapegoating blaming Israel – Is anyone surprised?
By Marika Sboros
So, Israel, the world’s most overworked, overused and abused scapegoat, is the “hidden hand” behind South Africa’s latest xenophobia crisis.
Of course, it is. If you believe the latest conspiracy theory to emerge recently from the fever swamps of South African social media.
But has Israel really been orchestrating South Africa’s xenophobic violence – or “afrophobia”, as activists and academics in the refugee and migration space now call it?
ProtectingAfricans from South Africans. The South African police during a protest against illegal immigrants organised by March and March in Goodwood, a Cape Town suburb, on May 30, 2026. (Photo: Roger Bosch/AFP)
And if so, why and how would tiny Israel find time and inclination in its hectic military schedule despite fighting ongoing wars back home, including against the Iranian behemoth?
In retaliation, apparently, for South Africa taking Israel to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in December 2023, on a genocide in Gaza charge. Or so the theory holds.
Israel could be understandably miffed at South Africa lodging its ICJ case “urgently” within weeks of a genuine genocidal attack by Hamas on October 7, 2023. That urgency speedily dissipated, and South Africa’s case has proved ill-judged.
Its own lawyers recently requested and were granted an extraordinary 18-month extension. This means that its written submissions won’t be completed until 2029.
Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs was unsparing on X:
“This case was never about the facts. It has always been a propaganda campaign by South Africa in the service of Hamas, masquerading as a legal process.”
One local Facebook “influencer” said the xenophobic violence would disappear “like the night when the sun rises” if South Africa dropped its ICJ case.
A pan-Africanist Facebook group claimed that Israelis were poised to swoop into South Africa, destabilise it from within by pushing Black Africans “to the margins” and to rebuild it “in their own image.” With a little help from friends in “Western powers” (aka the US).
That led critics to suggest that the conspiracy theory is aimed as much at US as Israeli “hidden hands”.
“HOME-GROWN’ HIDDEN HANDS
Yet accusing Israel of trying to destabilise South Africa from within describes precisely what years of ANC governance have actually done after more than 30 years since “liberation”. From within. By its own hand.
The hidden hand has always been home-grown.
If Soviet-Jewish writer and war correspondent Vasily Grossman were around, he’d say:
“Tell me what you accuse Jews of and I’ll tell you what you’re guilty of.”
It’s the closing line of a longer passage in his novel, Life and Fate, where he argues that antisemitism is never an end in itself. Rather, it is a mirror for the failings of individuals, social structures and state systems.
With those words and a novelist’s precision, Grossman captured what psychologists call “projection”. It is the mechanism by which people and institutions attribute to others the very impulses, failures and crimes they cannot face in themselves.
Their accusations are not random, say psychologists. They are often confessions.
Accuse Jews of controlling the world through money and fear, and you may be the one controlling through precisely those means. Or you may be helpfully deflecting attention from the real controllers.
A South African example of that projection is in a speech by Dr Imtiaz Sooliman, founder and CEO of Gift of the Givers, a local charity acknowledged globally for its humanitarian disaster-relief work.
On October 5, 2023, Sooliman addressed an anti-Israel rally in Cape Town beneath a banner declaring “We Are All Hamas”. He said, in his own words, that:
“…They (Zionists) run the world with fear. They control the world with money.”
He attempted to pre-empt accountability by saying antisemitism charges are just tools to silence criticism of Israel. However, while there is plenty to criticise in Israel’s government and its policies, genocide and apartheid are not part of that legitimate critique. As legal scholars across the world (not all of them Jews) say.
And antisemitic tropes are tropes, whatever political cover is thrown over them.
PROTOCOLS REVISITED
Sooliman’s language feeds into the core premise of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. That’s an enduring publication, which the Russian Tsarist secret police fabricated between 1898 and 1903. It purported to be the minutes of a secret meeting of Jewish leaders plotting world domination through control of global financial systems, governments and media.
The Times of London exposed it as a clumsy, plagiarised forgery in 1921. That did not dent its popularity. If anything, it became even more popular. Hitler cited it. Henry Ford distributed 500,000 copies of it across the US. It is still in print.
Sooliman’s declaration is one of the oldest tropes in the Jew-hater’s lexicon. It feeds off the original “blood libel” – the term for the claim that Jews kill Christian children to drink their blood in religious ritual. It dates back to the 12th century.
It is testimony to Jew hatred’s enduring power that both claims have retained their power into the 21st century. It is, after all, the world’s oldest hatred. (Call it “antisemitism”, if you prefer that 19th-century, pseudo-scientific euphemism coined by Jew-haters themselves to make their loathing sound respectable.)
Jew hatred has helped to make “Zionist” the anti-Israel lobby’s preferred code word for Jew. Lobbyists deploy Zionist as a swear word for Jew and a deliberate strategy to avoid detection of hate speech online. Social media platforms are slow to close the loophole because the distinction between legitimate criticism of Israeli government policy and antisemitic conspiracy theory dressed up as political commentary is notoriously difficult to police at scale.
Perhaps the most common and ironic example of projection in modern times is the ubiquitous accusation that Jews, aka “Zionists”, have committed genocide in Gaza. There can be no worse accusation to make against victims of actual genocide than to accuse them wrongly of being perpetrators of it.
That is projection in its most naked form.
DARK GLOBAL TRADITION
Hamas’s charter is explicitly genocidal towards Jews. Hamas political bureau member Ghazi Hamad declared on Lebanese TV on October 24, 2023, that October 7 was “just the first time and there will be a second, a third, a fourth” until Israel’s existence “finished”.
And while this is a South African story, it sits in a very long, very dark global tradition. It includes the latest mutation of Jew hatred with documentation over 900 years old.
Jew hatred has caused pogroms, mass expulsions of entire communities from countries Jews had lived in for generations, and the systematic murder of six million Jews.
The accusations change. The consequences for targets stay the same.
Post-October 7, Jews are being savagely attacked worldwide and killed just for being Jews. As the title of US author Dara Horn’s book bleakly notes, People Love Dead Jews.
October 7 is where nine centuries of Jew hatred, unchecked and unashamed, have ultimately led.
Yet October 7 denialism is rife. Some critics deny that Hamas committed atrocities on October 7.
They call it “resistance”;
They say that Israel “had it coming”;
that it was a “false flag” or “psyop” (psychological operation), in which Israel staged the massacre of its own civilians to gain sympathy and justify genocide on Palestinians in Gaza.
That is Holocaust denial in real time.
It raises the question of where this conspiracy theory linking Israel to xenophobic violence began.
Mzoxolo Mpolase, managing editor of Political Analysis South Africa, did some forensic work in an article on his website on May 27. He traces the conspiracy theory to a single January 2026 post in the Times of Israel’s open blog section, a platform for third-party contributors with no implied editorial endorsement.
WHERE IT ALL BEGAN
The author is a former South African, Grant Gochin, now based in California, USA, where he is a writer, financial advisor and serves as the Honorary Consul for the Republic of Togo in West Africa.
Gochin argued that African states are trapped by colonial borders and that South Africa should fragment into smaller sovereign entities. That was his opinion, nothing more, as Mpolase notes.
That’s where the chain of evidence ends, as Mpolase notes.
