A coalition of anti-Israel groups in South Africa threatens Johannesburg Holocaust Museum to endorse Gaza genocide claims or face protest and disruption.

By Marika Sboros

(Courtesy of BizNews where article first published)

South Africa’s anti-Israel lobby has lost all its marbles – if its latest initiative is anything to go by.

It has cobbled together a motley group of 14 extremist, pro-Palestinian lobbyists to send a “declaration of intent” to the Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre (JHGC).

The JHGC is hosting a conference of the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) from October 20-24. The group is not happy about the conference, and lots more besides, as its declaration makes clear.

The declaration is lengthy, laborious, overwritten and heavily weighted with rhetoric, false assumptions and irony. Its tone is strident. It accuses the JHGC of “silence and complicity at a time when a genocide is unfolding before the eyes of the world.”

No prizes for guessing just who the group believes is committing genocide and where.

The group informs the JHGC that it will protest at the venue. It makes a myriad of demands, including that the JHGC names and opposes the “genocide” in Gaza and acknowledges Israeli “apartheid and settler colonialism.”

It also demands that the centre calls for:

–  the closure of the Israeli Embassy

– endorses global BDS (Boycott, Disinvestment, Sanctions) efforts; and

–   partners with “anti-racist, anti-fascist and faith-based groups in education and prevention work.”

If the JHGC agreed to all those demands, it would have no time for the important work it was set up to do.

Its stated mission is to explore 20^th century history of genocide, focus on Holocaust case studies and the 1994 Rwanda genocide, and examine connections between genocide and contemporary human rights issues in South Africa. Its work is also to aid understanding of the consequences of prejudice, discrimination and “othering”.

JHGC makes it clear that, as part of its mission, organisations involved in Holocaust and genocide research (even if controversial) may use its venue to hold conferences.

The anti-Israel lobby’s declaration of intent leaves the group of 14 desperately seeking relevance as the US-brokered ceasefire-hostage release ending Israel’s two-year-long war against Hamas holds by the thinnest of threads.

That’s despite Hamas being in clear breach for not yet handing over remains of all dead hostages – and despite new video footage revealing Hamas in all its vengeful, genocidal extremism, executing and torturing its own people in public.

 Pro-Palestinian lobbyists globally remain deafeningly silent and more concerned with what Israeli football teams are doing.

Leading the group of 14 is the usual-suspect, pro-Palestinian power couple: the South African BDS (Boycott, Disinvestment, Sanctions) Coalition and its devoted bedpartner, South African Jews for a Free Palestine (SAJFP). SAJFP has revelled in its status as a key player thanks to the Jewish voices it brings to the table.

These voices are a tiny, vocal minority of South Africa’s Jewish community, and indispensable to the genocide claim against Israel. They make the claim not just news but narrative gold.

After all, nothing says – “we are not antisemitic, just anti-Zionist” – quite like a Jewish stamp of approval.

SAJFP members appear oblivious to the many landmines for Jews who align with the broader pro-Palestinian movement of Iran-backed Hamas, Hezbollah and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ). All are proscribed as terrorist organisations in many countries.

By default, or design, Jews who support it effectively endorse entities committed to their total annihilation.

In trying to protect Palestinian lives, Jews lend legitimacy to groups committed to ending all Jewish lives. They are left in a moral maze, with no easy exits and plenty of rhetorical tripwires.

The group of 14 includes the ironically titled Queers for Palestine.

In Israel, LGBTQ+ people enjoy legal protections, pride parades and social acceptance. In Gaza, homosexuality is criminalised under Hamas rule. Queer Palestinians face arrest, torture and death, often at the hands of their families.

Under the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, homosexuality is technically legal. However, LGBTQ+ people face widespread social stigma, harassment, and threats of violence, often from family or community members.

Queers for Palestine activists voluntarily embrace a cause that would erase the very freedoms they enjoy were it to succeed politically. They may rationalise such stupidity by saying that solidarity with Palestinians does not imply endorsement of Hamas or homophobia.

However, the juxtaposition is jarring, with rainbow flags waving in defence of a region where flying one could mean a death sentence.

The dominant aim of the group of 14’s declaration of intent is clearly to breathe new life into the zombie genocide claim. It falsely claims that “by now, every serious legal and scholarly authority has reached the same conclusion (that Israel is committing genocide).”

If the lobbyists had asked, I could’ve told them that that’s false. I could’ve provided a list of serious legal and scholarly authorities, Jews and non-Jews, who’ve reached the opposite conclusion (that Israel is not committing genocide in Gaza).

The list is too long to name them all here.

Eminent Jewish scholars and commentators argue that the genocide claim is a modern blood libel that echoes medieval myths about Jews murdering Christian babies to drink their blood.

It symbolically recasts Jews, historically victims of genocide, as perpetrators. It equates Israeli military actions with deliberate child-killing.

Critics warn that the genocide blood libel distorts legal definitions, ignores context and fuels antisemitic tropes, portraying Jews as uniquely monstrous.

It ignores the essential legal threshold for genocide – that the necessary special intent to destroy a group in whole or in part should be the “only inference that could reasonably be drawn from the acts in question,” as the International Court of Justice ruled in the Croatia vs Serbia case in 2015. It collapses complex military conflicts into morally absolute narratives.

The group of 14 intends writing to the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) to say that by “hosting their gathering at a venue that refuses to name Gaza as a genocide, they are legitimising both-siderism and moral cowardice.”

I could have told them to say nothing about anything to do with the IAGS, as the organisation is beset by possibly terminal credibility issues.

In September, the IAGS passed a resolution accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza. Mainstream media, including Reuters, and the BBC and The Guardian in the UK, instantly framed and amplified the resolution as “expert consensus”.

IAGS head Melanie O’Brien publicly supported the vote, stressing that the resolution passed with “overwhelming support.”

She was disingenuous in the extreme.

The voting was a sham, fractious affair marked by procedural flaws, divided membership and claims of hijacking and “invasion” by anti-Israel forces. It relied heavily on notoriously unreliable “Hamas-produced statistics,” without distinguishing civilians from combatants.

Although 86% of voters passed the resolution, only approximately 111 out of 129 participants, or just 22-28% of the claimed 500-member base, had voted.

The resolution’s passage without prior debate, town halls or disclosure of authors sparked immediate backlash. O’Brien’s stance drew praise and backlash, reflecting deep divisions in genocide interpretations in contemporary conflicts.  

IAGS member Rachel Stein, a US legal scholar in international criminal law, called the vote:

 “…deeply biased and inaccurate”.

Stein said it ignored Israel’s stated intent in prosecuting the war that Hamas started – releasing all remaining hostages, dead or alive, and disarming Hamas.

Critics also raised questions about the IAGS $30 entry fee as the primary membership criterion, for low-income members requiring no verification of expertise. As Grok points out, this allowed non-experts, activists, artists and even prank social media accounts on X, such as “Adolf Hitler” or “Emperor Palpatine”, to become members and vote.

In October 2023, this reportedly led to a membership surge from around 150 to over 500, with nearly half reportedly from Iraq.  Not surprisingly, the IAGS is left looking like a platform for activism rather than rigorous analysis.

The controversy reveals wider global tensions, blurring the line between genuine academic inquiry and activism. It risks the weaponisation of genocide discourse amidst conflict.

At heart, the group of 14’s “declaration of intent” ends up just another a “familiar script”, one that Canadian anthropologist Adam Louis-Klein has identified. It “circulates among anti-Zionist Jews globally,” he says in a social-media post.

Louis-Klein explains the script as a story of a character raised within a supposedly narrow world of Zionist “indoctrination” only to “wake up through an encounter with progressivism.” The character concludes that Zionism is “incompatible with their newfound moral clarity.”

