A coalition of anti-Israel groups in South Africa threatens Johannesburg Holocaust Museum to endorse Gaza genocide claims or face protest and disruption.
By Marika Sboros
(Courtesy of BizNews where article first published)
South Africa’s anti-Israel lobby has lost all its marbles – if its latest initiative is anything to go by.
It has cobbled together a motley group of 14 extremist, pro-Palestinian lobbyists to send a “declaration of intent” to the Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre (JHGC).
The JHGC is hosting a conference of the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) from October 20-24. The group is not happy about the conference, and lots more besides, as its declaration makes clear.
The declaration is lengthy, laborious, overwritten and heavily weighted with rhetoric, false assumptions and irony. Its tone is strident. It accuses the JHGC of “silence and complicity at a time when a genocide is unfolding before the eyes of the world.”
No prizes for guessing just who the group believes is committing genocide and where.
The group informs the JHGC that it will protest at the venue. It makes a myriad of demands, including that the JHGC names and opposes the “genocide” in Gaza and acknowledges Israeli “apartheid and settler colonialism.”
It also demands that the centre calls for:
– the closure of the Israeli Embassy
– endorses global BDS (Boycott, Disinvestment, Sanctions) efforts; and
– partners with “anti-racist, anti-fascist and faith-based groups in education and prevention work.”
If the JHGC agreed to all those demands, it would have no time for the important work it was set up to do.
Its stated mission is to explore 20th century history of genocide, focus on Holocaust case studies and the 1994 Rwanda genocide, and examine connections between genocide and contemporary human rights issues in South Africa. Its work is also to aid understanding of the consequences of prejudice, discrimination and “othering”.
JHGC makes it clear that, as part of its mission, organisations involved in Holocaust and genocide research (even if controversial) may use its venue to hold conferences.
The anti-Israel lobby’s declaration of intent leaves the group of 14 desperately seeking relevance as the US-brokered ceasefire-hostage release ending Israel’s two-year-long war against Hamas holds by the thinnest of threads.
That’s despite Hamas being in clear breach for not yet handing over remains of all dead hostages – and despite new video footage revealing Hamas in all its vengeful, genocidal extremism, executing and torturing its own people in public.
Pro-Palestinian lobbyists globally remain deafeningly silent and more concerned with what Israeli football teams are doing.
Leading the group of 14 is the usual-suspect, pro-Palestinian power couple: the South African BDS (Boycott, Disinvestment, Sanctions) Coalition and its devoted bedpartner, South African Jews for a Free Palestine (SAJFP). SAJFP has revelled in its status as a key player thanks to the Jewish voices it brings to the table.
These voices are a tiny, vocal minority of South Africa’s Jewish community, and indispensable to the genocide claim against Israel. They make the claim not just news but narrative gold.
After all, nothing says – “we are not antisemitic, just anti-Zionist” – quite like a Jewish stamp of approval.
SAJFP members appear oblivious to the many landmines for Jews who align with the broader pro-Palestinian movement of Iran-backed Hamas, Hezbollah and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ). All are proscribed as terrorist organisations in many countries.
By default, or design, Jews who support it effectively endorse entities committed to their total annihilation.
In trying to protect Palestinian lives, Jews lend legitimacy to groups committed to ending all Jewish lives. They are left in a moral maze, with no easy exits and plenty of rhetorical tripwires.
The group of 14 includes the ironically titled Queers for Palestine.
In Israel, LGBTQ+ people enjoy legal protections, pride parades and social acceptance. In Gaza, homosexuality is criminalised under Hamas rule. Queer Palestinians face arrest, torture and death, often at the hands of their families.
Under the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, homosexuality is technically legal. However, LGBTQ+ people face widespread social stigma, harassment, and threats of violence, often from family or community members.
Queers for Palestine activists voluntarily embrace a cause that would erase the very freedoms they enjoy were it to succeed politically. They may rationalise such stupidity by saying that solidarity with Palestinians does not imply endorsement of Hamas or homophobia.
However, the juxtaposition is jarring, with rainbow flags waving in defence of a region where flying one could mean a death sentence.
The dominant aim of the group of 14’s declaration of intent is clearly to breathe new life into the zombie genocide claim. It falsely claims that “by now, every serious legal and scholarly authority has reached the same conclusion (that Israel is committing genocide).”
If the lobbyists had asked, I could’ve told them that that’s false. I could’ve provided a list of serious legal and scholarly authorities, Jews and non-Jews, who’ve reached the opposite conclusion (that Israel is not committing genocide in Gaza).