Gochin posits no funding channel, instruction or organisational relationship between Israel, its government’s policy and South Africa’s xenophobic or afrophobic protests.
Seth Mandel, writing in Commentary Magazine on June 11, 2026, identifies an “emerging, seemingly iron rule” about accusations against Israel that may help to explain the real dynamic behind the conspiracy theory.
“Pay attention to the when, and you’ll figure out the why.” He could have been channelling Grossman.
Mandel gives four notable items, including a column in TheNew York Times on May 11, with “wild accusations that Israel is training dogs to rape Palestinian inmates, along with uncorroborated allegations of state-sanctioned abuse.”
On May 12, a major commission released a two-year catalogue of evidence showing that Hamas used mass rape and sexual torture as a key weapon of its military strategy on October 7 and after.
That made the timing of the Times piece, in pre-empting the results of an actual investigation into Hamas, “suddenly clear”, as Mandel notes.
Grossman saw the mechanism in 1960. Mandel documented it in real time.
It is all the more disturbing, then, that South African government ministers at the highest levels and respected NGOs (non-governmental organisations) have enthusiastically helped to spread the hidden-hands conspiracy theory.
Foreign Minister Ronald Lamola gave the keynote address at a symposium co-hosted by DIRCO (Department of International Relations and Cooperation) and the South African Institute of International Affairs in Cape Town on May 25, 2026. He condemned the xenophobic violence strongly and took care not to mention Israel by name.
He undid that good work by saying that “with the current geo-political environment, and South Africa’s role in the international space, including our case at the ICJ, you cannot exclude state and non-state actors trying to erode the human-rights standing of South Africa.”
That was a dog whistle with a foghorn attached.
Master Manipulator. Giving the keynote address at a symposium co-hosted by DIRCO in Cape Town on May 25, 2026, South African Foreign Minister Ronald Lamola condemned the xenophobic violence taking place in his country and although not mentioning Israel by name, implied such by stating that with “our case at the ICJ,” against Israel, “you cannot exclude state and non-state actors trying to erode the human-rights standing of South Africa.”
PROPAGANDA TV CHANNEL
Prominent refugee and migration academics and activists in South Africa have amplified it. Chief among them is Julie Eccles, a public face of Kopanang Africa Against Xenophobia (KAAX).
KAAX is a broad, grassroots civil-society coalition that claims to advocate for pan-African solidarity and constitutional rights for everyone, regardless of nationality or legal status.
Seeking Safety. Far removed from Israel, a man sits with a blanket to keep warm as thousands of Malawians take refuge on June 20, 2026 in Sherwood Park outside Durban, South Africa. Around 12,000 people have passed through the camp in recent weeks, seeking safety amid intimidation campaigns by anti-migrant South African groups. (Photo: Per-Anders Pettersson/Getty Images)
Everyone except “Zionists”, apparently, in Eccles’s book.
She appeared on a Salaam Media panel on June 3, with Sharon Ekambaram, KAAX co-founder and head of Refugee and Migrant Rights at Lawyers for Human Rights, Prof Loren Landau, professor of migration and development at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, and Oxford University in the UK, and Mthunzi Mdwaba, a controversial South African businessman and legal academic.
The panel’s topic was Xenophobia in South Africa: Is There a Hidden Hand Stirring the Chaos?
On live TV, Eccles named a “hidden hand”, Martin Moshal, who she described as “an Israeli billionaire” and “dyed-in-the-wool Zionist.” She said that he had donated “at least R40-million to Action SA”, a party that “doesn’t even have a seat in parliament,” and “talks openly” about turning South Africa into “whatever his vision is.”
She got most of that wrong. Whether by default or design, neither reflects well on her or KAAX.
Action SA has six seats in Parliament. Moshal is South African, born and raised in Durban, currently living in Sydney, Australia. He is a venture capitalist, a philanthropist, and the largest known donor to opposition parties in South Africa, including the DA (Democratic Alliance), Action SA, the IFP (Inkatha Freedom Party) and BOSA (Build One South Africa).
Singing for Salvation. While a man plays his guitar as thousands of Malawians take refuge on June 20, 2026 in Sherwood Park outside Durban, South Africa, certain leaders in South Africa try play a different tune pointing a finger of blame at Israel. (Photo: Anders Pettersson/Getty Images)
Eccles said none of that. Instead, she played by the anti-Israel lobby’s rule book of injecting Jewish figures as shadowy puppet masters into local disputes and manufacturing foreign conspiracies where no logical connection exists.
MORE DOG WHISTLES
Mdwaba declared himself “happy” that Eccles had “mentioned Israeli elements.” That was his loud dog whistle to scapegoat Israel as a hostile actor behind the xenophobic violence.
Landau, whose reputation at Wits and Oxford universities rests on rigorous, evidence-based analysis, could have challenged and corrected Eccles’ claims in seconds. He said nothing about her misrepresentations. Neither did Ekambaram.
Salaam Media, a Johannesburg-based media agency and radio station that claims to be committed to “humanitarian journalism”, could have included at least one dissenting voice on the panel. There were none. The question in the panel’s title was rhetorical, and the answer decided before the cameras rolled.
That is not journalism. It is propaganda.
The ANC’s support for the Palestinian cause is the main backdrop to the conspiracy theory. It remains rooted in its history of solidarity with anti-colonial liberation movements, regardless of how violently extreme.
The apartheid smear against Israel drives much of its rhetoric. Some South Africans who actually lived under apartheid recognise and reject it as a propaganda weapon. Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East. Its Arab citizens vote, sit in the Knesset and serve on the Supreme Court.
That is not apartheid.
And South Africa is no stranger to strains of afrophobic violence. Since “liberation” in 1994, there have been at least six major waves of such violence against Black African migrants. The worst came in May 2008, when 62 people died, some were left burning alive in the streets, and over 100,000 were displaced.
Since October 7, the response from some ministers, including President Cyril Ramaphosa, has been sartorial. They don a Palestinian scarf in public and ignore deepening potholes in the country’s literal and figurative roads.
The formula for scapegoating Jews has not changed globally in 900 years.
The accusation is always a confession. The charge is always a mirror. And the target is always the same.
US Representative Ritchie Torres put it bluntly on X in 2024, after Iran’s Supreme Leader praised American campus protesters against Israel:
“When … the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism and antisemitism … praises you, you have become useful idiots on the wrong side of history.”
Show South Africa’s scapegoating, hidden-hand conspiracy theorists anything remotely close to a peace sign, and they will still see a clenched fist.
They may think they are on the right side of history by demonising Israel and Jews who support it. If they keep going – and they most likely will – their place is secure as useful idiots on history’s wrong side.
*Feature photo: Recuring violence against foreigners from across Africa is now the norm in South Africa. Seen here foreign nationals holding a placard during an anti-xenophobia march outside the City Hall of Durban on April 8, 2015 where the protestors marched against anti-immigrant violence, a week after hundreds were viciously attacked. (Photo credit should read RAJESH JANTILAL/AFP via Getty Images).
About the writer:
Marika Sboros is a South African freelance investigative journalist with decades of experience writing fulltime for the country’s top media titles on a wide range of topics. She started her career as a hard-news reporter in the newsroom of the now defunct Rand Daily Mail, a campaigning anti-government newspaper during the worst excesses of the apartheid era. She commutes between South Africa and the UK.