After nearly two years of darkness, the Gaza ceasefire has brought flickers of light, increasing moral clarity and cautious optimism. Images of families embracing loved ones who survived the hell of Hamas captivity pay homage to the power of commitment, endurance and love.

But joy is tempered with profound, dark grief as Hamas prolongs the torment of families still waiting for closure in Israel.

Accusations of genocide against Israel continue. The extent to which Hamas weaponised deliberate starvation – hoarding aid, punishing dissent, turning hunger into control and starving hostages close to the point of death – is clear.

Hamas started this war with its genuinely genocidal rampage in southern Israel on October 7, 2023.

As Gaza exhales and its displaced people return to their homes, the true architects of genocide against Israel and Jews stand increasingly exposed.

The world community needs a real “awakening”. It has mostly stayed resolutely silent in the wake of atrocities Hamas, PIJ and assorted civilian hangers-on committed in Israel on October 7.

As Louis-Klein writes, a real awakening is not simply about “trading one set of slogans for another.” It is the refusal to let pressures of political moments capture the moral imagination.

It’s about building “judgment rooted in knowledge, complexity, and historical understanding.”

About the writer:

Marika Sboros is a South African freelance investigative journalist with decades of experience writing fulltime for the country’s top media titles on a wide range of topics. She started her career as a hard-news reporter in the newsroom of the now defunct Rand Daily Mail, a campaigning anti-government newspaper during the worst excesses of the apartheid era. She commutes between South Africa and the UK.

While the mission of Lay of the Land (LotL) is to provide a wide and diverse perspective of affairs in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world, the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by its various writers are not necessarily ones of the owners and management of LOTL but of the writers themselves.  LotL endeavours to the best of its ability to credit the use of all known photographs to the photographer and/or owner of such photographs (0&EO).

Divisions within South Africa’s Jewish community on Israel reflect global drivers.

By Marika Sboros

“At this moment, the heart of Israel beats as one with the hostages and their families.”

With these words, Israeli President Isaac Herzog took to social media on October 9, 2025 to welcome news of the ceasefire-hostage deal to end Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza.

The heart of a vocal minority in South Africa’s Jewish community is not beating to quite the same unified rhythm.

Divisions among South African Jews have become yawning chasms since the terror attack by Hamas on October 7, 2023 that started the war. You’d have thought the gratuitous savagery on the day was enough to unify all Jews everywhere. It was not.

The brutality was preceded by a barrage of 3873 rockets from Gaza. What followed was an unprecedented orgy of violence that left more than 1200 dead, over 5000 injured and 250 kidnapped as hostages to Gaza – most of them civilians and not all of them Jews. The terrorists mass raped women and young girls; they tortured, beheaded, burnt alive and summarily executed whole families – men, women, children, babies, the elderly, and pet dogs.

Some called it a pogrom. UK historian Simon Sebag Montefiore compared it to:

“a medieval Mongol raid for mass slaughter and trophies.”

A UK-Israel parliamentary report called it “the largest single massacre of Jewish people since the Holocaust, the deadliest per capita terrorist attack, with just over 1 in every 10,000 Israelis killed, and the third overall deadliest terrorist attack in the world to date.”

October 7 brought the depth of divisions in South Africa’s Jewish community to the fore. The most recent red flag began waving publicly just days before Rosh Hashonah and Yom Kippur 2025.

It was the news report of a R1-million (about ILS188 910,60.00) donation by a South African Jewish family charity, the Mauerberger Foundation Fund (MFF), to Dr Imtiaz Sooliman, a medical doctor and founder-CEO of the globally renowned South African humanitarian charity, Gift of the Givers.

R1-million is pocket change for the Mauerberger family. Its effects on the Jewish community were seismic, with aftershocks that continue.

The main driver of aftershocks?  Most Jews can’t fathom why members of a prominent, philanthropic, Jewish family would even think of donating to a charity run by one of South Africa’s most outspoken, implacable opponents of Israel. Sooliman has distinguished himself, if that’s quite the right word, with so many examples of conduct unbecoming of a humanitarian that they are too numerous to mention them all here.

Suffice to say he is known for inflammatory rhetoric, loathing of Zionists (the anti-Israel lobby’s code word for Jews), and spreading of antisemitic tropes. He believes that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza – and apartheid, ethnic cleansing, deliberate starvation and anything else he can think of to demonise the Jewish state.  He aligns with extremist Islamist jihadist forces that want to wipe Israel off the map. He speaks at anti-Israel protests beneath banners declaring “We are all Hamas”.

Sooliman regularly predicts Israel’s imminent demise.

This recipient of the MFF knows that accusing Zionists or any other Jews of genocide is the most provocative, inflammatory charge possible, as it weaponises the trauma of the Holocaust against its victims. Such rhetoric is not legitimate critique.

It erases the distinction between civilian casualties and intentional extermination. It distorts legal definitions and shifts blame in this war from Hamas, whose charter is explicitly genocidal against Jews. It is just another modern blood libel that effectively delegitimises Jewish suffering and fuels Jew-hatred conspiracy theories.

Genocide claims have targeted not just Israeli government policy. They have made the world a more dangerous place for Jews by normalising and undermining Jews’ right to speak out safely against existential threats.

But, back to the contentious MFF donation.

The MMF is headed by Dianna Yach, granddaughter of South African industrialist Morris Mauerberger, and a member of the University of Cape Town (UCT) Council. Mauerberger founded the MFF in 1936 as part of his philanthropic programme to support educational and community projects in South Africa and Israel that continue to this day. An early initiative was a clinic for Cape Flats workers who struggled to access state hospitals due to poverty and transport barriers.

Since the 1960s, the MFF has supported a wide range of projects in Israel most notably at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In 1969, the Mauerberger family was directly involved in establishing Ben Gurion University of the Negev.

Yach has a reputation as a “proud UCT alumnus, passionately committed to equality, diversity, and human rights”. After graduating from UCT with a BA and LLB, she was admitted as an advocate to the High Court in South Africa, obtained an LLM from the University of London and subsequently lectured in law at Queen Mary College, University of London.

She serves on the boards of South African NGOs including ORT Cape SA and Cape Jewish Welfare Trust.

If Mauerberger were alive today, one wonders what he would make of his granddaughter’s MFF donation to Sooliman.

There’s no doubting what Sooliman makes of it.

He instantly spotted its myriad PR advantages, posting photos on social media of himself grinning broadly while accepting the donation from Yach. Another image captures him sitting with Yach in the intimacy of the lounge in her elegant Cape Town home.

He posted a statement by Khalid Sayed, African National Congress (ANC) Leader of the Opposition in the Western Cape Legislature, “saluting South African Jews like the MFF for their solidarity with Palestine”.

Sooliman is taking full advantage of the “halo” of moral righteousness that the donation from and association with Jews such as Yach hangs over his head. It may mitigate reputational damage from ongoing claims that Gift of the Givers is a conduit for funnelling funds to terror groups, not just Iran-backed Hamas and Palestine Islamic Jihad in Gaza, but Hezbollah in the West Bank as well.

The evidence for terror funding is circumstantial, but copious. As legal experts make clear, circumstantial evidence, presented properly and in sufficient quantity, easily secures conviction. Sooliman’s own words support it by implication, at times.

In an interview on YouTube, Sooliman declares that he does not follow local or international law, only Islamic law, and that no one can tell him what to do. He says of himself and Gift of the Givers that “we know how to move cash.”

Sooliman vigorously denies claims of terror funding, while resolutely refusing to do the minimum required to put the claims to rest forever.

He won’t say who his funders are – except in this case, when the donors are Jews. He won’t say how much money Gift of the Givers receives in donations annually or where it all goes. Sooliman also won’t publish audited annual financial statements, as other international charities in South Africa routinely do.

