How a cancelled school tennis match escalated into a wider political battle over Israel, antisemitism, and boycotts.

By Marika Sboros

(First published in BizNews)

If you think the dust has settled over the “Roedean affair” – as the cancelled tennis match between two top Johannesburg private schools (one of them Jewish), is being grandly called – then think again.

The “affair” became public knowledge within days of Roedean Girls High School refusing to play the scheduled match against King David Linksfield girls on February 3, 2026.

From that moment on, the anti-Israel lobby has been hard at working trying to turn a tennis match into an international propaganda tool.

It has not let go. The lobby appears determined to keep the “affair” moving in its desired direction, supported by extremist, Islamist, jihadist lobbies.

That’s despite both schools moving in the opposite direction. Both have gone past claims of antisemitism and back to their core business of educating children.

Roedean has resisted the lobby’s undisguised fury at its public (though prompted) written apology to King David on February 12. The apology does not admit antisemitism but acknowledges the “deep hurt” to the Jewish community.

Roedean showed good faith by promising to reschedule the match, which further infuriated the anti-Israel lobby. If Roedean honours its promise, the lobby will likely use it to maximise political capital for its own agendas.

The drivers of those agendas are not difficult to spot.

These include barely disguised calls for ongoing sports boycotts of King David schoolchildren; revival of claims of “genocide” and “baby killers” against Israel and Jews who support it, with “apartheid” slurs thrown in for good measure; and support for South Africa’s ill-fated, ongoing ICJ (International Criminal Court) lawsuit against Israel on a charge of genocide in Gaza.

Ironically, South Africa lodged the case against Israel just weeks after a genuine genocide attempt by Hamas in southern Israel on October 7, 2023.

Underpinning these drivers is the anti-Israel lobby’s pathological anti-Zionism.

Legal and historical scholars say that anti-Zionism is a modern mutation of the ancient virus of Jew hatred known euphemistically in modern English as antisemitism.

It is also the lifeblood of the supposedly “pro-Palestinian” movement.

I say, “supposedly” because of the Orwellian manipulation of language lobbyists indulge in to justify support for groups that clearly don’t give a fig for Palestinians.

Hamas is a prime example. Video evidence shows it diverting humanitarian aid in Gaza into its own coffers, thereby worsening poverty and starvation, and shooting civilians who try to access the aid. 

It also routinely uses public executions to stifle dissent and oppress marginalised groups, including LGBTQ+ people.

Hamas does not typically employ the theatrical “rooftop execution” method associated with extremist groups, such as ISIS. Instead, it maintains a systemic environment of criminalisation, torture and extrajudicial killing of LGBTQ+ individuals in Gaza. 

It boasts of using its own people as “human shields” in conflict zones. On October 26, 2023, Hamas’s Political Bureau chief Ismail Haniyeh declared in a Lebanese TV broadcast: 

“The blood of the women, children and elderly … we are the ones who need this blood, so it awakens within us the revolutionary spirit …(and) resolve.”

Call me picky but I can think of adjectives other than “revolutionary” and “resolve” to describe spirits requiring such infusion to keep going.

Diabolical springs to mind.

I can also think of choice descriptions for Jews who voluntarily support groups that openly desire their destruction.

Unsurprisingly, among the first local anti-Zionist voices supporting Roedean and vilifying King David, was Jo Bluen, the public face of the bizarrely named South African Jews for a Free Palestine (SAJFP).

I say, “bizarrely named”, because there’s something unhinged about Jews voluntarily supporting groups whose goal is the same as Nazis intended for them in Germany.

The Nazis wanted to make their country “Judenrein” or “Judenfrei” – “cleansed” or “free” of Jews, according to the National Socialist term applied in the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question”.  Hamas and cohorts work towards the same goal extended to the entire world.

The best Bluen says about Zionism is that it is “a fascist project” and “settler colonialisation”. The worst? She accuses King David of being “prepared to sacrifice its own children at the altar of a wild and violent zionism (sic) that is deeply racist and misogynistic.”

No matter: to anti-Israel lobbyists, facts are less important than rhetoric and theatrics.

In a September 2025 article in an online magazine ironically titled Critical Thinking, Bluen accuses “Israel and its accomplices” of having “murdered nearly 700,000 Palestinians in the course of the genocide in under two years since 2023, half a million of whom are children.” 

Even Hamas’s own thumb-sucked figures on the civilian and child casualty rates since October 7 never reached such stratospheric heights.