While the mission of Lay of the Land (LotL) is to provide a wide and diverse perspective of affairs in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world, the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by its various writers are not necessarily ones of the owners and management of LOTL but of the writers themselves. LotL endeavours to the best of its ability to credit the use of all known photographs to the photographer and/or owner of such photographs (0&EO).
Surprise discovery of Iranian women’s hair raises serious concerns but reminds – you can imprison a person but not an idea.
By Marziyeh Amirizadeh
For nearly half a century, the Islamic Republic of Iran has attempted to convince the world that it represents justice, morality, and the will of the Iranian people. But behind the propaganda lies a brutal reality that millions of Iranians know all too well. The regime’s systematic oppression of women remains one of the clearest examples of its cruelty and fear. For as little as showing a strand of hair, Iranian women are met with intimidation, imprisonment, torture, or worse.
Today, the world is once again witnessing the Islamic Republic’s relentless assault on the dignity and freedom of women.
Recently, reports emerged from Armenia that customs officials intercepted 143 bundles of natural hair weighing approximately 26 kilograms at the Agarak border crossing with Iran. The “best” case is that the hair belonged to impoverished Iranian women selling their hair simply to survive in an economy devastated by corruption, sanctions, and government mismanagement. The “good news” is that women may be seeking ways other than the religiously sanctioned prostitution racket of “temporary marriages” to earn money.
The worst case is that the hair came from women who have been gunned down or executed by the Islamic Republic, in one of the most inhuman forms of human trafficking possible: profiting from women’s bodies after they have been murdered.
Either way, the discovery is deeply symbolic. The Islamic Republic has spent decades subjugating women by forcing them to cover their hair, arresting and torturing them for showing a single misplaced strand. Now, as economic desperation deepens, the very symbol of control over Iranian women has become a commodity.
Whether Iranian women are driven to such severe poverty that they must sell parts of themselves to feed their families, or the regime chops off the emblem of freedom for Iranian women from the corpses of their victims, the bottom line is that a woman showing her hair has never been about morality.
It’s always been about control.
Another shocking example of this oppression has captured international attention. Iranian singer Parastoo Ahmadi was sentenced to 74 lashes after performing without a hijab during a livestreamed concert. In addition to the flogging sentence, she and members of her production team reportedly received travel bans and restrictions on their artistic activities.
Iran Lashes Out. The Iranian singer Parastoo Ahmadi reportedly sentenced to 74 lashes for singing without hijab. (Photo: Hosseinronaghi)
Think about what this means.
In the twenty-first century, a woman can be sentenced to brutal whipping simply because she sang a song with her hair showing. I witnessed such torture of my husband who was forced to confess to the “crime” of drinking wine, which he never did. Neither the physical nor psychological scars of his 80 lashes ever healed and led to his death at the hands of the Islamic Republic.
The Islamic Republic fears music because music inspires hope.
It fears artists because artists tell the truth.
It fears women because women have become the strongest voice of resistance against tyranny.
Parastoo Ahmadi’s case is not an isolated incident. It is part of a broader campaign against women who refuse to submit. Women have been arrested for removing their hijabs, imprisoned for posting photographs online, and physically assaulted for challenging discriminatory laws. The regime’s “morality police” and Basij militia have become instruments of terror directed primarily at women and girls.
I witnessed this firsthand during my nine-month imprisonment and death sentence for the “crime” of becoming a Christian. Numerous cellmates shared harrowing stories of all kinds of physical and sexual abuse, judges and prosecutors demanding sex in order to receive a favorable verdict, and misogyny so deep seeded in Iranian society that it’s passed off as normal.
No story illustrates this reality more painfully than the death of Mahsa Amini.
“WOMEN,LIFE, FREEDOM”
In September 2022, Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian woman, was arrested by Iran’s “morality police” for allegedly violating the country’s mandatory hijab regulations. She was brutally tortured and within days, she was dead. Her death ignited nationwide protests under the powerful slogan “Woman, Life, Freedom.”
Millions of Iranians recognized what had happened. Mahsa Amini was not simply one victim among many. She became a symbol of every woman humiliated, threatened, beaten, or silenced by the regime.
The protests that followed, demonstrated the courage of the Iranian people, especially Iranian women. Young women publicly removed their hijabs. Students challenged government officials. Mothers demanded justice. Despite brutal crackdowns, arrests, executions, and intimidation, the spirit of resistance did not disappear.
An Iranian ‘Cover Up’. An Iranian woman walks on a street amid the implementation of the then new hijab surveillance in Tehran in, April 15, 2023. (Photo: Majid Asgaripour/Wana/Reuters)
While I was saved from physical torture, I still bear many scars of my experiences and what I witnessed. My closest friend, Shirin Alamhooli, suffered such severe torture, for days on end she could not walk and every day suffered debilitating headaches because her torturers brutally beat her on the head. Knowing that she was savagely raped (according to Islamic doctrine of not permitting a virgin woman to be executed), is a pain and indignity that Iranian women deal with – causing widespread pain and suffering to survivors like me, as well as the victims.
The Islamic Republic may imprison individuals, but it cannot imprison an idea whose time has come: freedom and the end of the regime.
As someone who personally experienced persecution under the Islamic Republic, I understand the regime’s tactics. Fear is its primary weapon. It sets men in the position of controlling women, and seeks to convince citizens that resistance is futile and that freedom is impossible. Yet history repeatedly proves otherwise.
The courage of Iranian women continues to expose the weakness of the regime. Every woman who walks without a mandatory hijab, every artist who continues to sing, every activist who speaks out, and every family that demands justice for victims like Mahsa Amini represents a challenge to a government built upon coercion.
The discovery of smuggled women’s hair at the Armenian border and the sentencing of Parastoo Ahmadi to 74 lashes may appear to be unconnected. In reality, they are inseparable. Both reveal a regime that exploits, controls, and punishes women while claiming to defend their dignity.
The international community must not look away.
Governments, human rights organizations, churches, and freedom-loving people everywhere should continue to amplify the voices of Iranian women. Silence only emboldens oppressors.
The women of Iran constantly show extraordinary courage. They risk everything for freedom, dignity, and equality. Their struggle is not merely an Iranian issue. It is a human rights issue.
One day, the women of Iran will no longer fear arrest for showing their hair, imprisonment for speaking their minds, or lashes for singing their songs. One day, the slogan “Woman, Life, Freedom” will no longer be a protest cry but a lived reality.
Until that day arrives, the world must stand with them.
*Feature photo: Armenian customs officers seize 143 bundles of undeclared hair from Iran.
About the writer:
Marziyeh (Marzi) Amirizadeh, the founder and president of www.newpersia.org, an author, public speaker, and activist. She has written two books “Captive in Iran,” and “A Love Journey with God” which are available on www.marzisjourney.com. She is an Iranian American who immigrated to the US after being sentenced to death by hanging in Iran for the crime of converting to Christianity. She endured months of mental and physical hardships and intense interrogation in Evin prison- one of the most brutal prisons in the world.
While the mission of Lay of the Land (LotL) is to provide a wide and diverse perspective of affairs in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world, the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by its various writers are not necessarily ones of the owners and management of LOTL but of the writers themselves. LotL endeavours to the best of its ability to credit the use of all known photographs to the photographer and/or owner of such photographs (0&EO).
