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?
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, not all of them Jewish.
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) rule the world with fear. They rule 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 The New 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.
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.
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).
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.
There is plenty to criticise in Israel’s government and its policies. But genocide and apartheid aren’t part of that legitimate critique, as legal scholars worldwide (not all of them Jews) will tell you.
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.
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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).
