COLLAPSE OF THE BLOOD LIBELS

Every pillar of the genocide accusation against Israel has crumbled. The institutions that built it have suddenly lost their voices.

By Andrew Fox

Sometimes I think I am not angry enough, but the scale of the problem is almost too huge to be angry at, collectively. Towering rage must be split into smaller rages at each of the component parts of the blood libel machine.

The fantastical Lancet “studies” salivating over hundreds of thousands of imaginary dead Gazans.
AirWars’ pearl-clutching reports, drawing conclusions of civilian targeting in Gaza without a tenth of the evidence needed to draw said conclusions.
Amnesty, B’tselem and all the other NGOs, releasing fraudulent genocide conclusions achieved only by changing the definition and parameters of genocide.
The paid media squad of hacks, twisting and distorting and murdering the truth just to get one over on the Jewish state.
South Africa, ripping apart the genocide convention at Iran’s behest, making it harder to punish real genocides in future.

The whole sorry mess sickens me, and now the great indictment of Israel is coming apart, one revelation at a time. This fact is not being reported by a single damned one of the media outlets that have spent years screeching over the war in Gaza to the exclusion of almost all else. Famine, deliberate attacks on hospitals, the slaughter of journalists and children, and systematic obstruction of aid: each allegation was broadcast as settled fact and then used to prove genocidal intent. The same newsrooms and universities that thundered these charges have shown remarkably little interest in the evidence that now destroys each of these allegations.

**Trading Places**. Clockwise from top left: Jaber Mohammadin in civilian attire and in Palestinian Islamic Jihad uniform; Ahmad Adel Abu al-Hilal in hospital scrubs and in Palestinian Islamic Jihad uniform; Abd al-Latif Abu Tuaima in civilian attire and in Palestinian Islamic Jihad uniform; and Salem Jumaa Shirab in civilian attire and in Palestinian Islamic Jihad uniform. (Photos: Palestinian Islamic Jihad social media, Facebook, social media)

It is incredible. There is no aspect of the genocide allegation that has not collapsed.

Start with the famine claim.

In August 2025, the IPC used two ways of measuring malnutrition in children: weight compared with height, and the size of a child’s upper arm. Gaza had no local data showing how those two measures matched up, so the IPC used an estimate from elsewhere in the region. It assumed the weight-and-height measure would find about twice as many malnourished children as the arm measurement.

The first large Gaza survey to use both measures found the reverse. Of 1,335 children surveyed in 2026, 0.5% were identified as acutely malnourished by weight and height, while 1.3% were identified by upper-arm measurement. That survey cannot tell us exactly what conditions were like in 2025. The later survey cannot recreate conditions in 2025, but it exposes the rotten foundation beneath a verdict presented to the world as scientific certainty: a key assumption behind the famine declaration had never been tested in Gaza itself.

The food figures are equally awkward. Official COGAT-based data show that about 1.01 million tonnes of food entered Gaza between 7 October 2023 and 17 January 2025, against an estimated requirement of 825,000 tonnes. From the October 2025 ceasefire to 7 June 2026, 1.78 million tonnes entered, against a calculated need of roughly 643,000 tonnes.

Of course, food crossing a border does not guarantee it reaches every family. Roads were destroyed, distribution failed, aid was looted, and Israel’s two-and-a-half-month block on aid in spring 2025 was a grave error. However, those qualifications cannot rescue the claim of a continuous Israeli policy to starve Gaza. The quantities of food that entered Gaza are simply too large.

The hospital narrative has also disintegrated. American intelligence independently confirmed that Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad used al-Shifa for command operations, weapons storage, and to hold hostages. Hamas accounts now describe armed men, including senior officers, sheltering inside the hospital during an Israeli siege. Hospitals remained protected, and Israel still had to obey the laws of war, but the moral fairy tale of innocent hospitals attacked by the brutal IDF is dead. There is now endless evidence in the public domain of Hamas using hospitals for military purposes.

**Medics who Murder**. Ahmad Adel Abu al-Hilal in hospital scrubs (left) in a photo circulated after his death and (right) in Palestinian Islamic Jihad uniform, after the group identified him as one of its members. (Photos: PIJ screenshots)

The casualty statistics have fared no better. The claim that 70% of the dead were women and children became a fixture of global coverage. OCHA’s July 2026 snapshot, based on Gaza Health Ministry figures for 71,444 identified fatalities, placed those categories at 45.2 %. Adult men make up over 50% of the fatalities, from a pre-war adult male percentage of approximately 25% of the population. Not all adult men can be counted as combatants, but a figure repeatedly cited as proof of indiscriminate slaughter is now shown to be false when applied to the overall toll. The “hundreds of thousands” of dead under the rubble have likewise not materialised. That number is completely implausible, given Gaza’s mechanism for reporting the missing and the financial compensation incentives to use it.

**Killers in Scrubs**. Ibrahim Abd al-Raouf al-Farra in hospital scrubs (left), in a photo circulated after his death and (right) in Hamas uniform, after the group identified him as one of its members. (Photo: Hamas screenshot)

The supposed massacre of journalists is now unravelling in the same way. A Meir Amit Centre study of 266 people listed as journalists or media workers found that 157, around 60 %, were members of or clearly affiliated with terrorist organisations. The Committee to Protect Journalists has already removed eight names after establishing that they were Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad combatants, removed another twelve for other reasons, and, after this exposure came to light, opened a full review. Other OSINT (open-source intelligence) suggests this figure of combatants is even higher.

This proves that “journalist” was often a dangerously incomplete label and that lurid claims of Israel slaughtering journalists were nothing more than propaganda. An artillery commander does not become a civilian by picking up a camera. Major outlets repeated the raw total for years, yet now they are barely reporting its collapse.

**‘Hypocrisy and Manipulation’**, 6 August, 2025, Israeli president Isaac Herzog exposes Hamas-led propaganda, citing investigative reports from leading German newspapers that revealed staged images from Gaza. Herzog contrasted these fabricated scenes with the very real suffering of Israeli hostages, exposing what he called Hamas’ “hypocrisy and manipulation.”

The same contamination appears across lists of healthcare workers and children. Militant obituaries have identified numerous medical workers as commanders and operatives, while faction records have revealed teenagers listed only as children despite their documented recruitment into armed groups. Recruited minors remain victims of the adults who used them, but age alone cannot establish civilian status or Israeli intent.

Hamas’s role in the aid disaster has finally forced its way into the UN’s own language. In July 2026, a senior UN official accused armed personnel affiliated with Gaza’s “de facto authorities” (i.e. Hamas) of breaking into a food distribution point and a World Food Programme warehouse, assaulting drivers and participating in a wider pattern of intimidation, obstruction and smuggling attempts. Years of sneering at Hamas’s aid diversion as Israeli propaganda ended with the UN admitting it.

**From Stethoscope to Automatic Firearm**. Mohammed Akram al-Kafarna, head of the Palestinian Nurses and Midwives Syndicate in Gaza and whose death was mourned by the International Council of Nurses, was also a member of Hamas. ( Photo: Hamas screenshot)

Academia performed no better. The International Association of Genocide Scholars declared Israel guilty, falsely claiming that the International Court of Justice had found genocide “plausible”. The court’s former president had already explained that it made no such finding. Only 28 % of the association’s members voted. Membership was open to literally anyone, yet headlines announced the judgment of the world’s genocide scholars. The same applies to the fraudulent squad of historians newly reinventing themselves as “genocide scholars”, assuming authority their qualifications do not grant, and grandly declaring Gaza a genocide. No mea culpa from these frauds. There are books to be sold.

The repercussions are no longer theoretical. Britain recorded 3,700 antisemitic incidents in 2025, the second-highest annual total in its history; the United States recorded 6,274, with physical assaults at a record. Two Israeli embassy employees were murdered outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington. Fifteen people were slaughtered at a Chanukah celebration in Sydney. And on, and on, and on.

No newspaper article pulled those triggers, and the hatred long predates Gaza, but the relentless depiction of the Jewish state as a child-killing, famine-making engine of genocide gave old hatred a new moral vocabulary. Jews everywhere were forced to answer for accusations that the evidence can no longer sustain. The genie of antisemitism is out of the bottle, and any corrections now will not put it back. The academics, NGOs, politicians and journalists who spread the genocide blood libel without waiting for evidence (or fabricating their own) now have blood on their hands.

**“Gazawood”**. While increasingly exposed are the ‘journalists’ who have staged depictions of daily life in Gaza and of fabricating images and videos, the damage to blacken Israel’s reputation has been done.

Israel should already have been exonerated of the blanket charge that it sought to exterminate Gaza’s civilians. Individual strikes and alleged crimes still require investigation, but genocide cannot remain the default verdict after every single factual pillar supporting it has cracked.

The record now requires urgent correction, followed by inquiries within the universities and professional bodies that lent the libel their prestige. Some of those responsible should resign.

They will not.

The people who spread these blood libels remain in post, reviewing one another’s work and hoping nobody notices the ruins of their reputations.

About the writer:

A veteran of three grueling tours of Afghanistan, Major Andrew Fox holds a Batchelor’s degree in Law & Politics, a Master’s in Military History & War Studies, Msc in Psychology and is currently studying for a PhD in History.

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).

EXPLOSIVE EXPOSÉ

What is the connection between the bombing of the King David Hotel 80 years ago and Moshav Gan Ner in Northern Israel?

By David E. Kaplan

One of the most iconic blots in Israel’s fight against the British for independence was the bombing of the King David Hotel on July 22, 1946, eighty years ago last week. Ninety-one people, died when explosives planted by an Irgun commando detonated in the basement of the building, which housed, among others, the British headquarters for Palestine.

An act of terrorism which killed mostly civilians, but:

Was it true as it was once asserted that no warning was issued?

**Hotel Headquarters**. The aftermath of the bombing in July 22, 1946 carried out by the Irgun Jewish underground at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, which housed the British headquarters for Palestine.( Wikimedia Commons)

BUILD-UP TO A BOMBING

To understand the circumstances leading to the bombing of one of the most historically iconic architectural gems in Jerusalem, one must understand the acute desperation of the parties to the conflict at the time.