UK Court of Appeals confirms Palestine Action proscription decision
By Lawrence Nowosenetz
The British group called Palestine Action (PA) was founded in 2020 and has been active in acts of violence and destruction of property at various sites in the UK. It has made well publicised threats and incitement. It’s stated goal being directed against what it regards as Israel’s “genocidal” and “apartheid regime“. This secretive and criminally minded group has now been confirmed to be unlawful in the UK.
Under the Terrorism Act of 2000, the UK Home Secretary has the power to proscribe (ban) any organisation believed to be engaged in terrorism. In June 2025, the Home Office designated Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation and this was announced to Parliament on 23 June 2025. After approval by positive resolutions of both Houses of Parliament, on 5 July 2025, the order implementing the proscription of Palestine Action came into effect.
British Barbarians. Elbit’s 35-million-pound ($43 million) research and development hub that was violently attacked by ‘Palestine Action’ (a now proscribed terrorist group) employs 680 people across 16 sites, working on multiple programs for the British military. During the raid, a ‘Palestine Action’ activist fractured a police sergeant’s spine with a sledgehammer.
The banning was challenged by Ms Ammori, a leader of PA, and the Divisional Court upheld this challenge setting aside the proscription ruling. This was based on two grounds: Firstly, that the Home Secretary did not correctly apply the proscription policy and secondly that the proscription disproportionately interfered with individual rights under the European Convention of Human Rights.
The Home Secretary appealed against this decision on both grounds and sought to restore her proscription ruling. The Court of Appeals fully upheld the Home Minister and restored her proscription decision in a judgment dated 15 June 2026.
The appeal has highlighted the disturbing nature of PA and its underlying ideology.
The court considered the shadowy structure and operations of PA. According to the official judiciary press summary:
“It held that the content of Palestine Action’s “Underground Manual” was revealing; evidence from or on behalf of Ms Ammori provided surprisingly little information about Palestine Action; the extent and nature of Palestine Action’s membership and organisation were largely unexplained; the lack of information was intentional and consistent with the image cultivated by Palestine Action in its “Underground Manual” of being a covert organisation; Palestine Action operated through cells of trusted people who were encouraged to avoid identification or detection and were advised on “smashing stuff” with a sledgehammer, and encouraged to be “creative” and to disrupt targets “without restraint.”
The Court rejected the notion of PA as a peaceful protest movement operating in the open but rather a covert organisation avoiding detection and prosecution with unidentifiable cells. It said in considered and restrained terms:
“Palestine Action could not properly be portrayed as a non-violent organisation; it was not accurate to describe it as an ordinary protest group engaged in activities falling within the well-established tradition of peaceful protest. It was engaged in causing serious damage to property. It presented a very real risk of injury not only to property but also to members of the public. Its campaign was intended to close down the operations of a company pursuing a lawful business by intimidation, not persuasion.”
“…many individuals have been arrested and/or charged for offences under the 2000 Act in respect of Palestine Action; there are currently over 700 cases pending in the criminal courts of England and Wales, and many more at the pre-charge stage.” (Judgment paragraph 6)
The activities of PA have included dramatic acts of violence and destruction targeting companies both British and Israeli manufacturing defence equipment for the IDF:
Elbit Systems have been a primary target. In 2021 members of the group clad in red boiler suits unlawfully clambered onto the roof of an Elbit owned UAV (drone) factory and staged an occupation lasting 6 days. Charges were laid against 10 members for conspiracy to commit criminal damage and aggravated trespass.
In 2022, protesters chained themselves to a gate of an Elbit UAV subsidiary. On 6 August 2024, at Elbit’s Aztec West compound, six activists driving a van, breached the security fences and entered the facility causing substantial damage to property and equipment. This episode resulted in confrontations with security personnel and police, in which a police officer sustained a fracture to her lumbar spine.
‘The Wild Bunch’. Portraying themselves as a mere “protest group” for Palestine, ‘Palestine Action’ used a decommissioned prison van to smash through security shutters on their way to wreak havoc, cause extensive damage and inflict bodily harm.
These actions contributed to multi-day shutdowns and potentially contributed to the loss of a £2.1bn contract between Elbit UK and the Ministry of Defence.
On 16 March 2025, Elbit’s Aztec West site was targeted by four Palestine Action activists with a crane mounted vehicle and a hammer attached to a rope to smash second floor windows and daub red paint on the building. They were arrested on the site with all being charged with conspiracy to damage property and three being charged with one count of assault by beating.
Return to the Dark Ages. Bodycam footage shows an officer aiming a taser gun at an intruder at Elbit UK’s site in Bristol, England, after the intruder struck a police officer with a sledgehammer. (Screen capture: Channel 4)
In June 2025, members of PA gained access to a RAF facility and sprayed red paint into the engines of two RAF Airbus A330 refuelling planes. This caused serious damage and can be regarded as sabotage.
Cambridge University has also been targeted. In 2024, PA activists defaced a historic portrait of politician Arthur Balfour with spray paint at Trinity College, Cambridge in protest apparently of the 1917 Balfour Declaration. The historic Senate House and Old Schools building were also spraying red paint by PA in subsequent incidents.
Rage and Rampage. Footage of the break-in was uploaded to social media by ‘Palestine Action’, whose campaign resulted in millions of pounds in property damage across the UK, multi-day site shutdowns, and severe injuries to security and police personnel. Seen here are its attack on Elbit Systems Raid (Bristol) causing an estimated £1.2 million in damages by using crowbars and hammers to smash windows and destroy computers, drones, and equipment.
BLUEN BABBLE
South African Jo Bluen of SA Jews for a Free Palestine, is an ardent supporter of PA. In her post on X dated 10 August 2025, she responded to the arrest by British police of a blind protester holding a sign supporting PA. In her inimitable Bluen babble:
“May these ziofascist and zioliberal met police in the imperial metropole know no peace as the colonial carceral guard of the western apparatus of genocidal complicity in the settler colonial ethnic cleansing, barbarism, holocausts, the ongoing Nakba in Palestine. Across the colonised world.
British, ‘brutish, nasty and in shorts’. British, brutish, from Balfour to Bibi.”
Bluen Blew It. At times incoherent pro-Palestine South African activist, Joe Bluen, may now have difficulty getting a visa to study in the UK following her public support for the now proscribed violent terrorist group, ‘Palestine Action’.
The British authorities are aware of Ms. Bluen’s activities and ideological alignment. She may face visa difficulties with the UK following a complaint to the Home Office.
The proscription of PA is a clear and unequivocal message to the world, that no amount of propaganda, lies and hatred towards Israel can mask the lawless, brutal, ugly, violent face of those who hide behind this mask to commit acts of incitement to hatred, destruction of property and injury to persons.
*Feature photo: Palestine Action activists take part in a protest after the government announced its plans to proscribe the group. (Photo: Neil Hall/EPA-EFE)
About the writer:
Born in Pretoria Lawrence Nowosenetz obtained his BA at University of the Witwatersrand and LLB at the University of South Africa. He has been admitted as an Attorney in South Africa and as an advocate in South Africa. He practiced at the Pretoria and Johannesburg Bar and worked as a human rights and labour lawyer at the Legal Resources Centre a public interest law firm. Lawrence was Awarded a Fulbright Scholarship and completed professional internship in the USA. He was a a labour arbitrator and mediator, part time Senior Commissioner at the Commission for Conciliation Mediation and Arbitration (CCMA) as well as a panelist at Tokiso Dispute Settlement. He was a member of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies and Pretoria Chairman. He has also served as an Acting Judge of the High Court, South Africa. He now lives in Tel Aviv.