The list is too long to name them all here.
Eminent Jewish scholars and commentators argue that the genocide claim is a modern blood libel that echoes medieval myths about Jews murdering Christian babies to drink their blood.
It symbolically recasts Jews, historically victims of genocide, as perpetrators. It equates Israeli military actions with deliberate child-killing.
Critics warn that the genocide blood libel distorts legal definitions, ignores context and fuels antisemitic tropes, portraying Jews as uniquely monstrous.
It ignores the essential legal threshold for genocide – that the necessary special intent to destroy a group in whole or in part should be the “only inference that could reasonably be drawn from the acts in question,” as the International Court of Justice ruled in the Croatia vs Serbia case in 2015. It collapses complex military conflicts into morally absolute narratives.
The group of 14 intends writing to the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) to say that by “hosting their gathering at a venue that refuses to name Gaza as a genocide, they are legitimising both-siderism and moral cowardice.”
I could have told them to say nothing about anything to do with the IAGS, as the organisation is beset by possibly terminal credibility issues.
In September, the IAGS passed a resolution accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza. Mainstream media, including Reuters, and the BBC and The Guardian in the UK, instantly framed and amplified the resolution as “expert consensus”.
IAGS head Melanie O’Brien publicly supported the vote, stressing that the resolution passed with “overwhelming support.”
She was disingenuous in the extreme.
The voting was a sham, fractious affair marked by procedural flaws, divided membership and claims of hijacking and “invasion” by anti-Israel forces. It relied heavily on notoriously unreliable “Hamas-produced statistics,” without distinguishing civilians from combatants.
Although 86% of voters passed the resolution, only approximately 111 out of 129 participants, or just 22-28% of the claimed 500-member base, had voted.
The resolution’s passage without prior debate, town halls or disclosure of authors sparked immediate backlash. O’Brien’s stance drew praise and backlash, reflecting deep divisions in genocide interpretations in contemporary conflicts.
IAGS member Rachel Stein, a US legal scholar in international criminal law, called the vote:
“…deeply biased and inaccurate”.
Stein said it ignored Israel’s stated intent in prosecuting the war that Hamas started – releasing all remaining hostages, dead or alive, and disarming Hamas.
Critics also raised questions about the IAGS $30 entry fee as the primary membership criterion, for low-income members requiring no verification of expertise. As Grok points out, this allowed non-experts, activists, artists and even prank social media accounts on X, such as “Adolf Hitler” or “Emperor Palpatine”, to become members and vote.
In October 2023, this reportedly led to a membership surge from around 150 to over 500, with nearly half reportedly from Iraq. Not surprisingly, the IAGS is left looking like a platform for activism rather than rigorous analysis.
The controversy reveals wider global tensions, blurring the line between genuine academic inquiry and activism. It risks the weaponisation of genocide discourse amidst conflict.
At heart, the group of 14’s “declaration of intent” ends up just another a “familiar script”, one that Canadian anthropologist Adam Louis-Klein has identified. It “circulates among anti-Zionist Jews globally,” he says in a social-media post.
Louis-Klein explains the script as a story of a character raised within a supposedly narrow world of Zionist “indoctrination” only to “wake up through an encounter with progressivism.” The character concludes that Zionism is “incompatible with their newfound moral clarity.”
After nearly two years of darkness, the Gaza ceasefire has brought flickers of light, increasing moral clarity and cautious optimism. Images of families embracing loved ones who survived the hell of Hamas captivity pay homage to the power of commitment, endurance and love.
But joy is tempered with profound, dark grief as Hamas prolongs the torment of families still waiting for closure in Israel.
Accusations of genocide against Israel continue. The extent to which Hamas weaponised deliberate starvation – hoarding aid, punishing dissent, turning hunger into control and starving hostages close to the point of death – is clear.
Hamas started this war with its genuinely genocidal rampage in southern Israel on October 7, 2023.
As Gaza exhales and its displaced people return to their homes, the true architects of genocide against Israel and Jews stand increasingly exposed.
The world community needs a real “awakening”. It has mostly stayed resolutely silent in the wake of atrocities Hamas, PIJ and assorted civilian hangers-on committed in Israel on October 7.
As Louis-Klein writes, a real awakening is not simply about “trading one set of slogans for another.” It is the refusal to let pressures of political moments capture the moral imagination.
It’s about building “judgment rooted in knowledge, complexity, and historical understanding.”
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).
