Preface:

Last August, in my article ‘Is Mandla Mandela an antisemite?’ I refuted the Zionist claim, published in the SA Jewish Report, that Mandela’s March 2022 address to the Pan African Palestine Solidarity Network (PAPSN) was antisemitic in intent and in effect.

In September 2022 I published a follow up article, ‘Israel’s ‘pernicious’ agenda in Africa’, which referred to 15 counties in Africa where Mandela’s key criticisms that Israel engaged in underhand practices and contributed to authoritarianism and elite manipulation of largely impoverished citizens, were credible by the historical record.

In fact, as my colleague Suraya Dadoo kindly pointed out to me, Mandela had already responded in April 2022 (in the Mail and Guardian) to the claim that he was an antisemite. In this article I reflect on the significance of Mandela’s April response.

Published shortly after his PAPSN speech, Mandela’s article in the Mail and Guardian provided a refutation of the antisemitic slur and also extra detail about Israel’s involvement in problematic practices in specific African states, which were not part of my then analysis. I refer to these in the second section (below), providing graphics for ease of illustration of the complexities behind which Israel’s organisational structures and practices often continue undetected by most media in the public domain in South Africa. It is precisely these examples that shed light on Israel’s hidden interests, which we need to debate publicly.

The following section identifies the key media sources linked to by Mandela in his Mail and Guardian article in April 2022.

Media reporting events:

Mandela’s article drew on reports from the following seven media platforms, the list with hyperlinks of which is contained in Annexure 1: Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), The Continent, Forbidden Stories/Amnesty International Security Lab, Ghana Business News Portal, African Arguments, Citizen Lab and Africa Report.

Two of these publications are linked to three international networks (i.e. the Global Investigative Journalism Network, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and the Centre for Collaborative Investigative Journalism) that claim to be committed to independent, investigative journalism, one is supported by a trust (Adamela) initiated by South Africa’s Mail and Guardian (for an African focus), one is affiliated to the university of Toronto and one is affiliated to a French-based media group.

There is an extensive, and at times interlinking set of media networks, focusing on events in Africa, all of which claim to support independent and investigative journalism.

The following section identifies additional practices of the state of Israel and Israeli individuals and companies in Africa, not covered by my article ‘Israel’s pernicious agenda in Africa’.

Further Israeli practices:

My September article drew mainly from Jeff Halper’s ‘War against the people’, which was sparse on Israel’s practices in South Sudan, Cameroon and Uganda. Furthermore, the article did not pick up on the sales and penetration of Israel-produced cyber-spying technology and Israel-produced mobile telecommunication interception technology and the engagement by Israelis and Israeli state agents in rigging elections in Africa.

Mandela’s article linked to sources referred to in the graphic above, that provided anecdotes of problematic Israeli practices in South Sudan, Cameroon and Uganda, as well as of their provision of cyber-spying technology, mobile telecommunication interception technology and services to rig the outcome of elections in certain African countries.

My September article had a fair amount of detail on naval military ships and infrastructure from Israel to Equatorial Guinea, support for that country’s elite presidential guard and brokering relations between Equatorial Guinea and the United States. Mandela’s article referred to a source in Eitay Mack, Israeli human rights lawyer/activist that corroborated the broad outlines of what I had written about earlier on Equatorial Guinea.

South Sudan

Journalist Thomas Mountain, who had been living in Eritrea, bordering South Sudan, wrote that the persistent civil war between South Sudan and the rest of Sudan was funded — and therefore fuelled — by the Central Intelligence Agency to cut off China’s access to the rich oil fields in South Sudan.

My earlier article referred only to United States (US)/Israeli activist Jeff Halper’s identification of Boas Badikhi selling arms to South Sudan during 2015. Badikhi was a former member of previous Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon’s notorious unit 101, who also personally trained Mobutu Sese Seko as a paratrooper in Israel in the early 1960s. Thus, following Mountain, Israeli arms dealers were profiting from a US geopolitical power struggle against the spread of Chinese influence in the Horn of Africa.

Drawing on investigation by the OCCRP (the investigative reporting platform for a worldwide network of independent media centres and journalists, referred to earlier) Mandela’s article added more substance to Israeli practices in South Sudan, and referred to Israeli company The Global Group’s 2015 funnelling of US$ 150 million worth of weapons to South Sudan militias under cover of an agricultural project. I have summarised the details of the OCCRP report in the following two graphics.