At most, the terror group claimed around 70,000 civilian deaths in Gaza. Its Ministry of Social Development proved that false with its plans in early February 2026 to pay stipends to “50,000 widowed families.” In other words, to the widows of 50,000 combatants!

Bluen, like Hamas, continues a practice that the Nazis introduced of distinguishing Jews and other groups in concentration camps with inverted red triangles. Hamas uses the symbol to identify Jewish and Israeli targets. Bluen adopted it on a social media post celebrating the deaths of IDF soldiers in Gaza.

Anti-Israel lobbyists often resort to pulling the race card when all rational argument fails them. Bluen is no exception.

She calls Zionism a “patriarchal white supremacy” and claims that King David deliberately “targeted” Roedean’s (first black) principal Phuti Mogale. That was probably news to Roedean’s leadership and Mogale, who reportedly resigned rather than waited to be pushed.

Bluen and others also criticise King David schools as bastions of Jewish exclusivity, yet not all its pupils are Jewish. King David Linksfield’s high school’s head girl in 2024 was a Chinese girl and not from a Jewish background. King David schools routinely accepted black children who were not allowed to attend state schools during the apartheid era.

On the global stage, “pro-Palestinian” Islamist activists continue to amplify voices supporting Roedean’s tennis boycott of King David.

New York-based journalist Azad Essa writes for Middle East Eye, an independent UK-based digital channel focusing on the Middle East, North Africa and the broader Muslim world.

In an article on February 21, he frames the cancelled tennis match as a heroic, moral stand by the Roedean girls. He claims that they rightly refused to play King David schoolgirls because the school was “supporting apartheid and cheerleading a genocide.”

That’s a textbook study in the collective-guilt argument the anti-Israel lobby uses to demonise and delegitimise Israel.

Essa describes the King David school network as a tool of “settler-colonial ideology.” He quotes a parent comparing playing tennis at King David to “playing against a school still flying the apartheid flag.”

By this logic, Jewish schoolchildren are inherently complicit in the actions of a foreign state thousands of kilometres away simply by attending a particular school.

That’s not political activism. It’s the targeted exclusion of a specific community on the basis of their religion and cultural affiliation. It clearly violates South Africa’s Constitution.

In the South African Daily Maverick on February 25, Kalim Rajab, a Johannesburg-based, Oxford-educated corporate executive, plays the “Framing Game”. Rajab calls King David Linksfield’s “victory” over Roedean “pyrrhic”, with a “chilling” effect rather one that achieves due accountability.

He omits from his potted biography that he is Chair of the Helen Suzman Foundation (HSF). The HSF honours one of South Africa’s most prominent and beloved Jewish anti-apartheid activists, who was also a committed supporter of Israel throughout her life.

Rajab writes, as one critic puts it, with the “measured cadence” of someone who has learned the most effective way to delegitimise a community’s experience of discrimination – by calling it a “strategy.”

He describes King David supporters as “successful in their strategy of framing the narrative as one where the school and its pupils were victimised because of their religion as opposed to any overt political ideology espoused.”

He uses the word “strategy” strategically – to transform victim into perpetrator and a factual description of the “affair” into an allegation of manipulation. Facts that emerged from leaked phone recordings between Roedean’s Mogale and King David head Lorraine Srage tell a different story.

Rajab then does something disturbing: he offers a tactical manual for future boycotts of King David schools and not just on sports fields. These could involve “silent peaceful protests by visiting schoolchildren, including wearing armbands, pins or bodywear to show Palestinian solidarity,” he helpfully writes.

Pupils could “conscientiously object to taking part in interactions with King David.”

Really? A columnist in a prominent South African publication advising on more effective boycotts of a Jewish school? What if columnists in mainstream South African publications published blueprints for boycotting Muslim, Christian, Hindu, Chinese or other schools?

Other fringe, local and usual-suspects ranged against King David include the Media Review Network’s Iqbal Jassat and the ironically titled Jewish Democratic Initiative (JDI).

All show predictable, monomaniacal obsession with one issue, one state and one tribe.

What escapes them all is that Zionists are not cheerleaders for war or participants in any “evil”, as British writer, theologian and “English gentile” Mark Pickles puts it.

Pickles similarly tears through the “genocide” narrative with consummate ease. It is, after all, a modern iteration of the medieval “blood libel” – that Jews murder non-Jewish children (traditionally Christians) to use their blood for baking matzah during Passover.

Pickles argues that the genocide claim is “as irrational as it is evil…highly damaging and dangerous.” It aims to justify “the murder of Jews, and all attempts – economic, diplomatic, and kinetic – to destroy the sole Jewish nation.”