Some South African Jews see the MFF donation as positive, even symbolic. They believe that Yach, however misguided, means it to bridge divisions between Muslims and Jews in South Africa.

Never was that more needed. Open hostility to Jews in South Africa is a top-down dynamic. UCT and the Western Cape province are hothouses of that hostility. It carries the African National Congress (ANC) government’s seal of approval for the “Palestinian cause”.

Most Jews I canvassed in South Africa and in the diaspora find the MFF donation deeply disturbing. They call it “disgusting”, “disgraceful”, a “betrayal”.  Most insisted on anonymity for fear of reprisals.

I emailed Yach for comment on the donation and another matter. She responded with a brief MFF statement and said she would not comment further and had handed my email to her lawyers.

According to a MFF statement, its directors “stand with Gift of the Givers in solidarity, giving their love for humanity and selfless work to address the urgent and pressing food and healthcare needs of the people of Gaza.” The donation is “…for children in Gaza, delivered within six months of fund receipt.”

The “ongoing humanitarian crisis in Gaza” has resulted in shortage of paediatric medicines, “with many health facilities destroyed and children facing preventable illness and mortality due to lack of access to vital treatment.”

The MFF saw Gift of the Givers as “uniquely positioned to address this urgent healthcare challenge, with an established track record of delivering lifesaving support to vulnerable communities across Africa and the Middle East since 1992.”

Yach’s brother, Dr Derek Yach, a US-based physician and epidemiologist, and fellow MFF director, was more engaging.

He said that the donation “aligns fully with MFF’s 70-year engagement with Israeli, Jewish and other commitments”. Its intent is “to provide humanitarian support to people in need, as (MFF) is doing with separate grants to Israeli mental health programmes.”

Pressed on why the family foundation chose Gift of the Givers, Dr. Yach explained that MFF directors considered its status as an approved non-profit organisation registered in the US; that it works with several faith-based charities (mainly Catholic); and has a “proven track record of getting medicines to those in need.”

Yet the donation is laden with ironies. Chief among them, the MFF is donating funds for medicines for Gazan children to the group that created the shortage of medicines in the first place. There’s also no guarantee that the medicines, by default or design, won’t end up in Hamas’s hands. Hamas, Gaza’s elected government, has a well-documented habit of embedding in hospitals, hijacking aid trucks and shooting to death hungry Gazans trying to access aid.

One critic who did speak openly via email was UCT emeritus professor of historical studies Milton Shain. Shain is author of Fascists, Fantasists and Fabricators: Antisemitism in South Africa from 1948 to the Present (Jacana Media, 2023), the final volume in his trilogy on South African antisemitism.

“One hesitates to criticise anyone giving support for the needy,” he said. The suffering in Gaza made it “obvious that support is needed.” Shain acknowledged Gift of the Givers as a successful global disaster-relief operation but noted that Yach “must surely know of Sooliman’s controversial statements about Israel,” and “…one needs to question (her) judgement.”

Another critic prepared to comment openly was Beulah Lange, a retired resident of McGregor, a village tucked away in the mountains of the Western Cape. Lange worked for more than 30 years in Jewish social welfare in Durban, 20 of those years as social worker and director of the then-titled Durban Jewish Welfare Association. She dealt regularly with trust-fund donations from Jewish philanthropists, including the MFF, which was “particularly generous to us.”

Lange was upset by the MFF donation to Sooliman, who she considers “virulently antisemitic.” She dismissed it as a “woke” attempt by those prepared to “bend over backwards to work with people who desire our demise.”

It does nothing, she said, to change her view of Sooliman and Gift of the Givers. 

An earlier red flag of deep divisions in South Africa’s Jewish community was the so-called “Gaza resolutions” that the UCT Council passed in June 2024. These call for an academic boycott of Israel and reject the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism.

The fallout from their adoption was swift. Immediate and massive cuts in donor funding followed, spiralling potentially higher than R700-million, and not just from Jewish sources.

The Donald Gordon Foundation (DGF) withdrew a R200-million donation to a private hospital for UCT. A potential R400-500-million DGF donation to UCT was lost.

The HCI Foundation also withdrew its R15-million funding. The foundation is the corporate social investment wing of Hosken Consolidated Investments, the holding company of a black empowerment investment company that has its origins in the Southern African Clothing and Textile Workers Union.

Despite the deep funding cuts, there was surprising support for the UCT resolutions from Jewish academic and student ranks, including Yach and members of South African Jews for a Free Palestine (SAJFP).

SAJFP is closely allied to the global BDS (Boycott, Disinvestment, Sanctions) movement against Israel. SAJFP leader Jo Bluen uses inverted red triangles on her social media posts to celebrate the deaths of IDF soldiers in Gaza.

Yach’s lack of support (to put it mildly) for the lawsuit that Prof Adam Mendelsohn brought against UCT for passing the resolutions has also highlighted divisions.

Mendelsohn heads UCT’s Department of Historical Studies and is director of its Kaplan Centre of Jewish Studies. He has alleged in court papers that Yach (a member of UCT Council’s exco at the time) tried to pressure him to drop the case against UCT, using wording suggesting that his career and family were at risk.

Yach has vigorously denied the accusation in an answering affidavit.

Mendelsohn declined to comment on the MFF donation or his case against UCT, as it is still pending. However, I have it on reliable authority that evidence of exactly what Yach said, supports Mendelsohn’s claim.

David Benatar, a UCT emeritus professor of philosophy, has written extensively on the university’s fall from grace in recent years. He said that academics fear risking “the ire of UCT’s activist ideologues who believe that, of all the armies in the world, the only one to single out for boycott is Israel’s.”

Divisions in South Africa’s Jewish community could be simply a function of global drivers. These include “groupthink” and “adoption of submissive behaviours by Westerners who have already capitulated to Hamas and are mirroring the behaviour of Gazans,” as British US-based journalist Eve Barlow has suggested. It leads to “normalising the erasure of Jews from public life” by those who understand the “power, money and social mobility that comes from promoting the Hamas cause,” Barlow tweeted. This leads Jews on a path to “denouncing their own identity, nation and people,” essentially “willing their own deaths by sporting antizionism.”

Some Jews in South Africa are far down this path, as SAJFP and BDS members demonstrate.

Divisions among Jews in the wake of the MFF donation and UCT Gaza resolutions may contribute to the emergence of what Hannah Arendt once called the “conscious pariah”, and not just in South Africa.

Canadian anthropologist Adam Louis-Klein notes on social media that Arendt used the term to describe “the Jew who does not flee from non-Jewish society’s construction of them as heretical, outside, or even despicable, but embraces that position and uses it as a place from which to intervene in society.”

Thus, the conscious pariah Jew stands in contrast to the “parvenu, or exceptional Jew”, the antizionist Jew, who treats his or her Jewishness as “a gimmick or credential for the gentiles, while removing himself from the pulse of his people,” Louis-Klein says.

South Africa has some notable parvenu Jews, Jo Bluen and Ronnie Kasrils, former ANC MP and Intelligence Chief among them.

Kasrils celebrated October 7 in its immediate aftermath by calling it “a brilliant, spectacular guerilla warfare attack.” He continued: “They swept on them and they killed them and damn good. I was so pleased and people who support resistance applauded.”

It wasn’t only South African conscious pariah Jews who found his sentiments grotesque. The MFF, whether by default or design, risks locating itself firmly in the parvenu Jew camp. 

After October 7, I wrote a piece titled: Worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust not enough for some. I quoted US Jewish atheist neuroscientist philosopher Sam Harris saying that October 7 proves that we “are all living in Israel. Some of us just haven’t realised it yet.”

This still holds. After all, Hamas demonstrably does not discriminate when it comes to its genocidal intent.

Tel Aviv author and businessman Saul Sadka writes eloquently in the Jewish Chronicle that the Gaza deal is:

“…no ceasefire – it is Hamas’s near-total surrender.