The OCCRP report notes that the US Treasury Department blacklisted an Israeli security services firm contracted to run a farming project, for breaking an embargo on arms and weapons sales to parties in the conflict between South Sudan and Sudan, identifying a ‘major multinational oil firm’ as collaborating. As indicated in the above diagrams, the report identified non-payment to Green Horizon Project, despite it being dedicated in the agreement between Trafigura (the multinational oil firm) and the South Sudan Central Bank. It also identified payment by the Central Bank of US$145 million to The Global Group, headed by ex-Israel Defence Force (IDF) officer Israel Ziv. It discovered that the farm project seemed to be languishing in the doldrums and also that the South Sudanese Minister of Defence had visited the project. It concluded that South Sudan paid The Global group US$145 million for arms and weapons shipments from Israel.

Cameroon

My September article referred only to Israeli Sami Mehuyas as a confident to Cameroonian president Paul Biya, and as an arms dealer brokering weapons sales to Cameroon. Drawing on an investigation by African Arguments, a self-proclaimed pan-African platform for news, investigation and opinion, published by the Royal African Society, Mandela’s article referred to Israeli engagement in creating — and maintaining — an elite unit, the Rapid Intervention Batallion (BIR), to keep Cameroon’s dictatorial president in power. I have summarised the details of the African Arguments article in the following table.

Uganda

My September article noted that by 2015 one Barak Orland worked the Uganda weapons and securitisation systems market, and was close to Ugandan President Museveni. Mandela’s article referred to a Mail and Guardian article linked to The Continent, a weekly digital newspaper by African journalists about Africa, reporting that in 2021 Israel was secretly providing weaponry for Uganda’s Special Forces Command, President’s Museveni’s private army. I have summarised the details of the Mail and Guardian and The Continent articles in the following graphic.

Cyberweapons and spying technology

Mandela’s April article referred to the provision of cyberweapons and spying technology by Israel to the African states of Rwanda, Morocco and Togo. The source of this was a link to the Africa Report, which is published by Jeune Afrique Media Group (JAMG). JAMG claims to have a mass-based readership (aiming to have 100 000 digital subscribers by 2025).

According to the Africa Report article, which draws on the Forbidden Stories Platform/Amnesty International Security Lab Pegasus Project, Israel’s NSO group produces and (through the Israel Ministry of Defence) markets the powerful Pegasus cyber-spyware programme, which enables operators surreptitiously to siphon off locations, messages, photos and even unanswered calls or visual recordings through secretly activated microphones and cameras linked to a suspect’s mobile phone.

I have summarised the details of the Africa Report and Forbidden Stories/Amnesty International Security Lab articles in the following graphic.

While the NSO Group claimed that the Pegasus software was only intended for use to identify and place under surveillance criminals and ‘terrorists’, Pegasus Project research revealed that many journalists, activists, opposition politicians and even academics were targeted by the regimes that bought and operated the software.

Morocco — engaged in the colonial control of the Western Sahara — alone surveyed 10 000 people. The Deutsche Welle as well as the Mail and Guardian reported that Rwanda, a close ally of Israel in East Africa, was said to have placed South African president Ramaphosa under surveillance through his phone — informed speculation was that the purpose was intelligence on Rwandan dissidents in exile in South Africa.[1]

My September article did not pick up on the sales and penetration of Israel-produced mobile telecommunication interception technology, but Mandela’s article specifically referred to this technology being provided to ‘various African governments’. The source of this was a link to an article in African Arguments, which identified Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Equatorial Guinea, Morocco, Kenya and Zambia as the African countries that had purchased this application. The communication interception technology is called Circles, and is produced by the Circles Telecom company, founded in 2009/10 by Taj Dilian ex-IDF cybersecurity specialist and Israeli tech entrepreneur, and currently closely associated with the NSO Group.

The graphic above identifies seven African governments using the Circles mobile phone interception technology, which while originated by Israeli tech entrepreneurs is now owned by private equity investors. This information is drawn from a report by the University of Toronto’s Citizens Lab, an interdisciplinary laboratory focusing on research, development, and high-level strategic policy and legal engagement at the intersection of information and communication technologies, human rights, and global security. It uses a ‘mixed methods’ approach to research combining practices from political science, law, computer science, and area studies.