On June 29, 1946, Britain launched Operation Agatha — a random name choice unrelated to the ‘who done-it’ novelist -in which 25,000 British troops participated, raiding the Jewish Agency headquarters and imposing curfews, seizing arms, and confiscating documents detailing Hagana operations and the activities of the joint resistance movement that included:

– the Hagana, the most organized group, which was aligned with the Jewish Agency;

– the Irgun, the Revisionist movement led by Menachem Begin that had initiated many military actions; and

– Lehi, which was the acronym for “Lohamei Herut Yisrael,” the smallest and most extreme of the three.

All three groups had put aside their differences and rebelled against British rule to pressure the revocation of the White Paper under Neville Chamberlain’s government which sought to appease the Arab population in Mandatory Palestine on the eve of World War II by:

– severely limiting Jewish immigration

– restricting land purchases, and

– abandoning the goal of a Jewish state.

The British arrested 2,700 individuals, including Moshe Sharett, head of the Jewish Agency’s Political Department and future prime minister; David Remez, chairman of the Jewish National Council; Yitzhak Gruenbaum, director of the Jewish Agency’s Labor Department; and Dov Yosef, a prominent Jewish Agency member and future minister. A people traumatized, the day went down in modern Jewish history as “Black Saturday” until it was superseded by the events of Saturday, Oct. 7, 2023.

The documents seized by the British were taken to the British Mandate Secretariat, located in the King David’s southern wing. As the center of British mandate rule in Palestine, the hotel was treated as a target even before Operation Agatha and with the transfer of these compromising documents to the secretariat it hastened a strategic decision to bomb the hotel.

**Cities on Edge**. British paratroopers enforce curfew in Tel Aviv post-bombing, July 1946. (Photo: public domain)

So, what is the connection of the bombing to the community settlement of Gan Ner, founded in northern Israel, south of Afula in 1987?

At the turn of the millennium, Lord Grenville Janner was visiting Israel from the UK and he addressed a meeting in Ra’anana where I had the opportunity to interview him.

**Lordship in Ra’anana**. Interviewing Lord Grenville Janner, the son of Sir. Barnett Janner in Ra’anana in 2007. (Photo: D.E. Kaplan)

He revealed an illuminating conversation he had with his mother following the passing of his father Sir Barnett Janner, who had preceded him as the Labour M.P. for Leicester West in the House of Commons and had also been president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews:

She said:

“Your Dad worked all his life for Israel and there is nothing named after him. You should rectify this and go see Mr. Begin.”

“The Israeli Prime Minister! What do I tell him?” asked the son.

“I’ll tell you. Not so long ago, a colonel wrote to your father revealing that he was in the King David hotel when Begin’s organization blew it up. However he knew that Begin had warned the military authorities prior to the operation, which our British government has always denied. He confirmed that he had been present when the warning call from the Irgun came through to the hotel switchboard confirming an effort was made to protect lives. Your father, despite being ideologically poles apart from Begin, had the courage to stand up in the House of Commons and proclaim that truth. It could no longer be publicly denied.”

JANNER DOESN’T GEL

So, Greville dutifully went off to see the Menachem Begin. The Israeli Prime Minister’s response was:

“Sure, we are truly thankful to your father for revealing an unpopular truth in your Parliament. However, we can’t name a place in Israel ‘Janner’ – it’s not a Hebrew sounding name.”

**Labored for his People**. Labour MP, Sir Barnett Janner who was created a life peer in 1970 held many positions in the Jewish community, including President of the Board of Deputies of British Jews 1955–64 and a member of the executive of the British Zionist Federation.

Pondering for a few seconds, Begin then continued:

“How about Gan Ner? Sounds Israeli and more-or-less like Janner and translates into Hebrew as ‘Candel Garden’. After all, your father shone a candle of light illuminating a truth. Nu, how about it?”

It was agreed.

**Running for Office**. A 1920 Cardiff City Council election poster when a young Barnett Janner stood unsuccessfully for election to Cardiff City Council as a candidate of the Comrades of the Great War.

However, when Begin suggested that Gan Ner should be located “in Judea or Samaria,” Lord Janner said he resorted to some very unLORDly Yiddish expletives to describe what his late liberal father would have thought about that and “So today, there is a delightful settlement of some 700 souls nestled in the heart of Israel in the Jezreel Valley at the foothills of Mt. Gilboa.”

That was over two decades ago and as at 2024, Gan Ner has expanded to over 2,657 souls with its Gan Ner Sports Hall serving as the home venue for the Hapoel Gilboa Galil professional basketball team.

**Embedded into Landscape**. An aerial view of Gan Ner at the foot of Mt. Gilboa in the Yizreel Valey named after Jewish British politician, Sir. Barnett Janner.

EPILOGUE

Unlike the warning given in 1946, there was no warning when a mass of marauding killers crossed over from Gaza into southern Israel on October 7, 2023 massacring Jews wherever they found them. “Black Saturday” of 1946 had an all-new meaning, and among the many murdered on October 7, was a young resident from Gan Ner, 22-year-old “partygoer” Stav Barazani.

She attended the Nova Music Festival with her boyfriend, Asaf Edberg. The two fled together and took refuge in a police station, where they were subsequently found and murdered.

For Stav, Gan Ner or ‘Garden Candel’, burns eternally – a flame of remembrance.

Stav Barazani, 22, from Gan Ner, was murdered by Hamas terrorists at the Supernova music festival on October 7.

OBSTRUCTION AND OBFUSCATION

Where is the global outrage at new UN finding of Hamas’ obstruction of humanitarian aid?

By Kenneth Moeng Kgwadi

There has been near-total silence from many of Israel’s critics following the recent United Nations (UN) finding that Hamas obstructed the delivery of much-needed humanitarian aid to civilians in Gaza. Hamas had long portrayed the humanitarian crisis as solely the result of others denying Gazans access to necessities such as food, medicine, water, clothing, and other essential supplies. However, the UN’s finding indicates that Hamas itself also played a role in preventing civilians from accessing this aid.

**Trucks and the Truth**. While for much of the war in Gaza, Israel has repeatedly accused Hamas of stealing humanitarian aid, intimidating aid workers and exploiting relief operations for its own benefit (seen above), the UN has finaly now issued a statement condemning what it describes as armed personnel affiliated with Gaza’s de facto authorities for interfering with humanitarian operations, entering aid distribution sites, assaulting aid workers and disrupting the delivery of humanitarian assistance.

Such actions serve Hamas’ political objectives by reinforcing its narrative of victimhood on the global stage. By obstructing humanitarian assistance while simultaneously presenting itself as the defender of Gaza’s population, Hamas has contributed to shaping international perceptions of the conflict in ways that advance its own strategic interests.

This is the same group of people who refused to allow people to leave endangered locations for the humanitarian zones after the Israel Defense Force (IDF) issued warnings of impending strikes. In their minds, they were being strategic in order for Israel to kill civilians and have blood on its hands, so that the world would believe that the IDF is the monster and isolate Israel in order to achieve their political and religious ends. It has previously been stated that Hamas is using innocent civilians as human shields, but to date the UN has neither seen, investigated, nor acknowledged some of these indictments.

In a strongly worded statement dated 12 July 2026, the UN Deputy Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process and Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator for the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Dr. Ramiz Alakbarov, said:

“I strongly condemn the recent obstruction of humanitarian operations in Gaza by the de facto authorities, which endangered humanitarian personnel, intimidated workers delivering lifesaving food assistance and disrupted lifesaving humanitarian assistance.”

What happened on Saturday, when armed Hamas men ambushed two truck drivers at a World Food Program warehouse, was not the first time they had stolen, hijacked, or intimidated humanitarian personnel. At the height of the war between Israel and Hamas, they stole food aid in order to feed their insurgents in the tunnels, while the remaining food aid was sold at exorbitant prices to the poor people of Gaza. Since its formation in 1987, Hamas has become accustomed to not taking any form of accountability for its actions. They always falsely blame Israel as a political strategy and people who accept this false narrative are complacent in the destitution that the people of Gaza are confronting.

**Truth be Told**. Following the IDF saying months ago that Hamas was hijacking aid trucks and stealing aid and were denounced as liars, the UN’s Deputy Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, and Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator for the Occupied Palestinian Territory, admits that Hamas stole aid and disrupted distribution.

Hamas won political power in 2006 but has held elections in 20 years. It recently announced the dissolution of its governing “Emergency Committee” stepping aside to transfer administrative authority to the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG) as part of the U.S.-brokered peace and ceasefire plan.

As a government ruling more than two million people, they have only brought terror to the lives of those people by inviting unnecessary wars, while they could have created a conducive environment for their people to thrive. It is highly unlikely that Hamas would be attacked by Israel without any provocation because Israel has invested its time and resources in establishing ties with its neighbours. In all the wars that have taken place between Israel and Hamas, it has always been Hamas that started the war, with Israel counter-attacking as a form of defense of its territory.

Since 2006, Hamas has been majorly responsible for the poor material conditions of the people of Gaza through its political divisions, incompetence, corruption, and war-mongering policies. Throughout the past 20 years, they have never gone to elections to allow the citizens to vote for their preferred government and use elections as an accountability mechanism, which means they have continuously imposed themselves on the people of Gaza to their detriment.

**Hamas Takeover**. Seen here in 2007, Hamas security force officers attack a Fatah supporter as he lays on the ground in Gaza City, following Hamas’ violent takeover of the Strip in June. (Photo: Adel Hana / AP)

About the writer:

Kenneth Moeng Kgwadi is a political scientist, journalist, and research fellow at the Middle East Africa Research Institute (MEARI).

*Feature picture: Hamas Hijack. A Hamas coordinated intercepting food aid from trucks.

HERZLIYA CONFERENCE MESSAGE – TIME TO TRANSITION

Failures leading to October 7 followed by poor policies since, necessitate a switch in direction and a ditch of leadership.

By David E. Kaplan

Addressing the 2026 Herzliya Conference at Reichman University, an exuberant and entertaining US Ambassador, Mike Huckabee said that when President Trump

“….. was looking who to appoint as the new ambassador for Israel, he said “Find me a ‘Maccabee”. Maybe, his folks didn’t hear him right so here I am instead – a Huckabee.”