Even if the jihadis won’t disarm, they have no meaningful ability to project power at Israel, only at its own long-suffering people.”

And yet, Sadka asserts:

 “…there is a genuine prospect for regional peace.”

I hope he’s right. And if regional peace comes, I hope it helps to heal at least some schisms in beleaguered Jewish communities globally.

About the writer:

Marika Sboros is a South African freelance investigative journalist with decades of experience writing fulltime for the country’s top media titles on a wide range of topics. She started her career as a hard-news reporter in the newsroom of the now defunct Rand Daily Mail, a campaigning anti-government newspaper during the worst excesses of the apartheid era. She commutes between South Africa and the UK.

While the mission of Lay of the Land (LotL) is to provide a wide and diverse perspective of affairs in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world, the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by its various writers are not necessarily ones of the owners and management of LOTL but of the writers themselves.  LotL endeavours to the best of its ability to credit the use of all known photographs to the photographer and/or owner of such photographs (0&EO).

We’ve seen it all before!

By Lawrence Nowosenetz

Former Acting Judge of the High Court, South Africa. 

Navi Pillay, the South African head of the UN Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory presented findings of its latest report at a press briefing on 16 September 2025 (the Pillay Report).  She said:

 “The ongoing genocide in Gaza is a moral outrage and a legal emergency.” 

DIRCO (the foreign ministry of the South African government) has trumpeted these findings, despite the complete lack of legal and factual basis for genocide in the Pillay Report. It is replete with poorly substantiated legal inferences of genocidal intent (dolus specialis) and distorted selective anti-Israel factual framing of the conflict with no attempt at objectivity.

The Pillay Report states confidently:

“Based on the above, the Commission finds that the Israeli security forces were aware that their military operations since 7 October 2023 would cause the deaths of Palestinians in Gaza. Furthermore, considering the duration of the military operations and reports of high numbers of deaths, it is reasonable to find that the Israeli authorities knew of the high numbers of casualties in Gaza since 7 October 2023. Nevertheless, Israeli authorities did not intervene to change the means and methods of warfare employed; on the contrary, the military operations persisted over time and caused even more Palestinian deaths. The Commission therefore finds that the Israeli authorities intended to kill as many Palestinians as possible through its military operations in Gaza since 7 October 2023 and knew that the means and methods of warfare employed would cause mass deaths of Palestinians, including children.”

A colossal piece of sophistry, untruths and tendentious conclusions.

Israel responded by strongly rejecting the report as a libellous rant and viewing it as politically motivated, declined to cooperate with the Commission. Pillay responded with “I wish they would tell us where we went wrong on these facts or just cooperate with us.”

Same old same old. We have seen it all before and a previous report didn’t end well.  In 2009, the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict, (the Goldstone Report) was released. It was established by the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) as an independent international fact-finding mission to:

 “… investigate all violations of international human rights law and humanitarian law by Israel against the Palestinian people, particularly Gaza.”  

This followed the three-week armed conflict in Gaza named Operation Cast Lead by Israel.  It began on 27 December 2008 and ended on 18 January 2009. Prior to the war, Hamas had fired extensive rocket attacks on Israel. The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) launched a ground attack as well as aerial bombardment on Gaza. No hostages were captured by Hamas. There are similarities in the conduct of the 2023 Gaza war, but also huge strategic differences.  The present war has become regional with rocket and missile attacks on civilian centres in Israel not only from Hamas and other Gaza-based Islamist militant groups, but from Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen and most notably – Iran.

Headed by South African Justice, Richard Goldstone it accused both Palestinian militants and the IDF of war crimes and possible international crimes against humanity. It was recommended that those responsible should be brought to justice.   In 2011, Goldstone made a public retraction. He said he no longer believed that Israel intentionally targeted civilians in Gaza as a matter of policy. He further expressed regret that:

“Our fact-finding mission did not have such evidence explaining the circumstances in which we said civilians in Gaza were targeted, because it probably would have influenced our findings about intentionality and war crimes.” 

The other authors of the report, however stood by the it.   Despite an attempt by the Palestinian Authority, Israel was not brought before the International Criminal Court and Hamas enjoyed complete impunity from sanctions or legal prosecution.

It bears noting that the conduct of both sides during Operation Cast Lead was similar to the 2023 war. Although less extensive than present, Hamas had already built a system of tunnels in preparation for combat and weapon storage as well as plans to kidnap IDF soldiers. Civilian buildings including homes and mosques were booby trapped and used for weapons storage.  During the 2009 Gaza war, Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni informed the media that Israel would strike all targets associated with what she called the “illegitimate, terrorist government of Hamas.” The IDF denied that it was targeting civilians and several soldiers including senior officers were indeed disciplined for misconduct.

This policy has continued in the 2023 war and there never was a genocidal plan aimed against civilians then or now. The Pillay Report completely ignores the principle that civilian structures such as homes, schools, hospitals and mosques lose their protected status according to the law of war when used for military attacks, as Hamas has indeed done.

During the 2009 Gaza war, the measures taken by the IDF to reduce civilian casualties became known: Extensive distribution of leaflets and phone messages to warn residents to evacuate from battle zones. The practice called “roof knocking” was used which consisted of warning calls before air strikes on residential buildings and sometimes a small non-lethal sound bomb was set off before imminent attack.  These measures continued to be used in the 2023 war.  

British military expert Colonel Richard Kemp, a former commander of British forces in Afghanistan, in his address to the UNHRC asserted that during the conflict, the Israel Defence Forces “did more to safeguard the rights of civilians in a combat zone than any other army in the history of warfare” and that Palestinian civilian casualties were a consequence of Hamas’ way of fighting, which involved using human shields as a matter of policy, and deliberate attempts to sacrifice their own civilians. He added that Israel took extraordinary measures to give Gaza civilians notice of targeted areas and aborted potentially effective missions in order to prevent civilian casualties. One searches in vain for references to any of the above most ‘ungenocidal’ conduct in the Pillay Report. She has, it seems, learned little if anything from the compromised and deeply flawed Goldstone Report.

The anti-Israel bias of Pillay is nothing new and is well documented.  The NGO United Nations Watch on 14 February 2022, filed a recusal petition before the UNHRC against Navi Pillay from the same Commission of Enquiry. It fell on deaf ears.   The petition presented a plethora of prior public partisan statements by her and consequently her failure to meet the minimal requirements of impartiality.

As Secretary-General of the UN Durban Review Conference in 2009, Pillay exonerated the infamous antisemitic Durban conference of 2001, and she demonized Jewish groups that sounded the alarm, calling them “lobby groups”. On 31 May 2010, while serving as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Pillay declared that “the Israeli Government treats international law with perpetual disdain.” Never throughout her UN tenure did Pillay employ such language regarding any other country – not even against serial violators such as China, Russia, Iran, Syria or North Korea. In November 2017, Pillay said “Apartheid is now being declared a crime against humanity in the Rome Statute, and it means the enforced segregation of people on racial lines, and that is what is happening in Israel.”  In June 2020, Pillay signed a petition to boycott the Jewish state, entitled “Sanction Apartheid Israel!”.   On 14 June 2021, mere weeks after the brief 2021 Hamas-Israel conflict, Pillay publicly declared Israel guilty of crimes against the Palestinians.  She signed a joint letter to U.S. President Biden, decrying Israel’s “domination and oppression of the Palestinian people,” calling on the U.S. to “address the root causes of the violence” by ending Israel’s “ever-expanding discrimination and systemic oppression.”  This was in regard to the clashes at Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem where the letter alleged “aggressive actions by Israeli forces” against “peaceful protesters and worshippers,” which amounted to “forced dispossession of Palestinians,” the“latest evidence of a separate and unequal governing system.”   

