No, not wardrobe malfunctions but naked bias in Daily Maverick reportage on Israel.

By Lawrence Nowosenetz

In an editorial on 27 August 2025 Daily Maverick (DM) editor Jillian Green pompously and self-righteously proclaims:

“We don’t, and won’t shy away from reporting on Gaza, famine and the pressing power of now.”

Oh really? 

It seems that the editorial and journalistic staff of DM are stung by allegations in social media and by the public of “perceptions of bias” about coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza. No perception. The bias is real and in your face. A previous version of this article was sent by this writer to DM which was neither published nor acknowledged.  

This is what the article said under the title of:

REPORTING ABOUT GAZA

Factual reporting from war zones has always been problematic as the editor acknowledges. Douglas Murray, a veteran and respected war journalist however points out that reporters and correspondents used to issue disclaimers when reporting from war zones under repressive regimes as their reports were subject to regime restrictions. Gaza under the rule of Hamas is no democracy even during peace time with:

• No press freedom
• No rule of law and
• No right of protest.

Reporters and writers who were too independent or were critical of Hamas were suppressed and even violently punished.

The Daily Maverick, like all the Western media, rely on reports from local journalists and foreign Western journalists in Gaza who suffer from the same restrictions. They are not at liberty to present a balanced picture or one which reflects adversely on Hamas. Ask Palestinian journalist Omar Abd Rabou who is reaching out on X for help to leave Gaza. His ‘mistake’ was that he was critical of Hamas. Frightened for his life, on August 27, Rabou published an abject apology:

 “…not to publish anything against the movement or engage in matters related to the war on Gaza.” 

News from Gaza is distributed worldwide by reputable news agencies. Compromised and unverified reporting is uncritically accepted and then processed into solemn official reports of UN agencies and NGOs with the stamp of authenticity. And so, the mill of disinformation, half truths and outright falsehoods grind on.  DM does not advise of expected journalistic caveats such as:

 – no independent corroboration was available or

– the Gaza Ministry of Health data may be unreliable.

Little coverage of professional and reputable sources which are contrary to the genocide narrative appear in DM. This is so despite that COGAT data from the IDF unit tasked with humanitarian aid in Gaza is publicly and easily accessible as well scholarly and professional refutations of starvation, war crimes and mens rea (criminal intent) on the part of Israel.   

GENOCIDE

Nothing illustrates the fragility of DM’s sources more that its reporting of an alleged genocide in Gaza. It offers no informed analysis by Western military experts such as Andrew Fox, John Spencer and Richard Kemp, senior officers with combat experience in asymmetrical and urban warfare in the Middle East. No careful examination and critical analysis of the fatality statistics in Gaza mainly sourced from the Hamas Ministry of Health. There are published research papers questioning the flawed methodology and basic inaccuracies such as the blurring of combatant and civilian fatalities. DM should pause to question the paucity of images of overcrowded morgues or piles of dead bodies as in Holocaust photographs.   Recently, the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) adopted a resolution accusing Israel of genocide.  DM should not have shied away from revealing in its reporting that the resolution was passed by ONLY 126 members of the organisations total 500 members – A vote of roughly 20%! This is hardly a resolution of resounding legitimacy further undermined by the dubious membership of this ‘scholarly’ association which has come to light.   DM should consider the three D’s as an editorial guideline about Gaza. Natan Sharansky differentiated genuine criticism of Israel from antisemitism by asking whether the coverage constitutes:

–  Demonization – typecasting Israel as intrinsically evil, lawless and criminal

– Delegitimisation – questioning Israel’s right to exist as sovereign Jewish state

–  Double standards – ignoring or overlooking worse conduct by its enemies or others and inconsistent application of international law. Here it should be noted Hamas is not a signatory to any international humanitarian conventions nor does it consider itself bound by customary international law of war and human rights. Indeed “resistance by the Palestinian people by all means available at their disposal against an illegal occupying power is a legitimate act” according to UN Rapporteur on Palestine, Francesca Albanese, who was recently in South Africa where she called for the “suspension of all ties with Israel.”

FAKE NEWS ABOUT GAZA

Fake news about Israel’s war conduct abounds. Every now and then a glimmer of truth emerges. We remember the al-Ahli Hospital air strike report wrongly blamed on Israel. A favourite and lurid narrative is famine and starvation in Gaza. A Bild photographer captured the staging of a fake image showing Gazans clamouring for food. Daily Maverick seems to have shied from reporting this. It certainly undermines the media narrative of starvation. DM shied away too from wide exposure of the fraudulent images of emaciated children presented as starving children. Evidence revealed showing that photographs widely showed in the international media of emaciated Gazan children as being fraudulent as they suffered from medical conditions unrelated to malnutrition. Days after Zakaria Ayoub al-Mutawaq emerged a poster child for Gaza starvation after a photo of his emaciated state appeared in The New York Times, the paper had to issue an apology when the child’s medical records were found and made public. It revealed that al-Mutawaq was suffering not from a lack of food but from a congenital disorder thus truthfully revealing his malnourished appearance. The original picture shows both the mother and the brother of the child looking well nourished and completely healthy. They were cropped out of the published photo. No thanks to the Daily Maverick for its failure to expose this fake news maliciously designed to demonise Israel.