All familiar with the biblical history, everyone laughed; it was witty but it was the proverbial ‘last laugh’ of the two-day intense conference such are the distressing existential issues confronting Israel today.

**Two-Way Street**. Following US VP JD Vance saying much of Israel’s defense was American-made and taxpayer-funded, US Ambassador Mike Huckabee says Israel provides technology, agriculture and intelligence that ‘saves, protects and takes care of Americans all over the world’.

PRESERVING DEMOCRACY

The tone of the Conference was set in a riveting interview of retired Supreme Court President Aharon Barak by Maj. Gen. (Res.) Prof. Amos Gilead. The warm applause that greeted this retired jurist and judge was telling of a man who survived the Kovno Ghetto by being smuggled out in a sack before his family immigrated to Mandatory Palestine and who would serve as President of the Supreme Court of Israel from 1995 to 2006.

**Saving the State**. Maj. Gen. (Res.) Prof. Amos Gilead (right) interviews retired Supreme Court President Aharon Barak at the 22nd Herzliya Conference, who delivers a stark warning about the state of Israeli democracy, cautioning that the country lacks critical checks and balances and is “moving away from being democratic.” The Hon. Prof. Aharon Barak | Herzliya Conference 2026

Known for his monumental impact on Israeli law, he warned Israeli democracy was unraveling. Undoing much of the safeguards he had contributed in securing, Barak warned that Israel was losing – under the current government – the necessary checks and balances, “placing the ultimate responsibility to protect the country’s democracy on the public.”

And why was he then still optimistic, Barak answered:

“There is an upcoming election; the people can change direction.”

The esteemed former Supreme Court justice was saying Israel’s salvation lay not with those today in office but with those tomorrow who will vote!

That “tomorrow” is October 27, 2026.

A DEFINING DIFFERENCE

There was something very different about 2026’s Herzliya Conference. Firstly, it was scheduled for weeks earlier but because there was the fear that the war with Iran would again flare up – which it now has – it was postponed, finally settling June 30 to July 1. Such uncertainty is the norm these days in Israel. As I write, the Maccabi Games or “Jewish Olympics” is being held, having being postponed from the previous year for the same reason – fear of war!

In these turbulent times, missiles raining down on Israel’s civilian population is less a surprise and more a question of:

“Are they from Iran, Hezbollah or the Houthis?” That covers north, east and south, and would also be from the west if Gaza had not been considerably neutralized.

One of the first questions the residents in my apartment complex collectively ask whenever we hurriedly assemble in the bomb shelter following a siren:

“Who is firing at us? Is the missile coming from Iran, Lebanon or Yemen?”

This bizarre scenario is a metaphor for life today in Israel. Our attackers could be coming at us from multiple directions and it could be separate or in concert. How frequently in our bomb shelter I would be on WhatsApp with my brother living in the north of Israel who was under attack from Hezbollah while we, in the center of the country, were under ballistic missile attack from Iran. Israel is surrounded by enemies who actively campaign for its demise hence the theme of this year’s Herzliya Conference was:

“Between National Security and National Resilience”.

A high-level strategic forum for evaluating Israel’s geopolitical standing and domestic resilience, the Herzliya Conference brings informed individuals from the Israel’s political, military, security, intelligence, academic and business communities together to exchange ideas, share knowledge, and build professional relationships.

All this in defense of Israel, but this conference in 2026 there was a difference because speaker after speaker conveyed the fear – Where lies the danger, in Tehran or Jerusalem? Between the crazy Ayatollahs and Bibi’s cobbled – and no less crazy – coalition, one had to try make sense of it all and plot a viable path forward.

As many of the speakers expressed that while Israel relies on “military power”, “economic stability” and “technical innovation”, it relies as much on “social cohesion” and “public trust”, both of which are currently being eroded. The lack of public trust in Netanyahu’s government was expressed in full throttle at the panel discussion surrounding Israel’s avoidance of a State Commission of Inquiry into the October 7 disaster.

Participating in the panel were two fathers who had lost children in the present war. One was Eyal Eshel, father of Roni Eshel, an IDF observation soldier, murdered at the Nahal Oz base on October 7, 2023. Eyal has become a vocal advocate for accountability, demanding a state commission of inquiry and frequently challenging government officials over the security failures that led to the tragedy. What most exposed the Prime Ministers “disconnect” was when Yoram Yehudai, the father of Ron Yehudai, who was murdered at the Nova music festival related his revulsion to the Channel 14 interview when Netanyahu was asked how he had personally changed since October 7 and jokingly replied that he had “lost a little weight“.”

Really?

“I lost a son and he jokes that he lost weight,” and added “I haven’t laughed at jokes in a thousand days.”

Discussions surrounding Israel’s avoidance of a State Commission of Inquiry into the October 7 disaster were a focal point at the 2026 Herzliya Conference with experts, including military and legal analysts, weighing in on the implications of sidestepping this statutory investigative mechanism.

Avoiding a formal State Commission of Inquiry – which is the most authoritative, independent investigative body under Israeli law, possessing the power to subpoena witnesses and issue binding, personal recommendations – shifts the inquiry to internal government reviews or politically appointed committees.

Panelists at the Conference argued that bypassing this independent probe, threatens long-term military accountability and public trust exposing the prime minister and his governing coalition to the not unfair accusation “as being more concerned over political survival” and “preserving wartime coalition stability,” rather than the national interest.

WEIGHTY ISSUES

Also not sharing Netanyahu’s joke about having “lost weight” since October 7, was the former Chief of Staff and an aspiring future prime minister.

Interviewed at the Herzliya Conference by Channel 2’s prime time anchor, Dana Weiss, Gadi Eisenkot – now Leader of the Yashar Party – brought credibility to his criticism of the prime minister, having lost not “weight” but a son and two nephews in the current war. He stated that his primary goal is to defeat Netanyahu’s coalition, asserting that leaders in command on October 7 “are unfit for the future.” He makes the case that “Twice, there was a sovereign Jewish kingdom here in the land of Israel,” referring to the Hasmonean Kingdom and the House of David, and “twice, it collapsed and fell apart in the eighth decade of its existence. Once again, we stand at a fateful point.”

To avoid a repeat dissolution, Eisenkot argued for Israelis to unify and come election, to remove the prime minister who he asserts “is out of touch,” and “unfit” to remain in office.

Eisenkot characterizes the cabinet as lacking independent thought, stating, “We have a weak Cabinet of submissive people,” allowing Netanyahu to lead the country in the wrong direction without challenge.

UNFIT FOR OFFICE

Being “out of touch” and “unfit” was the shared view of many of the speakers of a government that was undermining (during a war) the unity, solidarity and sustainability of Israeli society by its support of the Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) exemption from military and civil service. Conference participants could have opened the front pages of any of the daily papers and seen Haredi protests across the country, blocking traffic in support of their community’s “draft doggers.” This was no ‘Ivory Tower’ academic conference – the issues discussed were playing out on Israeli streets and Israel’s borders.

Experts warned that “demographic shifts and draft exemptions are fracturing national resilience and placing an unsustainable burden on the shrinking portion of the public that serves in the military and productive economy.”

The main concerns expressed regarding the Haredi threat was what was called the collapse of the “People’s Army” – so foundational and fundamental to Israel’s DNA. Experts highlighted that only about a third (35%) of each Israeli cohort completes significant military service. They warned that it is mathematically unsustainable for this minority to bear the security burden for the remaining 65% of the population indefinitely.

Reinforcing this concern, President Isaac Herzog used his address to warn of the “danger of social disintegration.” He stressed “the urgent need to renew the shared civic contract,” pointing to “the growing alienation between draft-exempt sectors and the broader Israeli public” that is actively bearing the costs of ongoing conflicts.

Despite the government pushing support for Hareidi draft dodgers, there is no dodging reality. Surveys presented at the Conference showed that a vast majority of the Israeli public demands equal burden-sharing, with 72% supporting the conscription of the ultra-Orthodox. The failure to integrate the Haredim into national and security service was cited as a “primary driver” of the extremely “low levels of social cohesion and trust in the government.”

**President’s Warning**. “Instead of being a diverse and thriving society of brothers and sisters, who quarrel and yet reconcile, we risk becoming a landmass that has broken apart into a handful of islands. Islands of exhausted, worn-out people…armed with a sense of absolute righteousness,” warned President Herzog addressing the 2026 Herzliya Conference. (Photo: GPO/Ma’ayan Toaf)

ECONOMIC STRAIN

Also flagged as existential long-term concerns were the failure of the Haredi educational system to incorporate core secular subjects (like math and science) and the community’s general lack of economic productivity.

Economists at the conference warned that as the productive tax base shrinks relative to the rapidly growing Haredi population, the burden on the working sector risks pushing skilled professionals out of the country.

All these discussions occurred against a backdrop of intense societal division, with the Haredi leadership threatening to dissolve the ruling coalition if the government did not advance laws that would permanently freeze draft enforcement and elevate Torah study to a foundational constitutional value.

EPILOGUE

Now post the conference, if ever there is an example why this government has failed to learn its lesson since October 7 and why is needs to be replaced is in the unfolding drama following Israel’s Chief of Staff, Lt.-Gen. Eyal Zamir’s recent letter to PM Netanyahu and others warning against legislation that would freeze arrests of Haredi draft dodgers.

Following months of warning that the IDC is facing a critical manpower shortage and needs an influx of 12,000 soldiers, he wrote that such legislation would create “a disincentive to report for miliary service” since it grants immunity from prosecution and would thus “rather than encourage enlistment” – which is desperately needed – it would do the opposite.

“Such a move would, “ wrote Zamir, “cause a rapture with those who have borne the burden of fighting for the past two and a half years, and would increase the sense of inequality.”

How can one argue against this logic.

Nevertheless, this is precisely what this government is doing by attacking the country’s top military officer accusing him of indulging in politics instead of focusing on “winning the war,” as expressed by Likud backbencher, Amit Levy in an Army Radio interview.

As all at the Conference were reminded, was it not Netanyahu who had deflected any criticism for October 7 arguing that the IDF and intelligence services failed to warm him of Hamas’ planned invasion.