Pillay has consistently singled out Israel for condemnation over alleged war crimes, human rights abuse and racism and was a consistent supporter of the Palestinian campaign to use the language and mechanisms of international law to delegitimize Israel as a criminal state.  United Nations Watch is a voice of conscience monitoring the UN and, in its petition, reminded that impartiality is a requirement under international law. Indeed, legal scholars know that impartiality as the first principle of fact-finding. It is set out as a requirement in Articles 3 and 25 of the UN Declaration on Fact-Finding.  Since the era of Roman Law, the legal maxim nemo iudex in sua causa – no one should be a judge in his/her own cause has been a cornerstone of justice. Pillay has made her career of condemnation of Israel a personal cause.  Why then would Israel cooperate in her transparent campaign to demonise and unjustly denounce Israel.

In response to her disingenuous plea for assistance, here is where the Pillay Report went wrong on the facts. Firstly, the lack of assistance of Israel is no excuse for the lack of corroboration from multiple non-governmental Israel and Western sources and researchers. The Pillay Report suffers from the fallacy of certainty – confidently reporting on unverified and unreliably substantiated figures relating to fatalities and starvation. Papers have been published carefully exposing major methodology flaws and overstatements and the unreliability of Hamas data or overreliance on Hamas approved reporting. Pillay neglected to consult Western military experts on asymmetrical urban warfare such as Major John Spencer of the USA who has been to Gaza and researched extensively on the war.  Nowhere is there any sign of reference to the Begin Sadat Centre for Strategic Studies: Debunking the Genocide Allegations: A Re-examination of the Israel-Hamas War from October 7, 2023 to June 1, 2025. Although the English translation only appeared in September 2025, the Hebrew version was published in July 2025. Consisting of 310 pages, it is a far more in depth factual and scholarly work eclipsing the Pillay report in accuracy, objectivity and detail.  While even a brief survey of this work is beyond the scope of this article, some of the chapters indicate its breadth and accuracy in analysing the 2023 Gaza war. It does not avoid criticism of Israeli policy makers nor does it sidestep misconduct and possible war crimes by the IDF.

Chapter 1 is ‘The Question of Starvation’, a highly fraught topic which is examined in detail with credible data of the number of trucks entering Gaza. Even taking into account the suspension of food deliveries in 2024, there were sufficient food supplies in Gaza and the allegations of famine are false. Much needed exposure is made of the diversion by Hamas of food for exploitation by black market sales and for own consumption. An aspect not examined by the Pillay report.

A chapter is devoted to what is termed “The Missing Context: Urban Warfare and Hamas’s Human Shields Strategy”, also a key omission from the Pillay Report.   Massacre and deliberate killing, the question of Indiscriminate Bombing are addressed.   Chapters 5 and 7 deal with the contentious question of casualty counting and assessment in conflict zones. The vital distinction between civilians and combatants overlooked by the Pillay Report are more carefully assessed. This has become a highly emotive issue with allegations made that Israel targets journalists.  Many were found to have been active Hamas operatives.   A comparative study is made with the war in Iraq, another vital methodology in evaluating legal consequences. Chapter 8: The Inverted Funnel: How to Study Conflict Zones reveals the problem with limitations on freedom of reporting in Gaza by Hamas and the repetition and expansion of this compromised data by media and researchers.

Pillay and her fellow commissionaires, Miloon Kothari, and Chris Sidoti have all recently announced their resignations from the Commission of Inquiry ,  Pillay citing age and the others on the basis of  “other commitments.”  The sudden resignation of all three officials follows the US decision to impose sanctions on UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, another UN official with a history of extreme anti-Israel statements, including denying Israel the right to self-defense against Hamas. No one is left standing to face criticism of this tawdry report.  

Battered and bruised, but still very much alive, truth and justice will prevail while the Pillay Report will gather dust like the discredited Goldstone Report as another failed attempt to intentionally distort international law in order to vilify the Jewish State of Israel.

*Feature picture: Probing or Plotting. A year before the October, 2023 massacre and consequent war, UN commissioners Navi Pillay (centre) discusses with  (l-r) Chris Sidoti and Miloon Kothari their probe into Israel and the Palestinians at the United Nations in New York. October 27, 2022. (Luke Tress/Times of Israel).

About the writer:

Now retired, Pretoria-born human rights and labour lawyer, Lawrence Nowosenetz practiced at the Pretoria and Johannesburg Bar. Recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship, Nowosenetz completed an internship in the USA and served as a part-time Senior Commissioner at the Commission for Conciliation Mediation and Arbitration (CCMA) as well as a panellist at Tokiso Dispute Settlement – the largest private dispute resolution provider in South Africa. He has also served as an Acting Judge of the Hight Court, South Africa.  

While the mission of Lay of the Land (LotL) is to provide a wide and diverse perspective of affairs in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world, the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by its various writers are not necessarily ones of the owners and management of LOTL but of the writers themselves.  LotL endeavours to the best of its ability to credit the use of all known photographs to the photographer and/or owner of such photographs (0&EO).

Danger Alert – words once said can be forgiven but never forgotten.

By Marika Sboros

Words are “our most inexhaustible source of magic, capable of both inflicting injury and remedying it,” JK Rowling writes in one of her best-selling Harry Potter books,

She could have been describing words and magical thinking of anti-Israel lobbyists, who show more intent on inflicting rather than remedying injury.

Israel’s critics routinely abuse, misuse and weaponise key words in a relentless barrage of global attacks in its war against Hamas. They lob these words mindlessly, like grenades into safe rooms and bomb shelters.

They don’t just distort the words’ meanings. They incite violence and spread hatred with potentially fatal consequences – not just for Jews who are their intended targets.

Prime examples of their weaponised words are “genocide” and its close companion, “holocaust”. “Rape” is another example locked in lethal embrace with “resistance”, a word that once evoked noble defiance against tyranny.

Today, critics use it to whitewash mass rape, torture and genital mutilation of women, children and men by Hamas as weapons of war.

“Revolution”, a word once linked to liberation and justice, now glorifies terrorism and erases moral boundaries. “Occupation”, “colonialism”, “settler”, “ethnic cleansing”, “starvation” and “famine” have become shadows of their former selves.

In this lexicon, Jews are genocidal “baby killers”. When they move to Israel, they are “settler colonialists”. Jewish babies are “occupiers”. Terrorists are “freedom fighters”.

“Zionist” is a swear word and the lobby’s code word for Jews. “Antisemitism” is the modern euphemism for the “world’s oldest hatred” – Jew hatred.

The backdrop to these semantic missiles is, of course, the killing fields strewn across southern Israel on October 7, 2023.

On that day, more than 3000 Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) terrorists and assorted Gazan civilians infiltrated the country by land, sea and air. They targeted mostly unarmed civilians at 22 mostly civilian sites, including the nearby Nova music festival held for peace.

They slaughtered over 1,200 people dead and left more than 5,000 wounded, many grievously to this day. The terrorists mass raped women, children and some men, tortured, shot, beheaded, burnt alive whole families and mutilated children and babies in front of their parents and parents in front of their children.

They kidnapped 250 people, including the elderly, children and infants as hostages to Gaza where 50 still languish in captivity in tunnels. Most are presumed dead, according to reliable intelligence sources. Those who have survived cling to life under hellish conditions.

The scale of gratuitous savagery on the day was so unprecedented that British historian Simon Sebag Montefiore compared it to a “medieval Mongol raid for slaughter and human trophies.” Others have called it a “pogrom” and “the worst terror attack in history.”

The terrorists set it apart by videoing themselves committing and celebrating atrocities and uploading these in real time online for posterity. Despite this, the denialism of the mass atrocities perpetrated on Jews on October 7 and the demonisation of Israel continue.