Groups and organisations with a notoriously long history of antisemitism continue to push the claim with impunity. Yet the “true perpetrators of genocidal intent,” he says, are Islamist factions whose founding documents explicitly call for the destruction of Israel and the murder of Jews.

The premise on which the anti-Israel, “pro-Palestinian” lobby hope to sustain the Roedean “affair” is that Zionist Jews are “complicit in genocide“.

That’s a shaky, dangerous premise.

As Canadian anthropologist Adam Louis-Klein warns, it is a way to mark Jews as “fundamentally stained and evil.” Anti-Zionists aim to “escalate all accusations toward the genocide libel… until it hardens into a global consensus,” Louis-Klein writes.

In this “new doctrine”, the Holocaust is no longer remembered but is “overwritten” to serve contemporary agendas.

This linguistic capture is likely what anti-Israel lobbyists hope will sustain the Roedean “affair” in their direction. The “quiet, student-led”, principled stance they claim to want will be the implementation of a hateful dogma against Jews.

It means that the time has come, as New York Times Jewish columnist Bret Stephens argues, for Jewish communities to end their “perpetual apology machine” in pro-Israel advocacy.

He calls for a shift toward “unapologetic Jewish confidence” and “moral clarity” over Israel’s existence and right to defend itself.

The shift is now more necessary than ever because, as British-Jewish columnist and Man Booker Prize-winning author, Howard Jacobson said:

 “Jews will never be forgiven for the Holocaust.”

Feature picture:
Empty Court. In early February, when a group of girls from Jewish King David High School in Johannesburg travelled to nearby Roedean Girls High School girls’ school for a tennis match, they found no one at the courts.

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).

As South African leadership indulges in state-sponsored antisemitism, it should remember the Jewish state’s unique contribution in the transition to post-Apartheid.

By David E. Kaplan

Attending from Israel the South African Limmud Conference in Johannesburg in 2016, I recall a presentation by the then Israeli ambassador to South Africa, Authur Lenk. He fended off questions from a deeply troubled audience about a rumor of El Al reducing its weekly flights between Israel and South Africa. There were animated exchanges reflecting how concerned people were. It would not only complicate travel arrangements for a community that has many family members living in Israel but it would also send a “depressing and distressing message” to a strong Zionist community of increasing isolation. The fear was as much psychological as geographic.

The anxiety in 2016 over flight reduction would end up in March 2024 of El Al suspending all flights to South Africa.   

This termination of Israel’s national carrier flights that began in October 29, 1950, proved a metaphor for the flight path of diplomatic relations between South Africa and Israel, culminating with South Africa recent expulsion of Israel’s top diplomat in the country under the pretext of “violating diplomatic norms“. South Africa, who welcomes terrorists and their sponsors – Hamas and Iran  –  with red carpet fawning, declared Israel’s chargé d’affaires Ariel Seidman, persona non grata and gave him 72 hours to leave the country.

“Zionism” has become anathema to this South African government and its President, Cyril Ramaphosa, who probably is unaware that the South African Zionist Federation was established in 1898, the second country after the UK to do so, and one year after the first Zionist Conference in Basel in 1897.  It predates the establishment of the modern State of Israel in 1948, and the establishment of South Africa’s ruling party, the ANC, in 1912.

AGE OF TRANSITION

All this I was pondering from my home in Kfar Saba, north of Tel Aviv and thought while South Africa offends, insults, demonizes, accuses and kicks out Israel’s diplomats, I thought back in time and to a place only a few kilometers north of where I live, to a complex called Beit Berl and the enriching contribution it made to the emerging new South Africa of the 1980 and 1990s.

Back then, if you by chance were to stroll along the stone paths of the wooded Beit Berl Campus outside of Kfar Saba in central Israel, you would have been surprised to overhear conversations in Xhosa, Tswana, Zulu or Afrikaans. Participants of every shade of colour from South Africa’s “Rainbow Nation” were attending a unique ‘Community Development & Leadership Training’ programme. Why unique?

Well, there was no other country in the world – besides Israel – providing this essential training for South Africa’s future!

SECRET STUFF 

That it has been doing so without any fuss or fanfare may explain why so few Israelis or South Africans knew about it then or would even know about it today. Then it was a  closely kept secret – a programme running since the dark days of Apartheid.