“I was not warned” has been his defense since October 8……

However, we now know this was NOT true. The head of Israeli military intelligence’s Research Division at the time had sent the prime minister a number of letters warning exactly this and the then-IDF Chief of Staff, Herzi Halevi, repeatedly sought to meet with him in the days leading up to October 7 to warn him about the severe security risks posed by Israel’s internal divisions, but was frequently rebuffed. So too then Shin Bet chief, Ronen Bar, who too gave multiple warnings to Netanyahu about Hamas and the rising risk of war in the months and days leading up to October 7.

Now we can understand how Netanyahu and those around him ignored the warnings because they are doing it again – in the open – by publicly ignoring the warning of the head of the IDF that the “military lacks sufficient manpower” thus impairing its ability to fight. Not only are they ignoring the message but are attacking the messenger. They are doing so to preserve power at the expense of the people.

Is there any doubt that under a Netanyahu government the people of Israel are facing a ‘Clear and present danger’.

This was reinforced by Likud stalwart and former Speaker of the Knesset, Yuli Edelstein who gave a sharp address at the Conference titled “A Half-People’s Army” where he criticized the unequal burden of military service. He advocated for “equality in service,” demanding that all Israeli citizens be subject to the same security service laws at age 18, and warned that the current system places an unsustainable burden on the nation’s reservists. As possibly a sign of a changing political landscape, Edelstein announced last month that he was leaving the party and would not run in the upcoming Likud primary.

**All must Serve**. Speaker of the Knesset, MK Yuli Edelstein stated that Israel’s current conscription model is unsustainable arguing that civic duty and security service must be mandatory for all citizens. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXcy3tVPmsY&t=6s)

The message of the conference:

There is an election coming up or as Gadi Eisencott expressed it in historical terms that we again “stand at a fateful point” and: “We are warned!”

**Wrong Direction**. Interviewed at the Herzliya Conference by Channel 12 anchor, Dana Weiss, Gadi Eisenkot characterized Israel’s governing cabinet as “weak” with “submissive people,” allowing Netanyahu to lead the country in the wrong direction without challenge.
(https://www.runi.ac.il/en/research-institutes/government/ips/herzliya-conference/hc2026/vod)

THE ANTISEMITIC GOSPEL ACCORDING TO REDI TLHABI

Relocated to the US, a popular South African journalist switches media platform to further outreach her antisemitism.

By Lawrence Nowosenetz

Relocated to Washington DC, South African journalist Redi Tlhabi broadcasts to a third of a billion people for the Qatari based network Al Jazeera.

For four months she has recited the oldest conspiracy theory in Europe, named it as antisemitism, and then told her audience it is true. Measured against the two screens the United States itself uses, the IHRA working definition and Natan Sharansky’s 3D test, an identifiable and fully documented body of her output stops being simply criticism of Israel.

Before leaving for overseas, Redi Tlhabi worked for many years as a broadcaster on Johannesburg based station Radio 702. She hosted her own programme called the Redi Tlhabi Show for about 10 years. Radio 702 is part of Primedia a broadcast media group founded by Issie Kirsch and his son William in 1994. Besides having Jewish management in its formative years, Radio 702 also featured well known and popular Jewish radio personalities John Berks and Stan Katz. This era also saw the new democratic South Africa formed and Radio 702 led the way as a talk radio station where openness and freedom of expression on radio flourished.

**Redi was Ready**. Back in 2018, Redi Tlhabi was all fired up to be anchoring a new current affairs show, named *Unfiltered* on SABC.

Funded in large part by the government of Qatar and chartered as an arm of the Qatari state, Tlhabi presents its popular current affairs programme UpFront. This is despite that the US Department of Justice ordered in 2020 for Al Jazeera to register as a foreign agent after concluding that it operated at the direction of the Qatari government. Viewed as the mouthpiece of the Muslim Brotherhood, Al Jazeera is banned across most of the Middle East, including Egypt, Israel, Bahrain, the Palestinian Authority controlled areas and other countries. It refused, arguing that it reaches out to more than 430 million consumers over 150 countries. To that outreach, Tlhabi adds roughly 700,000 followers on X.

There is a gospel Redi Tlhabi has preached with regularity this year that it now functions as an obvious self-evident truth. She takes the oldest conspiracy theory in European history – the belief that Jews secretly control the money, the media and the machinery of government – and calls it before anyone can object, exactly what it is – an antisemitic trope. Then, despite revealing exactly what it is by her own admission and acknowledgement, she falsely imparts to her viewers it to be true.

She comes to this conclusion following scrutiny.

Really?

Regrettably, Tlhabi neglects to also inform her audience that her present Qatari employer is far from being Jewish and that when she worked for a South African Jewish media company earlier in her career, she enjoyed success without any reproach against her apparent Jewish ‘controllers’.

Bigotry is seldom logical or fair, but always harmful and dangerous. Tlhabi has overstepped the antisemitism red line and now presents an affront to human dignity and freedom not only of Jews but to democratic society of all races and creeds where respect, truth and justice still matter.

**‘Upfront’ in her Prejudice**. Working for her new boss Al Jazeera, Redi Tlhabi is more than happy to propagate an antisemitic narrative evidenced by her postings like “…the Israeli lobby uses money and power to control the US and its lawmakers.”

Like happiness, antisemitism means different thing to different people. Yet antisemitism mutates. It has shifted from being hatred of Jews to hatred of the Jewish state. This reality is strongly contested by anti-Israel and anti-Zionist voices but nevertheless the standard definition has found traction. Let’s begin with the standard, even if Tlhabi will say the standard is rigged. The United States government itself uses the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition. The State Department has applied it since 2010; Executive Order 13899 made it a reference point for federal civil-rights enforcement in 2019; the 2023 National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism adopted it; and more than half of the states in the USA have endorsed it. The definition carries its own brake, written into its text: criticism of Israel similar to that levelled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic. (My emphasis)

The IHRA definition offers, as its textbook illustration, the making of “mendacious, dehumanizing, demonizing, or stereotypical allegations about Jews as such or the power of Jews as collective, such as, especially but not exclusively, the myth about a world Jewish conspiracy or of Jews controlling the media, economy, government or other societal institutions.”

That is the classic canard, named by the authors of the definition.

On 4 June, Tlhabi proudly proclaimed:

“Control the whole world… I thought this was an antisemitic trope.” She clearly identifies with this old timeworn lie.

On 11 May 2026 she asked her followers whether it is an “antisemitic trope still” to say Israel “wants to control social media.”

On 21 March 2026, she dropped any vestige of a bland façade:

“So can we say the Israeli lobby uses money and power to control the US and its lawmakers? … I think we must.”

On 5 June 2026, she instructed her audience to stop caring what they are called, because words like “control, influence, money” simply describe the truth.

This is the defining moment and the turning point when the certainty of prejudice allows no questioning or doubt. We have seen it before and we thought it was dead and buried after the Nazi era: Sheer and unadulterated anti-Jewish hatred and vilification.

Natan Sharansky’s older 3D test draws the same line and names the three markers of anti-Jewish and anti-Israel animus: demonization, double standards, and delegitimisation. A writer may despise the Israeli government, reject Zionism as a political ideology, call the conduct of the war in Gaza criminal, and still sit on the safe side of every line. The bar is set high by design. Criticism is not silenced. Obsessive discrimination is not lightly inferred. Tlhabi comfortably clears these hurdles and effortlessly enters the terrain of vicious hate filled antisemitism.

The machinery does not vary. She recites the conspiracy theory, names it as a conspiracy theory so that nobody can accuse her of ignorance, and then asserts that it is accurate. Tlhabi has done it across dozens of posts, openly and brazenly from a desk in Washington DC. She speaks with the voice of undisputed authority. “Those who know, know” she posted on X on 30 June 2026. No fact checking, no proof just sheer certainty. It is hard to reconcile such crude irrational dogmatism with a highly educated journalist and influential public model.

On 13 March, she ran the charge as sarcasm, reciting “it is antisemitic to say Israel controls US politicians” in the voice of someone tired of pretending it is false. The conduct matches the IHRA definition’s own example of the world-conspiracy myth, and it matches Sharansky’s demonization criterion. Absurd too and equally insulting of the sovereignty and power of the USA to suggest that its politicians are unduly influenced by a foreign government or individuals.

Tlhabi’s response to a blog in the Times of Israel (ToI) by a private identified contributor is illustrative of her conspiracy theorising. The article titled “Africa Must Fragment, South Africa First” argued that South Africa should be broken into ethnic successor states. A Tlhabi social media user posted this blog on Tlhabi’s comment section adding that (undefined) “they”, were “behind this nyaka nyaka (a colloquial African term for chaos) and “will stop at NOTHING.” Tlhabi quote-tweeted that post with a resounding affirmation:

“Nnete,” she wrote in Sesotho, her mother tongue (meaning true) and: “Mossad is GOOD. I hope our investigative journalists are working. I’m happy to give them leads”.

A Tlhabi social media user’s comment had become, in Tlhabi’s hands, proof of an Israeli intelligence operation to fragment a continent, and she was volunteering her services to help reporters investigate and expose this evil plan. The IHRA definition speaks of the myth of a world Jewish conspiracy. Here is that myth, transposed to Africa, named as Mossad and offered to journalists as a tip.

Tlhabi’s second category of demonization shifts from the Jewish State, Israel to individual Jews in South Africa. Her most sustained personal campaign of the year is against a respected rabbi. She has called South Africa’s Chief Rabbi, Warren Goldstein, “a divisive, hateful man.” She has charged that he “whips up fear and uses hyperbole to create the impression that Jews are in danger, from the rest of us.” She fails to acknowledge the real and existential dangers Jewish communities have faced worldwide since the 7 October 2023 atrocities and the incitement – including actual physical attacks – on Jewish civilians in Western cities. Instead, she attributes to the head of Orthodox Jewry in South Africa his concern for his congregation as paranoia and a fraudulent accusation against ordinary society.

**Redi and the Rabbi**. Redi Tlhabi posts about South Africa’s Chief Rabbi, Warren Goldstein, “You want Jews to feel hated and afraid. That’s your currency.”