The Citizens Lab report described how African countries used the Circles technology to spy on human rights activists, opposition political figures and journalists. The way Circles works is that it does not require an unsuspecting mobile phone user to click on a malicious link but exploits flaws in the signalling system that links mobile phones to one another. The technology allows the infiltrator to read messages, emails, and listen in on phone calls as they occur.

Rigging African elections

My September article did not pick up on the engagement by Israelis and Israeli state agents in elections in Africa, but Mandela’s article specifically referred to the role of these people in influencing (often unfairly) the election of various African governments.

The sources for this were various links to the following media platforms: The Sunday Standard (in respect of an election in Botswana), an Israeli TV report by an organisation called ‘Hamakor’ (reported in Haaretz) (in respect of an election in Ghana), the Maravi Post (in respect of an election in Malawi), The Guardian (in respect of an election in Nigeria) and Meta (in respect of facebook posts by the Israel-based Archimedes Group that misrepresented itself as individual facebook account holders, with the posts making strong normative comments which reasonably could be construed as attempts to sway public opinion for or against political leaders.

I could not find a website for the Archimedes group, although an article in the Times of Israel suggested that the Group took down its website in the wake of being banned from facebook in 2019 for allegedly publishing ‘false’ and ‘misleading’ information regarding political elections in Malaysia, Nigeria, Togo, Congo and Tunisia.

I have summarised the details of the reports in the media identified above in the following graphic.

Conclusion:

Rather than being the expression of his ‘own antisemitism’ — as proclaimed by the SA Jewish Report — Mandela’s claims both in his March 2022 speech and in his subsequent April 2022 Mail and Guardian article were congruent with the news reported by a range of self-proclaimed independent journalist outlets.

My central point in my August article was that whereas Zionists posit an eternal and immutable signification between the signs ‘Israel’ and ‘Jew’, linguistic understanding is an interpretive process, not a simple passage of information.[2] Following their assumption about this universal coding and immutable signification, Zionists then attempt to impose an outrageous censorship on anti-Zionist discourse like Mandela’s speech, that forms part and parcel of the struggle for a Palestinian identity based on human rights and national self-determination.

I also checked out the sources of the articles to which Mandela linked as evidence of his claims, as well as the media platforms that published these articles, their stated mission and who their funders are, to interrogate objectively the truth value of the claims made in these articles.

I did this because central to my argument is whether a discourse signifies the truth trumps other, alleged signification.

Part of the signification of truth is the objective impact of what is being reported, on public discourses. The truth is incontrovertible (to quote Churchill[3]) regardless of the intention of the speaker.

In the absence of knowing the subjective intentions of the journalists writing these stories, it is reasonable to assume their bona fides and that they accurately report events as they perceive them, through whatever ideological framework.

An analysis of the news sources of Mandela’s article demonstrates a wide range of relatively autonomous publications and media platforms. When events claimed by one source are verified from other relatively independent sources there is merit in provisionally assessing their statements to be objectively true.

Paul Hendler, Stellenbosch, 21 June 2023.

[1] Informing this speculation is the assassination by Rwandan agents of Rwandan dissident Patrick Kareyega in the Michelangelo Hotel, Sandton, referred to in my article ‘Israel’s pernicious agenda in Africa’. Unknown people attempted on three occasions to assassinate another dissident, Kayumba Nyamwasa.

[2] Cf. Bianchi’s and Vassalo’s Interpretation, encyclopaedia, translation, for more on this.

[3] Churchill famously said ‘the truth is incontrovertible. Malice may malign it, ignorance undermine it. But in the end, there it is’.

Annexure 1 — Reference list for publishers of articles referred to by Mandela:

· Organised Crime & Reporting Project

· The Continent

· Forbidden Stories-Amnesty International Security Lab

· African Arguments

· Citizen Lab

· Africa Report

· Ghana Business News Portal

Supporting platforms

· International Consortium of Investigative Journalists

· Centre for Collaborative Investigative Journalism

· Adamela Trust

· Global Investigative Journalism Network

· Jeune Afrique Media Group