On the day in 1997 that a delegation of the Kfar Saba branch of the South African Zionist Federation in Israel (Telfed) visited the campus, the atmosphere was vibrant. Met with traditional South African dance and music, the 28th group of participants from South Africa was celebrating the near completion of their leadership course with a farewell cocktail party. Among the graduates of the Beit Berl programme at that time were over two dozen mayors of South African towns and cities including the present mayors of the country’s two largest cities, Johannesburg and Cape Town, as well as those from smaller towns like Randburg, George, and Grahamstown. Adding to that list was Port Alfred’s mayor, Eric Khuluwe who addressed us:

“Port Alfred is growing at an enormous pace as people are streaming in from the rural areas, seeking employment. The job situation is bleak and we are finding it an uphill battle to provide basic civic services. We have sixty-one local councils in my district and we need to involve as many people on the local level as possible in decision-making. This is the policy of the ANC government and is indicative of the nature of our democracy that empowers people to determine their own destiny. The Beit Berl three-week intensive course was excellent; it widened my horizons and provided practical guidance on team-management. I feel far better equipped to return to my city now and impact on its future.”

From 1986 until that evening in 1997, over twenty South African Members of Parliament, as well as hundreds of local government officials and ministers of provincial councils had passed through Beit Berl. Patrick Adams, in charge of Emergency & Disaster Management for the Cape Metropolitan Council in Cape Town, had this to say:

“The course was very professional. I am in charge of Reconstruction & Development programmes in the Western Cape region, and my team is currently immersed in running numerous housing and community projects. Not only have I learned a new dimension of problem solving, but I have also been exposed to the problems in Israel and enjoy a greater understanding of the issues here.”

UNDERCOVER OPERATION 

What would seem inconceivable today in 2026 seemed routine back then 1997. Fascinated, I began to research on the genesis of this wonderful programme of South Africa/Israel cooperation and enriching partnership and learned that it all began in the undercover world of the early 1980s when clandestine contacts took place between progressive Israelis and the anti-Apartheid forces in South Africa. The Israeli powerhouse behind the project was Prof. Shimshon Zelniker, who masterfully manoeuvered between South Africans, Americans and Israelis, a fascinating amalgam of colourful characters that included Hollywood stars, Jewish politicos, civil rights activists, freedom fighters and donors. A professor of political science at Beit Berl and UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles), Zelnicker, was a member of Shimon Peres’ advisory team in 1982.

“I was given responsibility for third-world policies, and my first mission was making positive contact with leaders of the struggle in South Africa,” said Zeiniker.

COLOURFUL CHARACTERS 

The players in this unfolding theatre of clandestine operations spread across three continents. In South Africa, Clive Menell of Anglovaal paved the way by bringing on board Archbishop Benjamin Tutu. Soon other internationally renowned personalities like Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden joined the circle, as did Ethel Kennedy, who twisted the arm of a reluctant Tutu into meeting with the Israelis. This was the turning point, for what followed was a secret meeting in South Africa between a delegation of Israelis representing anti-Apartheid sentiment and prominent Blacks, such as Albertina Sisulu and Ntatho and Sally Motlana.

“We came out of the meeting with a clear mandate for action. Armed with an understanding that there would be no political manifestos and no pictures of politicians kissing each other, but a programme geared solely to assisting in the struggle, we approached Jews in the United States for support. In Israel, Yossi Beilin, Alon Liel, Ruth Baron and myself, among others, spearheaded the programme to be called the Israeli and South African Centres for International Cooperation” (ICIC) and would be based at Beit Berl.”

CLANDESTINE RECRUITMENT 

“The early days saw us,” explained Zelniker, “pounding the pavements in South Africa for some twenty months recruiting support and participants. The success of the operation was predicated on our ability to keep it under wraps.”

Asked how that was possible, Zelniker replied:

“You know how porcupines make love? Very carefully.”

The first group of twenty arrived in 1986 representing three constituencies:

– Soweto,

– the Cape Coloured community and

– Women’s groups.

“We brought in the Histadrut (General Federation of Labour) to help in the initial training,” said Zelniker. “After the success of that first group, it was easier to obtain more funding. We approached very prominent, radically anti-Israel, Black leaders in the U.S. and received their blessing. Individual Jews donated large sums of money in the full knowledge that they would receive no recognition, and the American Government very quietly also assisted us in funding.”

Zelniker’s shuttling to-and-fro between Israel and South Africa was not without risk.

“My associate Ruth Baron was also detained. There were many ways the South African Authorities could have derailed the programme and they made it crystal clear that physical intimidation could be escalated. We were worried about the graduates being whisked away on their return from Israel for interrogation and intimidation, which on occasion did happen.”