While the mission of Lay of the Land (LotL) is to provide a wide and diverse perspective of affairs in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world, the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by its various writers are not necessarily ones of the owners and management of LOTL but of the writers themselves. LotL endeavours to the best of its ability to credit the use of all known photographs to the photographer and/or owner of such photographs (0&EO).
Giving in to Iranian demands rather than achieve peace in the Middle East will instead facilitate perpetual war.
By Neville Berman
After publicly assuring the Iranian people, “Help is on the way”, Trump decided that America needed to do a deal with the world’s greatest exporter of terror and perennial liar about its nuclear program. Consequently, the Iranian regime has been given a lifeline.
Following the slaughter of tens of thousands of its own protesting citizens and Trump’s assurances, the US president has turned his back on the Iranian people who want democracy, freedom of expression, the rule of law, and human rights.
Misleading Message. “Help is on its way,” Trump tells Iranians as he urges them to keep protesting in January, 2026.
Initially, America held all the cards. The situation has now changed. The whole world is complaining about the increase in the price of petrol and gas. America does not want to be at war while it is co-hosting the soccer world cup. Once the tournament ends, campaigning for the midterm elections will take center stage. Americans are tired of fighting wars of choice in foreign lands thousands of miles away. Trump wants to end the war and be recognized as a peacemaker. In addition, Congress has not agreed to give Trump the green light to continue with the war.
The Iranian regime knows that it can rely on help from China and Russia. Russia is using thousands of drones supplied by Iran in its war against Ukraine, and Russia will veto any UN Security Council resolution calling for sanctions on Iran. They also know that China will buy billions of dollars of Iranian oil at a discount. The regime also knows that it has the backing of Qatar, and that it can rely on the Europeans to seek appeasement no matter the cost.
Twenty percent of the world’s oil exports flow through the Strait of Hormuz on Iran’s southern coastline. The Strait is an international waterway that should remain open and never be subject to tariffs. Nobody has to pay to use the English Channel and nobody should ever have to pay to use the Strait of Hormuz. Closing the Strait of Hormuz is against international law, but the Iranian regime knows that no Iranian has ever been charged by the International Criminal Court for committing any crime. The bottom line is that Iran is already planning a massive victory parade.
The Iranian regime is going for the jugular and when Pakistan was accepted as the venue for negotiations, it was a dead cert that America would bow to Iranian demands.
The world’s greatest superpower would no longer be calling the shots!
The Iranians are demanding :
the immediate lifting of American sanctions,
over $100 billion of frozen Iranian money in foreign banks to be released.
The right to impose fees on oil tankers passing through the “international waterway” of the Strait of Hormuz – amounting to an act of extortion.
$300 billion as compensation for war damage ignoring the war was caused by their own actions
removal of all US armed forces from the Middle East.
LostLeverage. With Pakistan the venue for negotiations, the US lost its edge and was no longer calling the shots.
To make matters worse, America is not insisting on restrictions on the Iranian missile program, nor is it insisting that Iran end its support for their proxy terrorist forces in the Middle East. In regard to the Iranian nuclear program, Iran is once again committing to allow the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)to inspect its nuclear program and its stockpile of enriched uranium. Iran had agreed to this in the past, and then lied and lied, and prevented the IAEA from carrying out what was agreed to. No matter what is agreed to in a new deal, Iran will continue to lie about its nuclear program in the future. The deal gives the Iranians everything upfront, and in return the US gets a commitment from Iran to end its nuclear program at some stage in the future. The Iranian regime is laughing all the way to the bank. They also have no intention of ever abandoning their nuclear program. Trump has completely lost the plot of what should be happening.
For over a decade Netanyahu warned the world about the danger of a nuclear armed Iran. Finally, when it came down to attempting to destroy the underground nuclear facilities in Iran, the US and Israel operated with an unprecedented level of partnership, co-operation and intelligence sharing. Together they significantly reduced the threat of Iran’s nuclear program and its capacity to wage war.
The Iranians have spent decades and billions of dollars financing, training and supplying Hezbollah with an estimated 150,000 rockets aimed at Israel. Using incredible intelligence capabilities, and innovative tactics, Israel eliminated the leadership of Hezbollah, and greatly reduced its capacity to attack Israel. Hezbollah still has a stockpile of anti-tank missiles and drones that they continue to shoot into Israel. Israel has replied by attacking Hezbollah facilities in Lebanon. The IDF have discovered massive amounts of armaments stored in civilian houses and underground tunnels in Lebanon.
The Iranians are trying to save Hezbollah. They are demanding that any deal between Iran and America must include a ceasefire in Lebanon. What this signifies is that Iran does not consider Lebanon to be a sovereign independent country. What Trump should be demanding is that Hezbollah disarm, so that Lebanon and Israel can then conclude a peace treaty and live in peace with each other. The problem in Lebanon is Hezbollah, and not the actions of Israel. Surprisingly, Trump has taken the side of the Iranians and has demanded that Israel implement a ceasefire in Lebanon. Israel has refused. Trump has now turned against Netanyahu with a vengeance. Israel has been totally locked out of the negotiations with the Iranians and Trump has turned Netanyahu into a pariah in the White House.
Money Talks. The talks are becoming a battle to unlock the funds.
What is actually happening is that America has agreed to a framework deal to be signed immediately, and that negotiations will then be held for a maximum of 60 days, in order to conclude a Memorandum of Understanding that will result in a permanent peace between the United States and Iran.
The world is cheering. Gas prices are going down, and Iran has promised not to build or buy atomic weapons. At long last, peace in the Middle East seems to be possible. What can go wrong?
In his second term, Trump believes – having repeatedly expressed so – he is deserving of the Nobel Peace Prize even though he has declared that:
– the US needs to own Greenland and would either take it the easy way or the hard way
– the US needs to take control of Canada, Mexico, Cuba, Panama, Venezuela, and the Gaza Strip
– signaled a cut back of American support to NATO.
While none of the above are likely to help Trump in his quest for the Nobel Peace Prize, if he does manage to bring ‘peace’ – that is, some modicum of a cessation of hostilities to the region, he just might receive it. However, what Trump is negotiating with Iran will not bring genuine peace for it will empower the leadership to renew all its nefarious terrorist activities and revitalize the fanatical religious obsession set on eliminating the State of Israel. Over 80% of Shiite Muslims in the world are known as Twelvers. They believe that the 12th Imam, Muhammad al-Mahdi, who disappeared in the 10th century, will one day reappear and bring Islamic rule and justice to the world. The Imams in charge of Iran believe that Israel needs to be eliminated in order to hasten his return. The general view of the Iranian people is that Israel has nothing to do with the return of the 12th Imam and that Iran and Israel should resume normal relations that existed before the revolution in 1979.
Trump’s Holy Grail. Speaking to reporters back in January 2026 at the White House, Donald Trump said he couldn’t “think of anybody in history that should get the Nobel Prize more than me.”