If Israel’s critics acknowledge the slaughter at all, they use language and logic to understate and misrepresent it. It’s as if they believe that Hamas had no choice other than to act as it did; as if the victims (not all of them Jews) somehow “deserved it” or “brought it on themselves”.

Mainstream and independent journalists collude and commonly call October 7 simply an “attack”. Cameron Bailey, Toronto International Film Festival CEO, called it an “event” after reversing his decision not to screen an October 7 documentary.

Bailey’s reason for initially banning the film? The filmmakers had not secured permission from Hamas to use its videos of atrocities.

Presumably, he would have required copyright clearance from ISIS before airing footage of its beheadings, or from Hitler and his SS before screening Auschwitz images.

An exacerbating factor in this semantic sophistry is the growing chorus of Jewish voices. Lobbyists seize on them as proof of claims against Israel. As if something is true just because a Jew says so. As if identity and virtue signalling equal evidence.

They ignore the many, more expert Jewish voices vigorously disputing these claims with facts. They ignore the basic principle that if 50 million people say a stupid thing, it’s still a stupid thing.

In South Africa, the first prominent Jew to raise his voice publicly just days after October 7 was former African National Congress (ANC) government Intelligence Minister Ronnie Kasrils.

Kasrils distinguished himself – if that’s quite the right word – by calling the slaughter “a brilliant, spectacular guerrilla warfare attack… damn good.” He went on:

“They swept on them, and they killed them, and damned good! I was so pleased and people who support resistance applauded.”

Not only Jews found Kasrils’ sentiments “grotesque”.

In May this year, Kasrils celebrated wildfires raging across nature parks in Israel as “resistance”. He expressed the fond hope that the country would burn to the ground.  

South Africa’s female Ronnie Kasrils – Jo Bluen, chief spokesperson for South African Jews for a Free Palestine (SAJFP) – expresses similar sentiments.

If Bluen has distinguished herself at all, it is by using SAJFP as a vehicle to take Kasrils’ lack of moral compass to new heights or more appropriately in this case – depths.

Lawrence Nowosenetz, a retired human rights and labour lawyer that has served as an Acting Judge of South Africa’s Hight Court, and now lives in Israel, describes the SAJFP as little more than:

“ a fringe, unrepresentative group, with no communal mandate or credibility. Its members are “obscure, morally blemished people who have not distinguished themselves in the communal, business or professional world – in society generally.”

Bluen and fellow SAJFP members cozy up publicly to Dr Imtiaz Sooliman, a controversial founder and CEO of the global Muslim charity Gift of the Givers. While ostensibly doing disaster-relief work, Sooliman remains dogged by claims that his charity has been channelling funds donated for humanitarian work to Hamas in Gaza.

Bluen and co routinely ridicule the Jewish community’s leaders, groups and organisations, including Tikkun Africa, which contributes to South Africa through genuine humanitarian work and not as a façade to cover nefarious activities.

To boost their numbers and impression of relevance further, they partner closely with extremist Islamist, anti-Israel and anti-West groups. Among these are the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement, MJC (South Africa’s Muslim Judicial Council), and other pro-Palestinian factions that support Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood.

In September 2024, the morning after Israeli soldiers found six young hostages executed by Hamas in Gaza, MJC president Sheikh Riad Fataar publicly declared:

 “I am Hamas! Cape Town is Hamas! Viva Hamas, viva!”

Freedom of speech is one thing. Such sentiment from a respected member of the Muslim community is another.

But then, Fataar takes his lead from high up South Africa’s political ladder, as does Bluen. The country’s ruling ANC party has a well-documented animus towards Israel and Jews who support it.

Bluen thinks nothing of massaging biographical details to boost her standing and relevance. She claims to be a journalist, citing a stint as a columnist for Business Day.

The newspaper published only a handful of columns under her name in 2016. It does so routinely on a fee-free basis with others in various industries who appreciate the free exposure.

Genuine South African journalist and satirist David Bullard dismisses Bluen as a “work-shy rich kid” in an opinion piece in Daily Friend in 2019.  Thanks to “daddy’s money”, Bullard writes, Bluen “got herself a couple of degrees” and was “trying to bag a PhD” through the London School of Economics (LSE).

Bluen started her PhD in 2017. Eight years later, aged 38, she’s still trying to bag it.

In the immediate wake of October 7, she claimed the existence of a “near-universal consensus among international lawyers” that Israel was committing “textbook genocide.”

No such consensus exists.

On LSE’s website, Bluen lists her expertise as “crimes against humanity, Nuremberg Trials and international criminal law”. She would be more honest to list chief propagandist for terror against Israel as her expertise.

Bluen’s rhetoric at anti-Israel protests is routinely, robotically incendiary. It includes de rigueur chants of “death to the IDF” and “Free, free Palestine”. 

Her armoury of invective against the Jewish state includes:

– “settler colonisation of Palestine since 1948”

– “a fascist Zionist hegemony”  

– “an apartheid project”

– “whole entity that must be unsettled”

“Unsettled” and “Free Palestine” are Bluen’s code words for Israel “judenrein”, the Nazi term for a Germany “cleansed” of its Jews. She hyperbolically accuses Israel not just of genocide but on a scale reaching “the threshold of almost every single crime in the (Genocide Convention) statute,” including “war crimes, apartheid, deliberately starving Gazan civilians by impeding relief supplies.”

She ignores the Hamas charter that is explicitly genocidal towards Israel and Jews, and Hamas leaders’ boasts that they’ll commit more genocidal October 7-style attacks until Israel is destroyed.

Bluen ignores the tsunami of publicly available evidence that:

– Hamas hijacks aid in Gaza

– shoots civilians trying to access it

– uses civilians as human shields

– uses starvation of its own people as a deliberate strategy.

A recent Gatestone Institute report headlined “The Famine That Wasn’t” notes that behind this narrative lies a cynically calculated strategy of:

“…weaponisation of humanitarian suffering, orchestrated by Hamas – the entity that controls Gaza and its distribution of aid … amplified by willing accomplices in the United Nations system and global media.”

The report exposes the goal which is:

 “Not to report the truth but to smear Israel, rally international condemnation and shield Hamas from accountability.”

Perhaps the most egregious sign of Bluen’s obsessive desire for Israel’s destruction is her use of inverted red triangles in her social media posts.

The Nazis used red triangles to mark Jews and political prisoners in concentration camps. Hamas has appropriated them to designate Israeli targets in its propaganda videos and its supporters use red triangles to identify, target and harass Jews online.

Bluen relishes using red triangles to celebrate the killing of Israeli soldiers in Gaza evidenced by the accompanying big grin and a keffiyeh draped around her neck.

Bluen offers, says Nowosenetz, “a twisted mirror image of morality in which supporting terror becomes virtue and self-defence becomes a crime.”

Joshua Schewitz, a researcher and analyst specialising in African and Middle Eastern security-related issues and blockchain technology, captures the character of Jo Bluen, describing her as a “vulture” in a “grotesque political theatre” that lurked in South Africa’s wings until October 7. For Schewitz, DIRCO – South Africa’s Department of International Relations and Cooperation – is the star director of this political theatre.

DIRCO, says Schewitz is backed by a “suspect cast” of terror-sponsoring states, full-time activists, bureaucrats and journalists, some of them Jews. Among those Jewish journalists is the Daily Maverick’s Kevin Bloom who routinely slings genocide and other arrows of blood libels at Israel and Jews. He claims that Israel is deliberately targeting and assassinating journalists in Gaza despite all evidence to the contrary.  

He did so again when Al Jazeera “journalist” Anas al-Sharif was killed in recent Israeli airstrike. Bloom blithely dismissed extensive evidence showing Al-Sharif celebrating the October 7 massacre, taking selfies with Hamas leaders and generally acting more as propagandist than journalist.