‘STARVED’ OF THE TRUTH

According to the latest figures from the Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza, (subject to serious reservations about accuracy) as of early August 2025 the figure of deaths by starvation is 188, including 94 children.  

Contrast this with South Africa during peace time that according to DM an average of 30 children die daily from starvation. Nearly 11,000 deaths a year according to South African human rights and social justice activist, Mark Heywood.      

UNICEF says chronic undernourishment is responsible for over half the deaths of South African children under five. One in three children in the country is physically stunted from lack of food. Cape Town’s Children’s Institute, an interdisciplinary and child-centred applied research unit, reveals that 4 million South African children are growth stunted, and 10 million go hungry every single day. South Africa’s claim regarding child malnutrition and death through starvation in Gaza is so deeply flawed and morally compromised that one would expect DM to not evade or deviously dodge from pointing this out.

GAZA IS NOT ONE OF THE GRAVEST HUMAN RIGHTS ISSUES

The war in Palestine, according to the editor, has escalated into one of the gravest human rights issues of our time. This is biased and risible. It has become an article of faith, a rallying point screamed by the protest mobs worldwide so that questioning voices are drowned out. Many would take exception and wish to challenge this benighted and bigoted view in a calm, rational, factual and objective manner. Ms Green cites as a reason for not allowing publication of contrary DM’spublication of disparaging and misleading coverage about Israel is itself a form of warfare going by the name of propaganda. It is an assault on fairness, objectivity, rationality and factual rigour.

Indeed, Ms Green is utterly and culpably wrong in failing to discern that in our lifetime there have been and still are far graver human rights catastrophes, war crimes and genocides.  According to the IPC, Gaza is facing a “confirmed famine” with half a million people facing phase 5 classification (catastrophic).  Indeed? This is factually contested and does not take into account Hamas culpability in exacerbating food scarcity, a topic which deserves careful and balanced coverage.  Starvation and gross well-documented human rights abuses abound in the world.  All on a far greater scale by any metric than Gaza.  Here are some really gross catastrophes:      

SUDAN

The three-year conflict in Sudan has become one of the worst humanitarian crises of the 21st century, leaving millions of women, children and displaced families suffering from violence, food insecurity and the collapse of essential services.  More than 150,000 people have died.  According to the UN, 30 million people are in need of humanitarian aid.  Famine is affecting children in displacement camps. The displaced population, people forced from their homes in Sudan is 11.3 million. Briefing ambassadors in the Security Council, the UN’s top relief official Tom Fletcher said “women and girls are being raped, people being mutilated and killed – with utter impunity.”

After overrunning the Sudanese Armed Forces’ (SAF) in the last major stronghold in Darfur, RSF fighters moved house to house, with “credible reports,” says Fletcher, “of widespread executions” as civilians attempted to escape. In the Saudi Maternity Hospital alone – one of numerous health facilities targeted in the fighting – nearly 500 patients and their companions were reportedly killed. With tens of thousands of terrified, starving civilians fleeing for their lives, “Those able to flee,” says Fletcher, “the vast majority being women, children, and the elderly – face extortion, rape and violence on the perilous journey.”

SYRIA

Upwards of 200 000 civilians had been killed in Syria between March 2011 and March 2025. This number does not include an estimated 26,000 civilians killed in government prisons. The Syrian civil war has produced the largest number of refugees in the world. As of February 2015, the UNHCR designated the conflict as the “world’s worst humanitarian crisis.” It is estimated that 16.5 million people are in need of humanitarian assistance.

YEMEN

Although Yemen is mostly in the news when it fires missiles at Israel in support of Hamas, less covered is its self-inflicted human misery brough on by its  civil war that began in 2015. According to UNHCR:

 “After ten years of war, Yemen remains one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises. An estimated 4.5 million people – 14 percent of the population – are currently displaced, most of whom have been displaced multiple times over a number of years. More than 18.2 million people are in dire need of humanitarian assistance and protection services. The risk of a large-scale famine in the country has never been more acute. Tens of thousands are already living in famine-like conditions and a staggering five million more are acutely food insecure.” Malnutrition rates among women and children in Yemen remain among the highest in the world, with 1.4 million pregnant or breastfeeding women requiring treatment for acute malnutrition. Meanwhile, Yemeni children continue to be killed and injured because of the conflict and are dying at increasingly high rates due to preventable diseases and malnutrition. According to UNICEF, one in two children under the age of five are malnourished in Yemen.