The deal that America is negotiating with Iran will ensure that perpetual war in the Middle East continues. Successive American administrations have never understood the Middle East, and the current administration is no exception.
There is another small minority viewpoint that holds that Trump is actually the most brilliant politician around, and that all his capricious behaviour is part of his master plan to ensure that America becomes great again. The theory is that Trump will get the Iranians to agree to a deal, and after that the Republican Party will win a majority in both the Senate and the House in the midterm elections. Iran will inevitably not keep to its commitments, and Trump will then get Congress to approve military action against the Iranian regime. He will once again partner with Israel, and together they will cause the Iranian regime to collapse and be overthrown. Netanyahu will be completely vindicated, and will be invited back to the White House to celebrate the fall of the Iranian regime. Hallelujah.
No matter what happens in Iran, and despite all the problems that Israel is facing, Israel will remain a democracy, and will continue to innovate and prosper. It will continue to ensure the rights of Christians, Muslims and members of various other religions to freely access and pray at their respective holy sites in Israel. It will continue to act as a light unto the nations of the world, and will play a positive role in improving the lives of tens of millions of people around the world. Millions of Jews have a yearning to live in the land promised by G-d to the seed of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. The population of Israel will continue to grow. Empires have come and gone, but Israel is here to stay. I would not want to live anywhere else. One last thought, Trump will never receive a Nobel Peace Prize.
About the writer:
Accountant Neville Berman had an illustrious sporting career in South Africa, being twice awarded the South African State Presidents Award for Sport and was a three times winner of the South African Maccabi Sportsman of the Year Award. In 1978 he immigrated to the USA to coach the United States men’s field hockey team, whereafter, in 1981 he immigrated to Israel where he practiced as an accountant and then for 20 years was the Admin Manager at the American International School in Even Yehuda, Israel. He is married with two children and one granddaughter.
While the mission of Lay of the Land (LotL) is to provide a wide and diverse perspective of affairs in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world, the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by its various writers are not necessarily ones of the owners and management of LOTL but of the writers themselves. LotL endeavours to the best of its ability to credit the use of all known photographs to the photographer and/or owner of such photographs (0&EO).
Also available on YouTube @The Israel Brief – Simply click on the red subscribe button to receive alerts when a new report is posted.
What’s happening in Israel today? See from every Monday – Thursday LOTL’s The Israel Brief broadcasts and on our Facebook page and YouTube by seasoned TV & radio broadcaster, Rolene Marks familiar to Chai FM listeners in South Africa and millions of American listeners to the News/Talk/Sports radio station WINA, broadcasting out of Virginia, USA.
Blocking more than roads, ultra-Orthodox (Hareidi) block way forward to societal cohesion
Police intervene as ultra-Orthodox Jews block roads in Jerusalem on June 10, 2026, where crowds gathered to protest against compulsory military service. This photo captures pictorially the HEATED debate over the question: “What constitutes a Jewish state”? (Photo: Mostafa Alkharouf/Anadolu via Getty Images)
ARTICLES
Please note there is a facility to comment beneath each article should you wish to express an opinion on the subject addressed.
(1)
FROM AN AILING KING SAUL TO A FAILING “KING BIBI” – TIME FOR CHANGE
Promises, platitudes and politics is all that is left on offer from Israel’s prime minister. By David E. Kaplan
Beyond the Bluster. In a De Gaulle mode of Je suis la France (“I am France”), Bibi believes he is indispensable to Israel – that he embodies the Jewish State. He doesn’t; the people do. His greatest act now will be to make way for new generational leadership.
A South African take on “As You Like It” is playing at the International Court of Justice at The Hague. By Craig Snoyman
South Africa Upstaged. Truth and fantasy flitted like prancing players in a mythical forest, with South Africa the ‘Court’ jester at the International Court of Justice. It now stands exposed as the real clown!
FROM URGENCY TO DELAY: WHAT HAPPENED TO SOUTH AFRICA’S ICJ CASE?
South Africa exposes through ineptitude its true motivations behind its fabricated case against Israel. ByKenneth Moeng Kgwadi
What a Drag! The image of empty seats at the ICJ stands as a metaphor of South Africa’s empty “genocide” case against Israel which is set to drag on for years due South Africa’s request for time to find the evidence!
When it comes to self-preservation, they will lie at every turn and manipulate even the Dealmaker-in-Chief. By Marziyeh Amirizadeh
‘Strait’ Talking’. Now that Americans can again cheaply fill up their cars this summer, Israelis will have to spend much more investing in its future defense. Such are the war-fought results of the ‘Opening of the Strait’ deal.
While the mission of Lay of the Land (LotL) is to provide a wide and diverse perspective of affairs in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world, the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by its various writers are not necessarily ones of the owners and management of LOTL but of the writers themselves. LotL endeavours to the best of its ability to credit the use of all known photographs to the photographer and/or owner of such photographs (0&EO).
Promises, platitudes and politics is all that is left on offer from Israel’s prime minister.
By David E. Kaplan
The story about the prophet Samuel informing King Saul that his kingdom was being taken away in favor of a more worthy successor, remains a pivotal moment in the biblical narrative about the wisdom of timeous political transition. (Samuel 15 and 16)
Some 3000 years later, this narrative could not be more instructive.
What if Samuel was with us today and like all Israelis on 16 June 2026, who turned on their local TV news channels to hear their prime minister address the nation on Trump’s MoU. (Memorandum of Understanding).
‘Deal’ with the Devil. In response to national anxiety over Trumps MoU, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu holds a press conference on the June 15, 2026, asserting that ‘we saved Israel from annihilation’ in war, admits he and Trump don’t always ‘see eye to eye,’ stresses troops will remain in south Lebanon and admits he does not know all the details of the deal. (Photo: Olivier Fitoussi/Pool)
After all, the issue is the number one existential issue facing the nation of Israel.
This is what the prime minister himself believes.
This is what he has been telling us and the world not for years but for decades. On this issue, he prides himself no less a prophet than Samuel.
So, what would Samuel have thought as he looked upon like all of us in disbelief?
What would he have wisely counseled while going about doing God’s work?
After so much war and suffering, did not the people of Israel deserve to hear at least some details from their prime minister to UNDERSTAND what was happening?
Bibi offered anything but UNDERSTANDING!
Well, not quite because we UNDERSTOOD that Bibi was as lost as all of us as the only relevant insight he could share on the MoU was that he did not know yet any details.
He let us know that we knew as much as he did.
Comforting!
As we prepared to watch Bibi’s carefully choreographed address, all were anxious having been subjected to the rumors that the agreement would:
– strengthen Hezbollah
– strengthen Iran and
– weaken Israel.
As we later learned, it did all three, virtually making Lebanon an Iranian protectorate. Bad enough for us in the center of the country but what of our fellow citizens in the north that as The Jerusalem Post editor solemnly writes would mean:
“…the difference between a family returning to Metula, Kiryat Shmona, Minara, Shlomi, or the Galilee, and another year of empty streets, shuttered businesses, improvised schooling and lives lived in suspension.”
Did the prime minister offer to them and the rest of his listening citizenry anything beyond, promises, platitudes and politics?
Like an ailing King Saul this was a failing “King Bibi” and that we, the modern citizens of Israel, needed fresh ideas and fresh leadership.