He naively believes that a PRESS vest magically transforms Hamas sympathisers and active members into journalists.

The Daily Maverick gives Bloom a platform and extraordinarily free rein for emotive attacks aimed at demonising and delegitimising Israel. The publication is now attempting public damage control after being exposed for its “Jew problem”.

The South African Jewish Board of Deputies (SAJBD) consultant and former associate director David Saks, notes the Daily Maverick’s “pronounced pattern of singling out the Jewish community for special attack.”

Adam Louis-Klein, a Yale graduate in philosophy, writer, anthropologist and musician, has an interesting take of the situation seeing such patterns as “projection-inversion”.

If the crime of genocide was, after all, meant to safeguard the continued existence of diverse peoples, anti-Israel lobbyists now, according to Louis-Klein “invoke it to preserve a political formation committed to the erasure of another people”. They use it to “paralyse the very mechanisms by which that erasure might be prevented.”

Such rhetoric, as Louis-Klein and others note, is not an aberration; it’s the logical extension of normalised discourse in activist and academic circles today.

Expert voices with sharply contrasting views and grounded in battlefield realities are steadily undermining the foundations on which that discourse is built. 

One voice is John Spencer, Chair of Urban Warfare Studies at West Point in the US. Spencer argues that Hamas’s strategy from the outset of October 7 was meticulously planned for decades to lure Israel into an “asymmetric” war deliberately engineered to provoke such claims and to kill as many civilians as possible.

With over 724 km of tunnels embedded beneath civilian infrastructures across Gaza over decades, Hamas has created a “subterranean urban warfare” system designed to shield fighters while cynically maximising civilian exposure.

This tactic according to Spencer is central to Hamas’s doctrine of:

– prolonging conflict

– manipulating media narratives and

– inviting international condemnation of Israel.

While Hamas’s tunnel strategy complicates Israel’s military response and fuels the rhetorical battlefield, Spencer reframes Israel’s war against Hamas as a war of survival against an enemy that cynically weaponises urban density and civilian shielding.

Among prominent Jews who echo this view are the University of Florida’s distinguished Holocaust historian Norman Goda, Jerusalem-based writer Sherwin Pomerantz and British barrister and international law specialist, Natasha Hausdorff.

All regularly critique the rhetorical, polemical misuse of genocide. All argue that the high civilian casualty rate in Gaza, while tragic, does not constitute genocidal intent under international law.

Such accusations, they argue, deliberately distort legal, historical and moral frameworks of war and turn political outrage into a substitute for evidence.

Brice Couturier, a French journalist who is not Jewish, puts it succinctly:

“Israel cannot win this war because it was not designed to be won. Not because (Israel) is militarily outmatched but because it is caught in an equation deliberately made insoluble.”

In essence, as sages through the ages remind us, language is never neutral. It shapes perception, policy, and possibility.

And as the late UK Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks wrote:

“Words are the vehicles of meaning. They can heal or hurt, uplift or diminish. Language is the architecture of peace – or its undoing.”

About the writer:

Marika Sboros is a South African freelance investigative journalist with decades of experience writing fulltime for the country’s top media titles on a wide range of topics. She started her career as a hard-news reporter in the newsroom of the now defunct Rand Daily Mail, a campaigning anti-government newspaper during the worst excesses of the apartheid era. She commutes between South Africa and the UK.

While the mission of Lay of the Land (LotL) is to provide a wide and diverse perspective of affairs in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world, the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by its various writers are not necessarily ones of the owners and management of LOTL but of the writers themselves.  LotL endeavours to the best of its ability to credit the use of all known photographs to the photographer and/or owner of such photographs (0&EO).

A breed of South African vultures prey upon the deceased to further their political narrative.

By Josh Schewitz

There is a grotesque political theatre that has been actively around for years in South Africa, hiding in the wings, that is, until Israel was invaded by marauding mass killers from Gaza on October 7, 2023!

The star director in these theatrics is DIRCO, the Department of International Relations and Cooperation, in ‘cooperation’ with a suspect cast that includes terror-sponsoring states, professional full-time activists, journalists, and bureaucrats who feed not on facts but corpses – literally – all to undermine the legitimacy of the one Jewish state in the world – Israel.  This is the script in a nutshell.

As if taking their cue off the local wildlife, they wait like vultures circling the wounded. They need and feed off death and salivate over child-sized coffins to prop up their message. They may call themselves humanitarians but in reality they are scavengers feeding off proverbial carrion.

Every Gazan life the Hamas terror organization purposely sacrifices as a human shield is a new talking point. Every IDF airstrike targeting terrorist’s intent on killing and holding hostages is spun into another indictment – not of Hamas, but of Israel.

The facts do not matter to them. The context does not matter either because to people like Jo Bluen – a former newspaper columnist for the South African daily ‘Business Day’ and presently a PhD candidate in the Department of International Relations at the London School of Economics (LSE) in genocide studies – tragedy is not a humanitarian crisis – it is political capital.

A good insight on Bluen’s bias is revealed in this 2 December 2023 posting of hers that articulates her ignorance as well as her naked prejudice:

“Abolish the South African Jewish Board of Deputies. Abolish the South African Zionist Federation. They do not speak for Jews, but for Zionists. They are dangerous, Islamophobic, racist and antisemitic.”

The ultimate evildoer in the world today for Bluen is the Zionist, and if evil is not rooted in Western colonialism, it warrants no concern to her. Hence ethnic cleansing of the Kurds, the slaughter of the Armenians by the Turks and the persecution of Christians by Muslims conveniently escapes her attention for it fails to fit into her worldview.

PATRON SAINT OF WEAPONISED GRIEF

Bluen is not some fringe radical shouting from the digital wilderness but has evolved into an amplified voice in South Africa’s anti-Israel propaganda machine – in classrooms, in the media, and outside the offices of companies that provide jobs for many South Africans. Her tantrums, incitement and hate speech towards Jews and her calls outside the US Consulate in Sandton or on her social media pages to “abolish” the State of Israel have not gone unnoticed.

Whether she lies about “290,000 children being starved to death,” or discredited stories about Israel bombing hospitals, her circle treats her malicious messaging as gospel. They do not question her sources but accept and recycle them.

Most of their talking points originate from rogue Hamas-run media offices in South Africa, Iranian-funded channels, or anonymous Telegram accounts.

POSTING FOR PERFORMANCE, NOT PEACE

Bluen boldly accuses Israel of “genocide” when there is no evidence whatsoever. Yes, the crime of genocide requires a specific intent, known as dolus specialis, that is, to destroy in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group. Israel has no such “intent” other than to defend its civilian population by rooting out and removing an existential threat. That is the nature of war not genocide. Bluen would off course know this but choses to ignore that her Hamas heroes killed scores of innocent people younger than herself while they were dancing and enjoying life; that they raped, beheaded, kidnapped and tortured, not to mention facts that Hamas:

– hijacks their own Palestinian people’s aid

– slaughters Gazan’s in cold blood and

– has built terror tunnels under hospitals and

– uses their own civilians as human shields.

When Israelis were slaughtered – babies decapitated, Israeli families burned alive and civilian apartment buildings and Israeli hospitals were destroyed by Iranian missiles, Bluen said nothing.

No outrage!

No grief!

Just lies and justification of terrorist murderers she has grown to admire and wilfully chosen to stand by, aid and support.

Because in her warped worldview, Jewish blood is not to her human loss but – using her lexicon – “colonial” consequence.