This malicious instinct extends to private Jewish South African citizens. Mark Saltzman, a member of the prominent family behind the South African pharmacy chain Dis-Chem criticised her over Israel. She recast his family’s philanthropy as proof of a hidden design, writing that he:

“…inadvertently confirms that money is donated as a [form] of control.”

The old trope about Jewish money, applied this time to a Jewish businessman rather than to a lobby in the abstract, surfaced the moment the quarrel spotlighted her personal animus against Israel.

In the USA, when a New York turbulent primary between two Jewish Democrats, Brad Lander and sitting Rep. Dan Goldman, produced a result that some Jewish New Yorkers found alarming, Tlhabi reposted a message that mocked that anxiety:

“Praying for your safety tonight, after one Jewish man was defeated by another Jewish man.”

**Mocking Message**. Responding to Rep. Dan Goldman, who shortly following been banned from a Brooklyn coffee shop over posture on Israel and was then unseated by a Mamdani-backed Brad Lander, Redi Tlhabi posted a message mocking “*… one Jewish man was defeated by another Jewish man*.” (Photo: Bing Guan/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

She reposted an item declaring that “Jews are many things, but stupid is not one of them.” She is perfectly right in that observation evidenced in achievements across academic, scientific and economic spheres, but her framing of their undoubted accomplishments was meant in a disparaging and dehumanising sense by referring to cryptic and unnamed “many things” that Jews are good at. Were any other religious, ethnic or national group to be characterized in this manner, it would rightly be regarded as racist.

In her coverage of a shooting at an Islamic centre in San Diego and the Jewish community’s caring response proving “the urgent, universal need for security protections at all faith-based sites,” Tlhabi inferred that Jewish fear of violence was a ruse. In her view, the World Jewish Congress recasts Jewish anxiety about antisemitism as a cynical tactic “at best conspiratorial.” For Tlhabi, Jewish conspiracy is a constant recurring theme in her reportage

The third category of her antisemitism is the easiest to evidence and the least contested supported by Sharansky’s unfailing 3D test. Tlhabi has posted the bare utterance “Israel is a terrorist state” on at least seven separate occasions in four months, the way a congregation recites a creed.

She has luridly described Israeli soldiers as:

– “savages”

– “murderers”

– in “the grip of some psychosis”,

– a “genocidal state led by psychopaths” and

– “filth”.

Such is the gospel of Tlhabi.

A reader may believe that the Israeli military has committed grave crimes in Gaza and still recognise that “savages”, “psychopaths” and “filth” is the vocabulary of degradation and dehumanisation – the precise character assassination the antisemitism definitions exist to flag.

Her reply is on the record, and it deserves to be put plainly. She holds that opposition to Zionism concerns a political ideology and a state, with no bearing on Jews as a people, and that the charge of antisemitism is a cudgel used to silence her. Writing in News24, she observed that when she criticises Israel, she is called an antisemite, and added that she can “live with this title.”

The frameworks marshalled against her are, moreover, contested. The American Civil Liberties Union and others have warned that the IHRA examples can be stretched to chill legitimate speech, and many reasonable people read the Israel-related clauses in good faith and reject them. This tired response overlooks:

– the crucial delineation between criticism and defamation

– between informed comment and character assassination

– between established facts and baseless dogmatic falsehoods. Anyone who resists rational debate and factual challenge is not part of the enterprise called civilizational enquiry and progress.

The safe harbour Tlhabi relies on to protect criticism of Israel is “similar to that levelled against any other country.” No – it is completely different: A double standard and hypocrisy as wide as the Grand Canyon. At present there is a genocide case against Myanmar pending in the ICJ. One does not see the leaders and supporters of Myanmar being described by Tlhabi or the media as psychopaths or the like. Similarly, those responsible for the huge human suffering, sexual abuse, starvation and death in Sudan are not singled out for dehumanisation or demonization. The deposed President of Syria, responsible for suffering, death and displacement of millions of Syrians also has not been subjected to close scrutiny or denunciation by Tlhabi – certainly not with such extreme language.

Measured against the definition the United States government itself applies and against the test a former Soviet prisoner devised to separate criticism from hatred, an identifiable body of what Redi Tlhabi broadcasts meets the egregious markers of antisemitism: world conspiracy theories, demonization delegitimation and double standards.

She flagrantly rejects the official antisemitism policy of the USA, her gracious host.

Tlhabi enjoys the freedoms in the USA including freedom of speech which she does not accord others who challenges her views. She benefits from a platform which is a Qatari state backed broadcaster with a reach of more than 430 million people and a personal following of three quarters of a million. She is a foreign national in Washington DC who has satisfied herself that the world conspiracy is real and that her task is to help the rest of us see it. She spotted the trope, identified and named it, and then told a third of a billion people that it was true. She is unwilling to allow her bigoted views to stand scrutiny. She should be held accountable for her contribution to the incitement and violence which has manifested in the US and across major Western countries against individuals, although unfortunately she is not alone.

Redi Tlhabi is abusing her freedoms to deprive Jews of their right to safety and dignity.

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.

*Feature picture: Redi Tlhabi (Illustrative image: Daily Maverick | Gemini)

THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD, MILITANT ISLAM AND QATAR

The power of money to influence, corrupt and ultimately erode the liberal western way of life.

By Neville Berman

(Warning from the writer: There may be incidents referred to below that you may find disturbing)

This article is not about nuclear war, global warming or a strain of some unknown virus that could result in the destruction of mankind. Instead, it is aimed at highlighting the actual greatest current threat facing the liberal Western way of life. Forget about Russia, China or communism as the major threats facing the West. The cold war is over. Russia is clearly no longer the power that Vladimir Putin thought it was when he ordered the Russian army to invade Ukraine. China might be an economic competitor to American financial dominance, but China relies on the markets in the West to ensure that its export-based economy can bring prosperity to China. It would be a strategic mistake for China to believe that its exports will not suffer if it wages war against the West.

The First World War was billed as “the war to end all wars”. It ended with a German surrender, and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire that had ruled large parts of the Middle East for nearly 400 years. The terms of the surrender agreement did not bring peace to Europe, and the Muslim community in the Middle East was plunged into turmoil.

In 1928, Hassan al-Banna started a Sunni Muslim organization in Egypt called the Muslim Brotherhood. He stated the following:

“The nature of Islam is to dominate and not to be dominated, to impose its law on all nations and to extend its power to the entire planet.”

**The Enforcer**. Founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, one of the largest and most influential global Islamist movements, Hassan al-Banna encouraged Egyptians to abandon Western customs and argued that the state should enforce Islamic public morality.

He rejected nationalism, and regarded all Muslims as members of a single Islamic movement that needed to establish Islamic rule across the world. Its core message was to subjugate the world to Sharia law by means of Jihad. He maintained that Jihad is an obligation from Allah on every Muslim, and that a guaranteed way to heaven was to die fighting for the cause of Islam. Partly due to the social activities in helping the poor, and partly due to the support from the Imams in the Mosques, membership in the Brotherhood grew rapidly across the Arab world. The Egyptian government recognized the threat that the Brotherhood posed to its rule, and in 1949, Hassan al-Banna was assassinated by agents of the Egyptian secret police. Despite his death, the message of the Muslim Brotherhood still resonates with millions of Muslims.

There are two significant changes that have now elevated the threat posed by the Muslim Brotherhood. The first involves the change in the financial position of the major oil and gas exporting countries in the Middle East, and the second involves the huge increase of the number of Muslims now living in the West.

The world runs on oil and gas and Saudi Arabia is the world’s number 1 exporter of oil, and Qatar is the second largest exporter of Liquefied Natural Gas. (LNG) The profits from the sale of these commodities have transformed these previously poverty-stricken countries into modern financial powerhouses. They are now using their financial power to undermine the West, and promote the growth of Islam across the world.

The second important factor is that the liberal West decided to promote a policy of human rights for mankind. The idea of prosperity through diversity, multiculturalism, and equal opportunity, led to the West opening its borders to immigration. Millions of immigrants from poor countries with little or no prospects, moved to the liberal Western world in the hope of finding a better life for themselves and their families. The vast majority of them lack marketable skills, and are impecunious. They do not share the same culture, religion, language or values of the countries that they have immigrated to. The result is that Europe and America now have sizable immigrant and Muslim populations. Saudi Arabia and Qatar have financed Mosques and Islamic cultural centers all across the world to serve the Muslim immigrant communities. The Imams in these institutions have radicalized tens of thousands of their followers to oppose the values of the West, and to see themselves as part of the army of Islam that aims to control the world.

The greatest threat facing the Western world at present is militant Islam coupled with the support that it is receiving from Qatar and other Middle Eastern countries. (The role of Iran and Saudi Arabia as a threat to the West will be presented in a follow up article.)

Qatar is a sovereign country surrounded by the Persian Gulf. It has a small land border that can be used to cross into Saudi Arabia. It has been ruled by the Al Thani family since the mid-19^th century. There are approximately 3 million people living in Qatar, of which about 320,000 are Qatari citizens. All the rest are expatriates and guest workers with almost no rights in the country. Qatar has donated billions of dollars to Hamas, which is an affiliate of the Muslim Brotherhood.

**All in the Family**. Qatar, a small Gulf country with enormous global influence, has been ruled by the **Al Thani** family since the mid-19^th century.

Qatar has the same aims as Al-Qaeda, but is much smarter in its strategy. Instead of blowing up buildings in the West and causing a military retaliation, Qatar is buying the buildings and using its financial resources to gain influence. The Al-Jazeera TV channel is financed by the rulers of Qatar. It broadcasts 24/7 in Arabic and English to 430 million households worldwide. It has radicalized millions of its viewers to hate and despise the West and is laying the seeds of an Islamic takeover of the West.

Qatar has spent billions on financing the building of Middle Eastern departments on all the major American university campuses. Only professors with a track record of being anti-Israel are hired. Their aim is to train the future leaders of America to oppose the values and foundational pillars of Western civilization, and especially to oppose Israel. The end result can be seen in well financed and organized protests against Israel on American campuses and across the Western world.