Displaying disdain for the concerns and anxieties of his people he hardly even addressed the MoU – the number one issue on all viewer’s minds and why they turned on their TVs to watch.
Desperate to hear some straight talk about what the burgeoning deal between the US and Iran would mean for us, all we got as most commentators agree was a superficial “campaign speech” using the platform to highlight Bibi’s military achievements and outlining future political goals.
Clearly, most pressing for Bibi was setting the record straight following a June 2026 interview, when U.S. President Donald Trump publicly questioned whether Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu intended to run in Israel’s upcoming fall elections, remarking “I wonder if Bibi even wants to continue.”
Soaking in the Spotlight. While Trump was enjoying his birthday week by parading his ‘Peace Deal’ with Iran at the G7 in France that sidelined Israel’s interests and concerns, Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu found himself adrift having few credible answers to an exhausted and skeptical citizenry that will in months be deciding his political future.
Bibi assured his viewers that he will be running and that “I intend to win.”
Hardly what many wanted to hear!
In a De Gaulle mode of Je suis la France (“I am France”), Bibi believes he is indispensable to Israel – that he embodies the Jewish State.
Having endured two major conflicts with the Iranian regime, spending hours in shelters as Iranian ballistic missiles rained down indiscriminately in attempts to kill as many Israeli civilians as possible, with lives lost, homes destroyed, and nerves frayed, Israelis deserved more.
They did not get it.
Where we did get the truth was from Trump’s former partner- in-chief during his first term, VP Mike Pence who blasted the U.S.-Iran MoU, warning it contains no requirement for Iran to dismantle its nuclear or ballistic missile programs and no commitment to end support for terror groups like Hamas and Hezbollah.
All issues critical to Israel, Pence said the deal would immediately ease sanctions, unlock billions in frozen Iranian assets, and pave the way for hundreds of billions in reconstruction funding for Iran, calling it “the kind of appeasement” seen under previous administrations.
Pense making Sense. Apart from Bibi not “seeing eye to eye” with his buddy Trump, neither did former U.S. VP, Mike Pence, who called the US-Ian MoU “the kind of appeasement” seen under previous administrations.
Days later, having time to “digest”, many in Israel felt a need to belch as the final memorandum appeared even worse than the leaked version, strengthening Iran’s hold over Lebanon, ignoring Hezbollah’s disarmament and exposing a seismic gap between Trump’s declarations and the agreement he signed. This deal sounds little more than extortion – paying Iran off to open Hormuz!
While all this is going on and Israelis have made such sacrifices for their families, for their friends and for their country, thousands of Hareidi protestors are blocking highways, attacking Supreme Court Deputy President Justice Noam Sohlberg’s private residence all in support of draft dodgers. What would Samuel say listening to a representative of the Jerusalem Faction protest say:
“We will shut down the country, and anyone who thinks they have seen it all is in for surprises. The struggle is only at its beginning, and our next steps will be far more significant.”
Irate Israelis. Israeli citizens voice their discontent with the reports of the agreement signed between the US and Iran, which completely sidelined Israel.
And what is this governments response to this anti-Zionist conduct undermining and dividing the country?
Adding insult to injury, this government under this prime minister is advancing a proposed Basic Law that elevates Torah study to a foundational national value that will define long-term Torah study as equivalent to “meaningful service” in the IDF.
Shame, Shame, Shame.
What would Samuel of 3000 years ago say today?
He would say like most are feeling.
It is time for change.
While the mission of Lay of the Land (LotL) is to provide a wide and diverse perspective of affairs in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world, the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by its various writers are not necessarily ones of the owners and management of LOTL but of the writers themselves. LotL endeavours to the best of its ability to credit the use of all known photographs to the photographer and/or owner of such photographs (0&EO).
15 June 2026 – “Let the oil flow” – what we know about the MoU between Iran and the USA on The Israel Brief.
16 June 2026 – Fasten your seatbelts as we make sense of the latest on the US – Iran MoU on The Israel Brief.
17 June 2026 – The leaks, the facts, the latest on the MoU between Iran and the USA on The Israel Brief.
18 June 2026 – The Versailles capitulation? The latest headlines and your mensches and morons on The Israel Brief.
18 June 2026 – Rolene Marks discusses the Iran – US MoU and Hezbollah on WINA the Schillng Show.
While the mission of Lay of the Land (LotL) is to provide a wide and diverse perspective of affairs in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world, the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by its various writers are not necessarily ones of the owners and management of LOTL but of the writers themselves. LotL endeavours to the best of its ability to credit the use of all known photographs to the photographer and/or owner of such photographs (0&EO).
A South African take on “As You Like It” is playing at the International Court of Justice at The Hague.
By Craig Snoyman
“Honestly m’lord, we know he was in the bank when the robbery took place, we believe he is one of the robbers. Grant us an urgent interdict preventing him from doing any further robberies. If he is the robber then we are stopping further robberies. If he is not the robber, well then, he is not suffering any harm. We’ll bring comprehensive evidence in to due course to show that he is actually the robber, we promise.”
This is not much different from the argument presented by South Africa when it arrived at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on 29 December 2023. The South African government sought renewed international relevance by filing an urgent case against Israel. And so it was that South Africa arrived, breathless with urgency, armed with the faded moral aura of Mandela with robes billowing, waving documents and followed by an army of lawyers in its wake, that might bankrupt a small country. In front of the world’s cameras, it demanded that immediate relief for what it alleged was a genocide.
The application was marked urgent.
The request for provisional measures screamed emergency.
The world was told there was no time to waste.
Hocus Pokus. Teetering on the verge of bankruptcy, the ANC announced in early January 2024 that it had suddenly managed to stabilize its finances – no explanations given – and in the same week, approached the ICJ to ask that Israel’s actions in Gaza be classified as “genocide”. Under the shadow of Iran’s plotting over proceedings, supporters of the trump-up charge outside the Western Cape High Court on 11 January 2024 in Cape Town, South Africa. (Photo: Gallo Images/Brenton Geach)
And the court played its part. The world watched two days of oral argument — a mere fortnight after filing. The provisional measures order followed against the presumptive robber, sorry, make that prospective genocider. All very urgent. All very now. All very theatrical — but then the world is a stage.
South Africa’s initial application ran to 84 pages. Its memorial, filed in October 2024, ran to over 750 pages of text with more than 4,000 pages of exhibits and annexes. Having seen the general competence of the South African government, one cannot, even on the most generous assessment, believe that it was capable of producing 4,750 pages of material between the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023 and the filing date of 29 December 2023. The unanswered question that the South African government has still not been willing to answer in public is how long, exactly, was this ‘urgent‘ application in the making before the moment of urgency that supposedly required it? The leader of the South African legal team, John Dugard– the man who has spent at least the last 10 years agitating against Israel – probably knows the answer. The circumstantial evidence suggests that it was not a mere three months in creation.
“Urgency” allowed South Africa to leapfrog the queue and obtain interim relief before a final hearing. The premise of urgency was that the harm was occurring now, that it could not wait for the judicial mill to grind at its exceedingly slow pace. Any delay would cause irreparable damage to rights that deserve protection. Whether the other party is left carrying the stigma as a robber, or a genocider, is outweighed by the risk of potential harm.