‘RED TRIANGLE’ RITUAL

Every time Israelis are murdered whether festival goers gunned down in fields, toddlers shot in cold blood or taken hostage only to be brutally murdered by their kidnappers, families burned alive in safe rooms or even an unrelated Israeli civilian diver killed in a Mediterranean off-shore shark attack, Jo Bluen has ZERO sympathy. Instead, she marks or nay we say celebrates the moment with an inverted red triangle – originally a sign of resistance in the Arab revolt against the Ottoman Turks – today the symbol adopted by online Hamas sympathisers to identify, harass, and target Israelis and Jews. Glorifying Hamas’ terror, the inverted Red Triangle – is a dog whistle for increased violence against Jews.

This symbol, banned in Germany since 2024, appears on Bluen’s profile not when Jewish civilians are spared, but when they are slaughtered. It is her euphemism for:

 “They had it coming.”

In any other conflict, waving the emblem of a terror group after a massacre would be called what it is: glorifying violence, but for Bluen, the red triangle has become her badge of honour – her digital bloodstain.

CULTURE OF COWARDICE

Let us not pretend South Africa has a watchdog culture. There is no press council challenging this infectious poison. The South African Human Rights Commission is complicit as are the NGOs that claim to champion human rights but are conveniently silent or captured. There are those South African journalists that quote these vultures masquerading as “experts”. They are invited onto panels; address public functions and provided op-ed space. Platformed and protected, this is not activism, it is indulgence. It comes at a cost. Because every unchecked lie about Israel “targeting children” while ignoring Hamas’ military tactics is not just bad journalism -it is incitement. It fuels antisemitism. It radicalises youth. It tears at the social fabric of an already fractured society and it will eventually kill.

CALL IT WHAT IT IS

What is in ‘play’ here in these theatrics is not peace-building but fetishised war porn masquerading as social justice and Jo Bluen and her comrades do not want the conflict to end because the minute the rockets stop flying and the cameras stop rolling, they lose the one thing they crave more than anything – relevance. This orchestra of enablers that includes government figures, academicians, media operators, and NGO apparatchiks have built entire careers out of blaming Israel while absolving terror.

Far from being humanitarians, these are political morticians who dress corpses in talking points. Unless South African institutions grow a backbone, they will keep thriving on the blood of others.

About the writer:
Josh Schewitz is a researcher and analyst specializing in Africa and the Middle East, with a focus on securitiy related topics in addition to blockchain technology.

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).

Ink dripping with blood, South African Jewish cartoonist endangers his people.

By Stephen Schulman

Like so many others, I am familiar with the work of the South African cartoonist Jonathan Shapiro better known as Zapiro. Shapiro, the source of many biting caricatures has been gifted with exceptional artistic talent but most sadly, very little else.

Shapiro positions himself as the great and fearless crusader wielding his mighty pen “fighting monsters” whilst carrying the banner of an unbiased moral authority that clearly differentiates wrong from right in exposing the injustices in our world. Unfortunately, his hatred of the State of Israel runs so deep that all of his cartoons of our country overflow with such venomous bilge that all pretence of his vaunted morality is jettisoned.

In Iran, a theocratic, despotic and repressive government boasts an atrocious human rights record of incarcerating, torturing, murdering and publicly executing its critics; in the first four months of 2025 alone, there have been at least 343 recorded exe­cu­tions. It has also long trumpeted its declared aim – with all means at its disposal – of obliterating the Jewish state. The IAEA has revealed that this regime while employing its well-honed strategy of prevarication, threats, obfuscation, subterfuge and outright lying has blatantly contravened all imposed limits and manufactured large amounts of highly enriched fissionable uranium suitable for the construction of an atomic bomb. How did our Shapiro react to this scenario of a Holocaust denying genocidal rogue state acquiring the means of mass destruction? His cartoon of the 12^th June speaks for itself:

If you are looking for any condemnation or even hint of Iran’s actions, you will be sorely disappointed for once again Shapiro’s old flogging horse Netanyahu reappears, now depicted as a sinister war monger with a mushroom cloud spouting from his head. To our Jonathan it matters not one whit that Iran’s actions have been condemned by the European community and many Western countries. For, as usual, as portrayed in his regular vilifying and demonizing cartoons, Netanyahu i.e. Israel i.e. the Jews are the root of all conflicts and injustices in the Middle East.

Why his silence on Iran’s crimes and transgression? The answer lies with SA’s ruling African National Congress party’s accumulation of huge debts that were suddenly paid off by a mysterious but well known benefactor: Iran. Shapiro is not only a highly moral but also a most pragmatic individual and knows full well that any attempt to criticize his government’s close ally and party bankroller would have officialdom fall on him like a ton of bricks. How true for him is the old adage: “A dog barks for his masters.” After all, a man has to put food on the table for all those hungry mouths and nobody likes to be unceremoniously hoofed out of lucrative newspaper jobs and see his dedicated buying public boycotting his books. So accordingly, principles must be swept under the carpet and a politically correct silence must be maintained.

On the 13^th June, only one day after the publication of this scurrilous cartoon, Israel launched a pre-emptive strike on Iran’s military-nuclear complex – a war for its survival that has been condoned by the enlightened international community. While Israel has confined its targets to Iran’s military and nuclear installations, Iran, unsurprisingly, has had no compunction about sending its UAV’s and missiles into a hospital and heavily concentrated urban areas.

The war is still ongoing and Shapiro’s pen will be busy drawing for his select audience. If anyone wonders about the content of his forthcoming cartoons, a glance at a few of his notorious past endeavors should leave no doubt. The cartoon of the 8^th October 2024 is so disgusting in its distortion of truth and warped narrative that it is simply beneath contempt. Other repulsive cartoons portray Israel’s P.M sitting in a bath of Arab blood and as the charioteer behind the four horsemen of the apocalypse.

But what about Shapiro’s pursuing of some genuine “monsters” in this world such as the repressive North Korean regime and China’s persecution of the Falun Gong sect and the cultural genocide of the Tibetans and the Uyghur? Neither a squeak nor a plaintive bleat emanates from our crusading knight, for after all, China is a valued trading partner and investor in SA’s crumbling economy and it wouldn’t do to ruffle their feathers.

On October 7^th 2023, a Hamas terrorist army invaded Israel in an orgy of rape, sodomy, plundering and destruction, sadistically murdering twelve hundred people – the biggest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. Two hundred and fifty innocent people – from little children to infirm octogenarians were forcibly abducted into Gaza and held in unspeakable conditions, suffering sexual abuse, torturing and beatings while being systematically starved and dehydrated. Many of them were murdered in captivity including a young mother together with her toddler and his small brother. Fifty hostages still remain and of those twenty are reputed to be still alive. Would this not arouse outrage in the heart of any decent, thinking person? Jonathan Shapiro, true to form in his callousness and selective morality, turns a blind eye to the suffering of his fellow Jews in Israel and never a hint of the tragedy or condemnation of its perpetrators has ever appeared in his work.

Nevertheless, to Shapiro living in Cape Town, Jewish lives do matter. They do indeed matter very much to him when they are in close proximity and when they can serve him or be exploited for his personal needs. He besmirches Israel at every opportunity, yet had no problem in sending his children for a good education to Herzlia, the Jewish day school. He also sent them to a Zionist Jewish youth movement’s summer camps knowing that they would be well looked after and he would have peace of mind. He also had no qualms about applying for a place for his aged mother in the Jewish home for the aged in Cape Town.

Jonathan Shapiro is nothing more than a self serving hypocrite, a pitiable individual hiding behind the façade of a crusader with a high moral stance but who applies his principles only when they serve his needs. The stench of a putrid morality has long clung to this despicable personage.

About the writer:

Stephen Schulman is a graduate of the South African Jewish socialist youth movement Habonim, who immigrated to Israel in 1969 and retired in 2012 after over 40 years of English teaching. He was for many years a senior examiner for the English matriculation and co-authored two English textbooks for the upper grades in high school. Now happily retired, he spends his time between his family, his hobbies and reading to try to catch up on his ignorance.

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).