Despite all the harassment, including infiltration by the South African Bureau of State Security (BOSS), the programme flourished. At one point in the late 1980s, Thomas Friedman of the New York Times bumped into a group of Black trainees in Tel Aviv. He thought he had uncovered the scoop of the century:

 ‘ANC and AZAPO forge secret ties with Apartheid’s ally!’

“He telephoned me and said, ‘this is sensational. What’s it all about?” When I explained to him the need for secrecy, I thankfully managed to persuade him that the programme and South Africa’s future were far more important than his ego. He dropped the story.”

THE NEW AGE 

It was only a year or so after Mandela’s release in 1990 that the programme’s profile entered the public domain.

“In 1993, we introduced a rural community development programme in the former homelands, and it was then that we came out into the open,” revealed Zelniker.

The participants had such interesting stories revealing  the enormity of the challenges they faced in South Africa. Thabisile Msezane from Boksburg, who ran a daycare centre related that:

 “…in the Boksburg area there were no schools and children loitered aimlessly in the streets wasting away their lives. Each day I noticed a little boy roaming around the shopping centre where I bought milk. He would ask me for money to buy food. I thought:

“What kind of future does this child have? As I was starting a day care centre, I wanted to enroll this kid and so went in search of his parents. I was directed to a shabby compound behind a farmhouse, where I found them. While speaking to the boy’s father, the child spread the word amongst his friends telling them he was going to school. By the end of my conversation, I had enrolled another twelve children. Today I have 150 pupils, some of whom walk a distance of twelve kilometres to get to the school.”

Trevor Ngwame, a councilor from Johannesburg, was all praise for Israel’s ‘Beit Berl Programme’.

“We are dealing with the legacy of apartheid – no jobs, lack of housing and poor education. My approach is to offer people hope, and motivate them to organize themselves. We have seen how successful Israelis have been in overcoming insurmountable odds. Like South Africa, Israel has never been short of problems and yet it manages to advance amazingly. This is what we want to do. Of course, Israel’s problems are very different, and in the South African context we must ensure that people see a light at the end of the tunnel. I am not naïve to believe that matters are going to fall into place overnight. While the government must deliver the goods, the people also must rise up to the challenge and they need the tools to it. This programme has been a tremendous help in this regard.”

Reflecting on his role, Zelniker’s expressed to me:

“As a Jew, I have learnt that liberation is not simply about taking the people out of the ghetto. It means taking the ghetto out of the people. To say that I am proud of this programme would be an understatement.”

In the years that followed, this writer, together with fellow South Africans living in Israel became actively involved in the project offering home hospitality and engaging with the participants. One of the South Africans living in Israel taking a keen interest  in the project was architect and artist Prof. Arthur Goldreich, who years earlier had been recruited by Nelson Mandela to join uMkhonto weSizwe, the paramilitary wing of the African National Congress. Arrested during a raid at Lilliesleaf Farm, he would later escape from the Old Fort  prison in Johannesburg,  flee to Israel where he became a prominent figure at the famed Bezalel Academy in Jerusalem.  Such were the personalities that were involved in the Beit Berl project that had as its primary goal – to help the new South Africa emerge from the darkness of Apartheid.

Today, in 2026, I reflect back to those encouraging days of partnership as I observe what is tragically playing out presently in South Africa. Rather than focus on uplifting its people after three decades after Apartheid, the South African government is focused on:

– falsely accusing Israel of genocide

– expelling Israel’s diplomats

– sabotaging Israel’s offers of its expertise in agriculture and water management.

Worst of all it is fueling antisemitism like what transpired earlier this month when Johannesburg’s prestigious private girls’ school, Roedean, cancelled a scheduled tennis match against players from King David – a Jewish day school. It was revealed that some parents at Roedean argued “that the school should align with the government’s anti-Israel stance.” Little wonder what is unfolding has been characterized as “State-sponsored antisemitism.”

We have seen how and where unchecked vitriol leads to – the murderous attack at a synagogue in Manchester in October 2025 and the massacre on Sydney’s iconic Bondi Beach on the 14 December. Can anybody say they would be surprised if a terrorist against Jews was to occur in South Africa?

All this I reflected on and wondered where are all those graduates of Kfar Saba’s Beit Berl Programme today? What contribution did they make and what impact did they have on the lives of fellow South Africans?

And what would they think of how their country has so turned against the Jewish state that had voluntarily helped them to help South Africa and remains ready to help?

Feature picture: Participants from South Africa on the Community Development & Leadership Training programme at Beit Berl, Israel with members of the South African community and South African embassy staff in 1997. (Photo: D.E. Kaplan)

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).