**Gift or Graft?** Seeming oblivious to the image of Qatar buying influence at the highest level of the US administration, President Donald Trump celebrates the new Qatari-gifted ‘Air Force One’ before its initial voyage to North Dakota, saying the U.S. “should be very proud” of the new luxury jet.(AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)

Qatar has used its enormous wealth to corrupt the world. They bought the right to host the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar. They are also buying influence within the American administration. Steve Witcoff owned a hotel in New York that was sold to Qatar for $400 million. He claims it was at fair market value. According to a Netflix program called Dirty Money, Jared Kushner was bailed out of insolvency by a $400 million loan from Qatar. Witkoff and Kushner are presently the negotiators representing America in negotiating a deal with Iran. Qatar has just presented Trump with the world’s most luxurious Boeing 747 aircraft costing over $400 million. The Attorney General has determined that the gift is legally permissible, as it is gifted to the US government and not to Trump personally. Trump is now using the plane. Whichever way you look at it, there is no doubt that Qatar has bought influence within the highest levels of the US administration. President Trump sees Qatar as a friend and ally of America. Qatar is playing a double game of pretending to be a friend of America, while actively promoting the aims of the Muslim Brotherhood and the downfall of the West.

More than a decade ago, Dutch politician Gert Wilders produced a short movie of the growth of Islam in Holland. The final scene was filmed inside a mosque of an Imam waving a sword during a sermon, declaring, “Come and cut off his head! By Allah, we shall cut it off!”

**To Crown it All**. This Bel Air home in LA, listed on the market as the US’s most expensive residential property is owned by a Qatari billionaire and former prime minister. Qatar’s ruling Al Thani family and state funds have amassed massive real estate portfolios across Western capitals with their holdings often exceeding those of local monarchs. (Photo: Simon Berlyn/The Beverly Hills Estates)

Gert Wilders was charged with inciting hatred for making and showing the movie. No charges were ever laid against the Imam. There is no doubt that the message of that particular Imam is part of Islam.

In the early hours of October 7, 2023, Hamas invaded Israel. They rejoiced at filming themselves committing the most violent crimes of murder, rape, beheading, and hostage taking. Many people in the West believe that the Muslim concept of Jihad applies only to Jews. They are mistaken. Jihad is aimed at every single person who does not believe in Islam. This is a wakeup call to all those Westerners who are totally ignorant of what Islam and Jihad are all about. One day, when the Islamists decide that it is time to overthrow the West, tens of thousands of militant Islamists that are your fellow citizens, and could be living next door to you, will act in the same way that Hamas acted against Israel. They will take out their guns and invade your residences. They will shoot your dogs, murder your babies and children in front of you. They will gang rape the female members of your family, and then mutilate and decapitate you and your parents. Some of you will have metal rods shoved into your vaginas and others will have your breasts cut off. All of this will be filmed by the people rejoicing at what they have done. Some of you will be kidnaped and kept in cellars. You will either be killed, used as sex slaves, and finally used as bargaining chips to secure the release of other Jihadists that have been incarcerated. If you find the above shocking, then it is time to wake up to the reality of what Hamas actually planned and carried out in Israel. This is what Jihad is all about. As they say in Hollywood, Coming shortly to your neighborhood. Groups such as “Gays for Gaza” are the epitome of the ignorance that exists about the dangers of militant Islam.

**Tuitions of Terror**. The preferred host of Hamas terrorist leaders, Qatar is the largest foreign donor to American higher education, funneling billions of dollars into U.S. and Western universities. Seen here is Cornell University that received over $2.3 billion. (Credit: Cornell University stock photo)

I will end with what must be the strangest case of genocide ever recorded. Thousands of Palestinians living in the West Bank are finding illegal ways to cross into Israel to find employment. Tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza would gladly come to work in Israel, if Israel would allow them to do so. It defies all logic that all these Palestinians would be trying desperately to come to Israel, if Israel was committing genocide against them. It is time for all those gullible Westerners who are protesting that Israel is committing genocide to understand that you are supporting a blood libel and false narrative. It is time to reflect on your support for those that aim to kill you. It is time to understand the disproportionate role that tiny Israel is playing in preventing militant Islam from taking over the western world.

It is time to say “Thank you Israel.”

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.

CAN LEBANON FINALLY ESCAPE HEZBOLLAH?

Rubio has delivered a diplomatic breakthrough. Now comes the difficult task of turning a framework into lasting security.

By Andrew Fox

For the first time in 44 years, Israel and Lebanon have put their names to a framework agreement. Rubio is presenting it as a first step toward ending the conflict, restoring Lebanese sovereignty, dismantling Hezbollah’s military infrastructure, and creating a verifiable path toward security on Israel’s northern border. The deal reportedly begins with two pilot zones, into which the Lebanese Armed Forces will enter as Israel redeploys. At the same time, the IDF remains in Lebanese territory for as long as Hezbollah continues to pose a threat.

**Brave New World**. Meeting with CENTCOM Commander Admiral Brad Cooper in Beirut on June 29, Lebanese president Joseph Aoun (centre) is bravely navigating a high-stakes strategy by chartering a historic and unprecedented path directly confronting the Iranian-backed Hezbollah.

This agreement is a meaningful development. It is also where the hard part begins. The agreement creates a process, not an outcome, and the central question is whether anyone can impose that process and outcome on Hezbollah. According to the framework text, Israeli withdrawal is tied to the verified disarmament of non-state armed groups and the dismantling of their infrastructure. That sounds straightforward in Washington. In Lebanon, it runs straight into the political and coercive reality of Hezbollah.

Iran will not let Hezbollah go quietly into that good night. For decades, Hezbollah has been an integral part of Tehran’s regional architecture: a military asset in the plan to destroy Israel, a deterrent, and a lever in wider negotiations. It has proven its utility both by striking inside Israel’s borders and by keeping Lebanon diplomatically tied to Iran’s confrontation with Israel. From Tehran’s perspective, the disarmament of Hezbollah would be a catastrophic strategic loss.

That said, Hezbollah is far more than a line item in an Iranian budget. It has its own funding streams, including smuggling, illicit trade, and international criminal networks. Pressure on Tehran alone will not collapse Hezbollah’s operating capacity. The group has spent years building redundancy into its financing, logistics, and social control.

The pilot-zone mechanism is therefore the key test. The Lebanese army’s entry into the first two areas could be a useful beginning, especially if it establishes a precedent for state authority in places where Hezbollah has long treated Beirut’s sovereignty as an irrelevance. The problem is that Hezbollah overmatches the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) in most important respects: firepower, salaries, coercive capacity, embedded networks, and willingness to intimidate local opponents.

**Mapping Path to Peace**. This is the map of the “buffer zone” stipulated in the historic agreement signed between the Lebanese and Israeli governments, which will allow Israel to maintain its troops on Lebanese soil commensurate with Hezbollah disarmament.

(On the origins of Hezbollah – see here.)

The success or failure of the deal hinges on operational freedom. If Israel hands areas to the LAF and the LAF cannot prevent Hezbollah retrenchment, can Israel still act? Israeli officials are already saying the IDF will retain freedom of action in the security zone and remain until Hezbollah and other armed groups no longer pose a threat. That answers part of the Israeli security concern, but “pose a threat” is a loose definition and “no longer” may be doing some heavy lifting. Still, it also creates an obvious point of Lebanese and Hezbollah resistance: an agreement framed as restoring sovereignty may be attacked domestically as legitimising an open-ended Israeli presence.

The risk of Lebanese civil war is already more than a theoretical problem. Hezbollah has already rejected the deal, with Naim Qassem describing it as a surrender and saying the group will continue armed resistance. We have seen reports today of an Israeli drone strike in southern Lebanon, in an area outside the newly defined Israeli-held zone. In other words, the announcement has not suspended the underlying dynamics of the conflict.

**Set for Showdown**. Hezbollah leader Naim Qassem has formally rejected the US-brokered framework agreement signed between Beirut and Jerusalem, characterizing it as a surrender of Lebanese sovereignty stating that the group will not relinquish its arms and is prepared to continue armed resistance.

The same question applies beyond the south. What happens in Hezbollah’s depth areas, including the Bekaa Valley and the logistical corridors that keep Hezbollah in the fight? Can Israel still strike weapons flows, command nodes, and rearmament infrastructure there under the terms of this deal? A framework that manages the border while leaving Hezbollah’s rear areas intact may reduce friction without meaningfully changing the balance of power in Lebanon.

There is also the view from northern Israel. If residents of Kiryat Shmona, Metula, Manara, and other border communities still believe Hezbollah can rebuild observation posts, restore launch capacity, or prepare another frontier shock, displaced Israelis will not return simply because a framework exists. They will only return if the facts on the ground change, visibly and durably.

The Lebanese side faces an equally hard political problem. Hezbollah’s power inside Shia communities rests on welfare provision, patronage, identity, coercion, and deep disillusionment with the Lebanese state. If Lebanon is serious about replacing Hezbollah’s order with state authority, it has to offer more than checkpoints, and foreign-backed security plans. It has to offer protection, services, and a political alternative that does not leave communities feeling exposed.

**People Power**. Defiant of Iran-backed Hezbollah, a poster depicting Lebanon’s President Joseph Aoun that reads ”The decision-maker, the protector of Lebanon, Lebanon first…The State always. We are with you” hangs at the entrance of a tunnel on a street in eastern Beirut on April 28, 2026. (Photo: Joseph EID / AFP via Getty Images)

So, yes: this is progress. A signed Israel-Lebanon framework after 44 years is not nothing, and the pilot-zone model gives the parties something concrete to test. The right posture, however, is cautious scepticism. The success of this deal depends on enforcement, verification, Israeli freedom of action, LAF capacity, Hezbollah’s coercive response, Iran’s tolerance for strategic loss, and Lebanon’s ability to offer its Shia citizens something better than the status quo. Until those details are clear, this is a good first step but it is not yet a settlement.

About the writer:

*Feature picture: ‘Sign’ of the Times. The historic signing of the Israel-Lebanon-U.S. “Trilateral Framework Agreement” is intended to contribute to regional transformation by envisioning an eventual normalization of relations between the two states of Israel and Lebanon. (Photo: AP Photo/Kevin Wolf)

THE ODYSSEY OF THE OCHBERG ORPHANS

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF ISAAC OCHBERG

An upcoming exhibition in South Africa will reveal through personal testimonies, an extraordinary life whose legacy is enshrined for eternity in the young lives he saved in Eastern Europe in 1921.
It’s an example for Jews today everywhere.