Any honest, unbiased observer of Gaza would plead no contest.    

THE REAL HUMAN RIGHTS ATROCITIES IN GAZA

Gaza is indeed unique and unparalleled as a grave human rights atrocity but in a totally different sense from the DM narrative.  The war is characterised by the corrupt misallocation of aid money into costly preparation for war by the building of extensive underground combat tunnels by Hamas – not for the protection of civilians as shelters against aerial bombardment -but as military attack and weapons centres exclusively for use by Hamas militants. What is more, all these tunnels are positioned under civilian homes including mosques, schools and hospitals, facts mostly ignored in the international media. It renders civilian structures vulnerable as legitimate military targets of attack and bombardment. The failure of Hamas operatives to wear uniforms makes then indistinguishable from civilians and constitutes perfidy, a crime under the international law of war. It places civilians at risk. Unique too is the refusal to permit refugees from war zones to leave Gaza through Egypt, a fellow Muslim Arab country. In no other conflict in recent history has a population been denied this right.

These injustices and violations of humanitarian law however pale into insignificance when viewed in the light of the barbaric attack by Hamas on 7 October 2023 on Israeli civilians including the abduction and capture of Israeli hostages. All filmed and beyond dispute. Not a single day event either but a continuing international crime and an affront to humanity.

Also overlooked is the indiscriminate firing of thousands of rockets at Israeli cities, not only from Gaza but by Hezbollah and the Houthis in Lebanon and Yemen respectively, territories that were not in any armed conflict with Israel.  Par excellence Iran too, where Iranian missiles caused serious damage to Soroka Hospital in Beer Sheba and the Weitzmann Institute in Rehovot. These are major and egregious violations of the laws of armed conflict and humanitarian law begging the question why DM skirts from focussing on the legal and moral accountability of these belligerent armed forces in perpetrating these war crimes?    

The pages of DM are strangely bereft of outrage or empathy for the unprecedented ongoing starvation and torture of hostages in almost three years of captivity. Although Hamas had released a grim photo of emaciated and skeletal former hostage Evyatar David digging his grave in a tunnel, Daily Maverick failed to interview hostage survivors – some with South African backgrounds – when visiting South Africa. It appears like shying away from a compelling injustice and a humanitarian tragedy of South African interest.  It is also a failure of journalism!

Posturing as the conscience of humanity admonishing readers from burying their heads in the sand, DM publishes a piece entitled:

 “Vicious circle of bloody war crimes makes me feel sick to the core; we can’t bury our heads in the sand,” (Daily Maverick 13 October 2023).

This article by Heather Robinson is a master class in obfuscation and dissimulation. The date of publication tells all.  It was first day Israel had begun its war offensive, but DM had already demonised Israel. “Vicious” yes, “circle” no. There were no Israeli civilians in Gaza since the disengagement in 2005.  IsraeI has never and will never commit crimes like mutilating babies and women, raping women in front of their families, decapitating and murdering civilians in cold blood and all with glee and joy. This is what Hamas does…and films! These rulers of Gaza stand alone in its unprecedented, unprovoked, carefully planned genocidal terror. It takes a special type of twisted historical and moral logic to conflate so called “Israeli oppression” and Hamas so-called “resistance”.  This article was unchallenged despite a refutation submitted by the writer which DM ignored.

BIAS CONFIRMATION  

The simple stratagem that DM uses to manipulate news coverage on Gaza and steer the narrative is simply. It mostly declines to publish any material presenting factual refutation or contrary opinions to DM’s editorial policy about Gaza. It has blocked many refutations and contrary opinions submitted by credible, legitimate leaders and writers in the Jewish community and beyond. Instead, DM is replete with unchallenged demonization of Israel and unbalanced coverage of Palestinian suffering. There is a legal maxim:

‘No one can take advantage of their own wrong’

Hamas is culpable of not taking any steps to prevent civilians from harm. Indeed, it has prevented the evacuation of civilians from war zones and actively promoted suffering. Any unbiased observer would agree, yet Israel unfairly bears the burden of moral opprobrium.   

The veteran British Jewish journalist, Melanie Phillips has exposed this same journalistic self-righteous bigotry in The Guardian. For her service in the quest for truth, she was “othered” i.e. ostracised when she started questioning the hypocrisy of her colleagues about condemning Israel and overlooking the evils of terrorism in the Palestinian conflict.  DM similarly pursues a genocide narrative, reckless whether the facts fit. Eventually the narrative becomes the facts. If this is allowed to happen, we are heading for real danger. Hello Pravda, George Orwell and the world of doublespeak.  

Why doesn’t the DM’s morally blighted editor Green simply abandon the pretence of objectivity and admit that its editorial stance is based on the narrative that Israel is guilty of genocide, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, oppression and colonial domination?

This way it could spare its readers the insult of pretending to pursue truth and promote open reasoned diverse opinion.

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).

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).