On 26 January 2024, the International Court of Justice issued its Order on provisional measures. The court explicitly stated that its order was “not a ruling on whether Israel is in breach of the Genocide Convention.” The former President of the ICJ, Joan Donoghue — who had presided over the very hearings in question — explained that the court had not found that it was plausible that Israel was committing genocide. It had found that certain rights asserted by South Africa — not the right to be free from genocide as such, but rights under the Genocide Convention — were plausible enough to justify provisional protection from irreparable harm pending a full hearing.
Corrupting the Court. Despite former ICJ President Joan E. Donoghue clarifying to the BBC that the court did NOT conclude that there was a “plausible case” of genocide against Israel in Gaza, did not stop the global hysteria from propagating otherwise in order to besmirch the character of the State of Israel.
This finding detonated through global media like a diplomatic hand grenade. South Africa celebrated and its domestic commentators declared that the ICJ had found that Israel was ‘plausibly committing genocide.’ Legal academics issued breathless analyses confirming that the court believed genocide was occurring. I recall one very prominent South African law professor asking Natasha Hausdorff where she got her law degree, after Hausdorff had pointed out to her that the court had not found there was a plausible genocide.
The distinction is not technical wordplay. It is the difference between a court saying “we find it plausible that the party is a robber” and a court saying “we find it plausible that there are rights worth protecting while we decide whether the party is a robber.” The court followed the latter principle. South Africa’s government either did not read that part, or found it inconvenient. The world’s media, supplied with South Africa’s narrative and disinclined to examine ICJ jurisprudence on a Friday afternoon, ran with the finding that a genocide was plausible.
South Africa filed its memorial in October 2024: 750 pages of text, 4,000 pages of exhibits. Israel could and did raise preliminary objections to jurisdiction and admissibility, choosing not to raise the issues as a standalone exercise earlier, which would delay proceedings for six to twelve months while they are decided. Israel has raised these arguments in its counter-memorial, filed on 12 March 2026, requesting extensions from the court. South Africa opposed these extensions on the grounds that they “undermined the urgency of the proceedings.”
THE ‘PLOT’S’ (ANTI)CLIMAX
On 21 May 2026, a notice was published on the ICJ website which granted South Africa until 22 November 2027 to file its replying memorial, and set 22 May 2029 as the deadline for Israel’s rejoinder. The same country that stated extensions undermine the urgency of the proceedings asked for and was granted an extension of 18 months. If previous court procedure is followed then Oral Hearings, should probably occur in late 2029. A final judgment as to whether genocide actually occurred would only be expected sometime in 2030 or 2031.
If the matter was urgent enough to demand provisional measures within two weeks of filing, it is curious that when faced with Israel’s 1,000-page counter-memorial and its 4,000 pages of exhibits, South Africa now requires 18 months to formulate a reply. Perhaps South Africa’s founding memorial represented the entirety of the government’s awareness, and the subsequent 4,750-page memorial required far more critical analysis on a matter which is far more complex than it had initially led the world to believe. One wonders whether Pretoria’s legal team had war-gamed the scenario where the funding pipeline has dried up when further rounds of written pleadings and oral hearings still need to be attended to. Perhaps that accounts for the 18-month extension request. Perhaps the delay is not about complexity. Perhaps it is about waiting to see whether the financial climate improves, whether the government in Tehran survives and proves generous, or whether some other source of support emerges to defray the huge costs of this case.
Murky Machinations. Responding to allegations that the ANC received funding from Iran to finance the legal costs to charging Israel at the ICJ in the Hague of “genocide”, the Iranian Ambassador to South Africa, Mansour Shakib Mehr, refuted such allegations at a press conference saying that in any event, “the case was filed by the South African government” and “not filed by the ANC.” (Photo: Supplied)
Israel has carried the ‘genocide state’ label since 7 October 2023 — the date Hamas committed the largest massacre of Jews since the Second World War. This label was magnified by the January 2024 order, mischaracterised by governments, adopted by protest movements, and has been continuously repeated by worldwide legacy and social media for the last two and a half years.
No finding of genocide has been made.
The ICJ has not concluded that genocide occurred or is occurring. The court has issued provisional measures — temporary interdicts pending a full hearing — but has explicitly declined to rule on the merits. But Israel will continue to carry the ‘genocide state’ label until the finalisation of the case.
What will happen if, sometime around 2030, the ICJ finds for Israel on the preliminary objections alone, by holding that the court lacks jurisdiction, or that the application is inadmissible or that the genocide convention cannot be expanded into a general mechanism for adjudicating the legality of the use of force? Or my personal favourite: that no dispute exists because no “positively opposed views” had been found and there had been no exchanges, either publicly or privately, to establish a dispute. This would be a monumental screw-up on the part of South Africa, and Dugard did not address the issue particularly well in January 2024. The case would be dismissed without any finding on the merits. In the court of public opinion, Israel would not be found innocent of genocide, because the court would have examined whether genocide occurred. It would simply have been determined that South Africa had no standing, or that the court had no jurisdiction, or that the application was procedurally defective.
“WORDS, WORDS, WORDS”
The genocide label, however, will remain in circulation. The articles will not be retracted. The resolutions will not be rescinded. The protest chants will not be updated. Public opinion operates on narratives, and the narrative of a “genocide state,” “ICJ genocide case” “plausibly genocidal” will be further grist to the mill.
Israel would emerge from nine years of lawfare and worldwide accusations of genocide in the world’s highest court, having its reputation treated as collateral damage by a government in Pretoria that has neither the answers to confront it legally or to comply within the timeframes it originally demanded to prevent undermining the process.
Rot in the Republic. While the republic of South Africa’s government focuses on pursuing false charges of genocide against Israel, it fails abysmally in dealing with humanity issues at home like these foreign nationals sleeping on the street after fleeing their homes amid anti-immigrant protests in Durban, South Africa on June 9, 2026. While demonstrations across the country have escalated into violence, resulting in injuries and the deaths of foreign nationals, South Africa’s government prefers to focus on Gaza! (Photo: Reuters/Rogan Ward)
And what if Israel is successful on the merits? There is apparently an amicus curia brief (a report to aid the court by a non-party) by some of the world’s pre-eminent military experts, stating that Israel’s war in Gaza has been more protective of non-combatants in a warzone than any other war in the history of mankind. It makes no difference. For the duration of this case — which will extend into the 2030s, Israel has carried and will continue to carry a status in international community that one might describe as the legal equivalent of a skunk at a garden party. No formal finding of genocide. No conviction. A verdict of acquittal. But the association, repeated daily in global media, in university campuses, in governmental statements from hostile states have real-world effects on trade, on diplomatic relations, on the treatment of both Israeli nationals and Jews abroad.
South Africa will continue to play the role of the global avenger until a final verdict is delivered and possibly even beyond. And while it reads its lines and while its government officials talk of accountability and international law, they speak with the sincerity of men who have spent the better part of the last few years avoiding both.
About the writer:
Craig Snoymanis a practising advocate in South Africa.
While the mission of Lay of the Land (LotL) is to provide a wide and diverse perspective of affairs in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world, the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by its various writers are not necessarily ones of the owners and management of LOTL but of the writers themselves. LotL endeavours to the best of its ability to credit the use of all known photographs to the photographer and/or owner of such photographs (0&EO).