In December, 2026, the SA Jewish Museum in Cape Town, South Africa will host an exhibition on one of the finest and heroic chapters of the South African Jewish community – the life and times of Capetonian, Isaac Ochberg (1879-1938).

Entrepreneur, philanthropist, community leader and Zionist, Isaac Ochberg in 1921 mobilized communal Jewish support, obtained government permission through his friendship with Prime Minister Jan Smuts and then single-handedly, went into the most dangerous region in the world for Jews beset by war, pogroms, rampant antisemitism and a typhoid epidemic – to rescue Jewish orphans from certain death.

Even death did not stop Isaac Ochberg saving Jews.

Leaving the largest bequest in History to the JNF-KKL following his death in 1938, the proceeds were used to support higher education at universities in preparation for the future Jewish state (notably the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Weizmann Institute) and acquire the land that became kibbutz Dalia and kibbutz Galed, that would, following WWII, absorb the survivors of the Shoah. It is no wonder that there stands today in the Megiddo region, the Isaac Ochberg Park that has a ‘Hill of Names’ enshrining the names of all the orphan children he saved.

Today, thousands of their descendants are today spread around the globe and in preparation for the exhibition, the SA Jewish Museum is seeking to trace as many of them to document the never-ending enriching saga of Isaac Ochberg. For further information see details at the end of the article below on the Ochberg saga by French historian, Michel Levine.

David E. Kaplan
Chairman of the Isaac Ochberg Heritage Committee (Israel)
Editor of Lay of the Land

THE ODYSSEY OF THE OCHBERG ORPHANS

How one South African businessman in 1921 set out by himself, risking life and limb to save Jewish orphans in worn-torn Eastern Europe

By Michel Levine

What drove Isaac Ochberg, a respectable and prosperous South African businessman, in 1920 to undertake an adventurous expedition thousands of kilometers to the north, into a Europe plunged into the bloody turmoil of civil wars?

For him, things were undoubtedly simple: born Jewish in Ukraine, he had been fortunate enough to flee the hell that awaited him to live under different skies. This chance, he wanted to offer in turn to the most vulnerable children: the orphans.

Isaac Ochberg was born in 1878 in Russia, into a Jewish family of German origin with six children, in the small town of Uman (now Ukrainian) located in what was then known as the “Pale of Settlement”. Created by Empress Catherine II in 1791, this was a vast area stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea, including Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, Moldova, Belarus, Crimea, and part of Poland. When Isaac Ochberg was born, the situation of the five million Jews living there was hardly enviable. Excluded from public service and higher education, they had gathered in certain city neighborhoods or in small towns called shtetls. Forbidden to own land, they survived by practicing small trades, commerce, crafts, tavern management, but also pawnbroking, this last activity arousing resentment among the Orthodox common people who had only emerged from serfdom in 1861.

**Man with a Mission**. Isaac Ochberg (1878-1937) Ukrainian-born South African businessman, Jewish community leader, savior of Jewish orphans in Eastern Europe and passionate supporter of a Jewish State in Palestine.

Young Isaac was three years old when the assassination of Tsar Alexander II triggered a series of pogroms that led to a massive exodus. About two million Jews emigrated between 1881 and 1914, mainly to the United States. But it was to South Africa, this land said to also offer a new El Dorado, that his father Aaron decided to emigrate.

He arrived in 1893 in a peaceful country, although sporadically shaken by wars between the Boers, descendants of Dutch settlers, and the British. South Africa was then open to significant immigration following the discovery of gold and diamonds in the Transvaal and welcoming to Jews, a small community of whom had been settled in Cape Town since 1841, living mainly from commerce and crafts while maintaining their distinctiveness. More interested in studying the Talmud than in financial success, Aaron nevertheless managed, after two years, to gather sufficient funds to bring Isaac, his eldest son aged sixteen, who risked being conscripted into the army at any moment for a duration of six long years during which he would be exposed to the worst harassment as a Jew. Upon his arrival in his new homeland, young Isaac demonstrated his talent. Inventive and resourceful, he soon abandoned the watchmaking apprenticeship his father had intended for him to launch into business – all sorts of businesses according to his capricious inspiration, ranging from scrap metal recovery to ship salvaging, passing through coffee sales, gold prospecting in the Transvaal, or creating Cape Town’s first cinema. During this period, he made a trip to Russia to visit his ailing mother and took the opportunity to be exempted from military service due to defective vision. He also met Pauline, a friend of his sisters, whom he married before returning to Cape Town with the entire family.

At forty, with an established fortune, father of five children, and an honorable British citizen (the country had been a dominion since 1910), Isaac Ochberg led the life of a notable. An executive member of the Council of Jewish Deputies, representing his country at the 16th World Zionist Conference in Zurich, he participated in managing organizations to help children and orphans in particular – in this capacity, he had participated in founding the Cape Jewish orphanage, of which he became President. It was undoubtedly this last function that led him to become acutely aware of the dramatic situation of Jewish orphans living in Eastern Europe.

**Key Coordinator**. 26-year-old Alexander Bobrow (above) was a key player in assembling the orphans making it easier for Ochberg logistically, accompanied – at the children’s crying insistence – the orphans and Ochberg on the ship to Cape Town planning on returning to Eastern Europe. He never did, and his daughter Liebe would later marry Aaron Klug who would receive the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1982.

At the end of the First World War, from 1917 onwards, Russia had been the theater of a civil war between the Bolshevik “Red” armies and the Tsarist “Whites,” the latter supported by contingents of French and British soldiers. The situation worsened in 1919 when the Second Polish Republic undertook a war of territorial reconquest against Soviet Russia. At the same time, Lithuania, Ukraine, and Belarus were the scene of independence uprisings. While these ideological and nationalist forces, mixed with bands of looters, fought each other, they attacked a common prey: the zhid (the kike). For the “Reds”, although the new regime had abolished Tsarist antisemitic laws and promoted Yiddish as the Jewish national language (while nevertheless proscribing Hebrew, deemed bourgeois and Zionist), this representative of capitalism, “stateless” and “reactionary”, remained a class enemy. For the Tsarist “Whites”, driven by ancestral hatred, he had become the “Judeo-Bolshevik” embodied in the person of the Jew Trotsky and held responsible for all the misfortunes of Holy Russia. As their supreme weapon, the “Whites” brandished the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, this forgery manufactured by the political police, the Cheka, which they would then spread in Western Europe during their flight. For the bands of starving peasants, encouraged to revolt by Tsarist forces, the greedy Jew was designated as the absolute culprit, the one who had “killed Christ” and engaged in ritual murders of Christian children, as an ancestral rumor maintained. This justified massacring him and his family and seizing his property. Of the five million Jews residing in the Pale of Settlement (officially abolished in 1917 by the Bolshevik government), more than one hundred thousand had perished, two hundred thousand survived wounded or disabled, and there were more than 150,000 orphans. A 1919 report by the great American Jewish charitable organization the Joint (American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee) testified:

“In Poland, suffering is intense. There are institutions for children deprived of a morsel of bread, hospitals unusable due to lack of doctors, nurses, and medicines, despite an enormous number of diseases. A large percentage of people have been kept alive thanks to soup consisting of water, potatoes, and a little salt.”

Many voices rose up around the world to denounce these crimes. In London and New York, in particular, meetings and demonstrations were organized in which Jewish veterans of the Great War participated prominently. Under pressure from the Committee of Jewish Delegations, the 1919 Paris Peace Conference ordered a vast inquiry whose reports led to launching an “Appeal to Humanity” signed by great names such as Anatole France, Henri Barbusse, Elie Faure, and Albert Thomas.

President Wilson expressed his distress:

“One of the things that troubles peace in the world is the persecution of the Jews.”

He ordered the creation of a commission led by Henry Morgenthau, future minister under President Roosevelt, to investigate the pogroms in Poland (this work could only be carried out in that country, as the new Soviet government had forbidden entry to its territory). This commission traveled through battlefields and mass graves and published upon its return an alarming report on the fate of Jewish minorities. A commission led by Sir Stuart M. Samuel, British Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, succeeded it, at the initiative of the representative council of Jews in the United Kingdom. This one in turn denounced the scandalous situation. But these accumulating reports were not followed by action because, lacking a state to represent them, Jews were considered a minority among others, deprived as such of any real political power.

In South Africa, during an extraordinary meeting of the South African Relief Fund, a Jewish organization to aid war victims, Isaac Ochberg proposed that the Cape Jewish Orphanage he had been directing for several years organize a mission to “rescue” endangered Jewish orphans who would then be brought to the country. Certainly, he was aware that this mission close to his heart could only save a very limited number of children, but these would be lives preserved. “Whoever saves one life saves the world,” Isaac argued, citing the Talmud to support his proposal. His project was accepted – it remained to obtain the endorsement of the authorities. Prime Minister Jan Smuts, his friend, submitted his project to the government. Good news: Although immigration was strictly limited at that time, the response was positive, with some reservations. Entry visas would be issued to the orphans, but according to very precise criteria: there would be no more than two hundred, not exceeding 16 years of age, they must be in good physical and moral health, have lost both parents, and finally brothers and sisters could not be separated to avoid emotional problems. All, finally, must express their will to participate in this journey. Heavy-hearted at the idea that he would have to select among these children and abandon some to their fate, Isaac accepted these conditions – we will see that he would interpret them in his own way… What saddened him most was this cut-off figure of 200. He discussed, negotiated, and obtained that after this trip, if things went well, the State would consider repeating the operation. As for financing, it was decided that the Jewish community would bear half the cost. This was a significant commitment, as it would have to assume the costs of the journey, the maintenance and care of the 200 children, and then, once they arrived in Africa, the costs of their accommodation in orphanages, some until they came of age if they were not fortunate enough to be adopted by families.

**Saga of Salvation**. South African Prime Minister Jan Smuts (top left) who granted Isaac Ochberg (top right) permission to bring into South Africa 200 rescued Jewish orphans from Eastern Europe. (centre) Isaac Ochberg disembarking with his rescued orphans who throughout their lives would refer to him as “Daddy Ochberg”. (Botton left and right) Passport photos of some of the 187 rescued orphans brought to South Africa.

Assisted by the South African Aid Fund for Jewish War Victims, Isaac then launched a campaign across the country, personally traveling through cities and villages to organize public meetings followed by fundraising collections. During this fundraising, critical voices were heard in the Jewish community:

– Would this expedition, conducted in countries at war, not endanger the children concerned?

– Would their arrival in the country not risk being experienced as a provocation by certain conservative Christian circles, the National Party in particular, when South Africa was experiencing an economic crisis?

Some suggested it would be wiser to send these foreign children to the Yishuv (the Jewish community in Palestine). Isaac remained deaf to what he considered submission to intolerance and continued his project.

Soon good news reached him: the fundraising campaign had raised sums far exceeding the expected figures. Dr. Jochelman, president of the federation of Ukrainian Jews in London, had let it be known that his organization was willing to house the orphans and handle their embarkation for South Africa.

On March 18, 1921, in Cape Town, Isaac Ochberg embraced his family, greeted the children of the orphanage, and amid a large gathering that came to encourage him and wish him a good journey, boarded the steamship that would take him to London.

Expected duration of the expedition: seven months.

TUMULTUOUS TRANSITION

Upon his arrival in the British capital, Isaac learned that the political situation in Eastern Europe had profoundly changed while he was sailing across the ocean. Russia and Poland had just signed a treaty in Riga that granted the latter numerous territories, the Kresy Wschodnie (“Eastern borderlands”) which included parts of Belarus, Lithuania, and Ukraine. This meant that all the cities constituting the stages of the planned journey were now under Polish administration and that the hard-won Soviet safe-conduct was now worthless.

Fortunately, the great explorer Fridtjof Nansen was passing through London. President of the League of Nations High Commission for Refugees, he had just created the first international identity document, the “Nansen passport”, a document which from 1922 would protect hundreds of thousands of wandering “displaced persons“, driven by conflicts and incessant border redrawings. During his meeting with the great man, Isaac explained his project to him. Nansen was enthusiastic. He managed to obtain from the new masters of Poland, whom he knew were concerned about international recognition, a safe-conduct authorizing Isaac to travel through the country with the benevolent assistance of local authorities. But as for the orphans, now Polish, how to obtain authorization to take them out of the country? Nansen obtained a commitment from Polish authorities that they would issue them special identity papers: “collective Nansen passports”.

On May 18, 1921, Isaac began his journey. Paris first, where Dr. Boris Borgen, head of the Joint, provided him with authorizations for the heads of orphanages under his organization so that they would entrust Isaac with the residents he had chosen. Next stop, Warsaw. In the capital of the Second Polish Republic that the Treaty of Versailles had brought back from its ashes in 1919, Isaac hoped to obtain help and assistance without too much illusion however – after all, he was just a Zhid (Slavic pejorative term for a Jew) who had appeared from nowhere…

In Warsaw, the ‘Jewish metropolis’ (Di Yidishe metropolye), the Joint officials, who managed most of the country’s orphanages, described to him the difficult relations they maintained with victorious Poland. Certainly, its government had ratified in 1920 the treaty annexed to that of Versailles concerning minorities, but nationalist parties accused Jews of having sided with the Bolsheviks during hostilities while the Catholic hierarchy continued to pursue them with its ancestral hatred. This hostility manifested itself through restrictions on credits to orphanages and rationing of their medical protection. Many of these establishments survived only thanks to the help of the Joint or local charitable organizations like Tzedakah Gedolah – which led some non-Jewish orphans to say:

“Those bastard zhids, they’re lucky to have other zhids to come to their aid.”

Isaac organized his journey. The large and small cities he would have to visit drew a vast triangle with 400-kilometer sides. First in the north, Brest-Litovsk, then Pinsk, then descent towards Sarny, Kowel, and Rovno to Lvov, finally return to Warsaw where all the chosen children would be gathered, whose state of health would have allowed them to contemplate the journey. Hence the necessity of adding a certain number of round trips to the route. Given the poor state of communications due to the war, he had planned to use trains that were still running, otherwise buses or trucks. He did not yet know that he would also have to use horse-drawn carts.

**Flourishing Future**. The last surviving Ochberg orphan Cissy Harris, who died at the age of 102 in Modi’in, Israel, is seen here planting a tree at the opening of the Isaac Ocberg Park in 2011 marking the 90 anniversary of the heroic rescue. She is supported by Maish Isaacson (left), chairman of Telfed and Bennie Penzik, whose both parents were orphans rescued by Ochberg.

CHILDREN OF MISFORTUNE

On August 24, the orphans had barely settled into the premises of the Shelter for Jewish Poor located in the East End when representatives of the British and international press appeared. Extracting children from a turbulent and dangerous Europe, often saving their lives, was a bold move that surprised them and that they were very eager to make known. Gathered in a room, the orphans were presented to journalists. They stood properly, under the flashes. Isaac, surrounded by officials, answered questions. He made it a duty to insist on the role played by charitable organizations and the support of the South African government. He also pleaded for other countries to take over and welcome other children.

Preparation for the journey to Cape Town was organized. It was a long trip and the children had to be in good physical shape and not be carriers of diseases that might contaminate other passengers. Medical examinations followed one another. Numerous cases of anemia were detected, which would not prevent embarkation, but also more serious conditions, which required hospitalizing some children. The latter would remain in London, which was a great heartbreak for them, but they could keep hope that soon a new voyage to Cape Town would come get them, or that other countries would decide to welcome them. Doctors and nurses were hired for the journey.

On September 2, children and companions took the train to Southampton where the steamship Edinburgh Castle awaited them.

Destination – Cape Town.

**Past Preserved**. Erin Kumin from Ra’anana, Israel, points to the plaque of her great-grandmother, Janie Odes, one of the orphans saved by Isaac Ochberg in 1921 at centenary event at the Ochberg Park on the 12 March 2021. (Photo D.E. Kaplan)

THE CROSSING

The children were at first afraid of this dark and vibrating mass, then got used to it. The large steamship offered them an enclosed space, a playground, where they loved to run, but under supervision, because their vitality led them to often bump into chimneys, ropes, and in narrow passages. At night, they laughed and cried too, fought with pillows. The sailors, of various nationalities, were very friendly – some told them stories about their country, incredible stories. As for the cooks, they were reluctant to prepare this complicated kosher food but complied with the instructions.

Nurses and doctors had their work cut out for them monitoring big and small ailments and seasickness. They drew their medicines from a large carefully arranged pharmacy. One of the children had mumps, which required special care during a stopover.

The companions organized games. On deck, the wind rushed into their clothes and made the little caps they had been given at departure fly, some flew away and came to float on the waves. The passengers, sometimes jostled, were mostly touched and moved by the story the children had lived through, and they applauded the ‘God Save the King’ that they sometimes sang, with a very particular accent.

**Field of Dreams**. Ochberg dreamt of a green fertile Israel such as this field with youngsters cycling at the Ochberg Park, Megiddo.(Courtesy Megiddo Regional Council)

THE PROMISED LAND

After a 17- day crossing, early in the morning, the children grouped on deck saw lights blinking on the horizon on a gray land planted with misty and dark mountains. The sailors pointed out the curiously flat summit, called Table Mountain. The boat approached and soon the children distinguished more precisely people who had come to welcome them carrying flowers and brandishing welcome banners in Yiddish. These people had white skin, others black, it really was Africa…

As the ship docked, the children broke into a song than was joined by people on the quay. Everyone knew the words, so moving in these circumstances:

“Hinei ma tov u’ma nayim Shevet achim gam Yachad” (“Behold, how good and how pleasant it is when brothers dwell together in unity! “). Greeted by the cheers of a crowd in tears, the children disembarked. “Until my last day,” Fanny Frier would write, a little girl who would later become president of the Cape orphanage, “I will never forget the first time we saw the lights of Cape Town, then the wonderful welcome we received when we disembarked, when half the city apparently awaited us on the quay.”

**‘Hill of Names’**. Visitors to the Isaac Ochberg Park in Megiddo, Israel look closely at the plaques of all the known names of the orphans Isaac Ochberg rescued and brought safely to South Africa.

NEW LAND, NEW LIFE

What would become of these little beings thus projected into this new world? Taken in and raised in the two orphanages Oranjia in Cape Town and Arcadia in Johannesburg and some, not many, would be adopted by families where they would live their childhood surrounded by attention and love. Then they would set out to conquer the vast world to experience the most diverse destinies. Almost all would have children, often numerous.

**Alive Because of One Man**. Descendants of Ochberg orphans from all over the world attend the inauguration of the Ochberg Park, Megiddo in 2011 are seen here at nearby Kibbutz Gal’ed, founded in 1945 by members of Habonim from Germany. The kibbutz was built on land purchased by the JNF-KKL from the Isaac Ochberg bequest. (Photo: D.E. Kaplan)

For years, their descendants, who now number several thousand, have ritually gathered to celebrate with emotion the anniversary of their arrival and the memory of Daddy Ochberg, the “man from Africa” who came to get them before the Shoah exterminated most of the other Jewish children who remained in Europe.

About the writer:

Michel Levine is a historian of Human Rights and the author of a work dedicated to the major cases of the League of Human Rights (Unclassified Cases. Unpublished Archives of the League of Human Rights, Paris, Fayard, 1973).
Further publications include a historical investigation on the repression of Algerian demonstrations in Paris in October 1961 (The October Ratonnades. A Collective Murder in Paris in 1961, Paris, Ramsay, 1985; reissue Jean- Claude Gawsewitch Publisher, 2001.)

*Feature Picture: Savior of Children. Isaac Ochberg (centre) with Jewish children at an orphanage in Eastern Europe.

PAINFUL PARADOXES

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.

SOUTH AFRICA CLAIMS ISRAEL IS BEHIND ITS ‘AFROPHOBIA’ VIOLENCE

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?

**Protecting** **Africans 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 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.

**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.

Follow Marika Sboros on X: @MarikaSboros
Subscribe on Substack: Marika Sboros

Category: Antisemitism

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