Preface

This is a follow up on the earlier article, ‘Charge of antisemitism 1 — Cape Union Mart and Phillip Krawitz versus Palestine Solidarity Campaign Western Cape‘. Following Hamas’ and Palestine Islamic Jihad’s Operation Al Aqsa flood armed actions on 7 October 2023, the ensuing Israeli military and civilian casualties on that day and Israel’s subsequent bombardment and invasion of Gaza, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that Israel was committing ‘plausible’ genocide. Across the globe the Boycott Divestment Sanctions movement mobilized tens of thousands in protest at Israel’s actions, including in South Africa through the activities and political practices of local Palestine solidarity organisations.

There also occurred spontaneous protests by individuals on the streets of South Africa and particularly on social media posts.

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One of these was by Ms. Mariam Jakoet-Harris from Cape Town, who during November and December 2023 posted several protests against what she saw as Israel’s criminal acts in destroying Gaza and its people, as well as calling for a boycott of a shop the owner of which she had identified as pro-Israel, pro-Zionist and antagonistic to shopper-customers wearing Palestinian regalia inside the shop.

In response to Ms. Jakoet-Harris’ posts to her approximately 36 000 followers, the Cape South African Jewish Board of Deputies (Cape SAJBoD) in October 2024 (one year later) submitted an affidavit to the Cape High Court (sitting as the Equality Court) to institute judicial proceedings against Jakoet-Harris for engaging in hate speech as defined by the Promotion of Equality and Prevention of Unfair Discrimination Act (PEPUDA), against people identified as Jewish and Zionist. In essence the Cape SAJBoD affidavit claimed that in her social media posts Jakoet-Harris had engaged in antisemitic speech. The Cape SAJBoD affidavit sought relief in the form of a court ruling that Jakoet-Harris’ posts constituted hate speech as defined by PEPUDA, that she apologise to the South African Jewish community, pay across R25 000,00 to the South African Holocaust and Genocide Centre and pay the costs of the Cape SAJBoD application to the court.

In her answering affidavit (during the same month) Jakoet-Harris denied the charge of antisemitic hate speech, defended her right to constitutionally protected free speech, gave notice of her intention to institute a counter claim for harassment, the details of which were to be specified at a further court hearing and said that she remained open to resolving the issue through mediation. Cape SAJBoD responded to the answering affidavit in May 2025 (about seven months later) acknowledging and supporting a mediation process within a defined time-line and announced that it would seek Court permission to expand the content of its initial affidavit. In turn Jakoet-Harris’ practice note confirmed her availability for a mediation process but challenged the validity of Cape SAJBoD introducing amendments to its initial affidavit as violating court procedures, calling into question the good faith of the complainant.

I understand from Jakoet-Harris’ legal counsel that both parties intend calling at least three expert witnesses, and that Jakoet-Harris is considering a counter claim against Cape SAJBoD for its complicity in, and support for, genocide. At this stage the parties are waiting for the judge to convene a directional hearing to discuss the further conduct of the matter, but the date of this hearing still has to be set. The expert witnesses will be clarified at the directional hearing, after which the court will decide whether the matter is ready for trial.

I have written many articles on this platform debunking the myth that anti-Zionism and critique of Israel’s policies and actions towards the people of Palestine constitutes in any way antisemitic hate speech. I have made the same point regarding speech that in the context of Israel and the Jewish community makes reference to the German genocide of the Jews, the German National Socialist Workers (Nazi) Party and/or Adolf Hitler and his accomplices. I have also noted that both the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) as well as the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (JDA) determine antisemitic speech from how we verbally criticize Israel, critique Zionism and relate the Jewish community and/or Israel to the German genocide and the Nazis: it is in the how that the IHRA and the JDA manufacture the code of equivalence of antisemitism and anti-Zionism and of antisemitism and speech relating to the Nazis and the German genocide.[1] I have also argued that this is a conscious strategy by the Israeli ideological state apparatuses (ISAs) and similar ISAs of its allied countries in Western Europe and North America, which developed a narrative about ‘examples’ that illustrate antisemitic discourse through the IHRA and the JDA, where 64 per cent of the IHRA examples and 57 per cent of the JDA examples (of antisemitic discourse) involve criticism of the state of Israel; and 45 per cent of the IHRA examples involving Israel, and 50 per cent of the JDA examples involving Israel, are about portraying Israeli practices with the symbols of classical antisemitism and through comparison with the Nazis and with the German genocide.

In ‘The charge of antisemitism: Jews, Israel and the risks of public critique, Judith Butler, a renowned scholar in literature interpretation, and Jewish public intellectual, noted that Zionists have taken the theory of semiotics and proclaimed that ‘Israel’ is a signifier that signifies ‘Jew’. Based on corroborating statements by Zionist leaders and commentators about the eternal Jewish ethnos[2] and the equally eternal virus of antisemitism,[3] the Israeli and Western ISAs have effectively imposed a view of the immutable code ‘Israel’ = ‘Jew’ as justification for clamping down on so-called anti-Israel, anti-Jewish hate speech. Attached to this code is the further code ‘Hitler/Nazis/genocide’ = ‘Jew’.[4] But Umberto Eco, in his ‘Theory of Semiotics’ (pages 7 to 9) makes it clear that linguistic codes are historically and culturally determined, and not ontologically immutable.

Thus, in the name of anti-racism these states impose an outrageous form of censorship that threatens the core of free speech in democratic societies. As will become apparent later, this application to the Equality Court is consistent with the erroneous IHRA/JDA ‘definitions’ and ‘examples’ of what constitutes anti-semitic speech. The Cape SAJBoD charge juxtaposes reference to German genocide of Jews with a picture of the Star of David in a rubbish bin, and reference to Jewish CEOs of top tech companies, with organ harvesting from Palestinians.

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The charge is that the significance of the boycott of Cape Union Mart is to target a ‘greedy’ Jew (its major shareholder is Jewish), and that the significance of other speech posted by Jakoet-Harris is its call for extermination of Jews and rape of Jewish women.

Should this court rule in favour of the applicant it would be succumbing to an anti-democratic influence that would further stifle public debate on issues that are of vital concern to the interests (both moral and material) of the citizenry.

This article critically addresses several points specific to the initial application, which I think are pertinent to exposing the illegitimacy of the key claims made by the Cape SAJBoD. This is an attempt to embellish neither Jakoet-Harris’ answering affidavit nor her practice note, as the points I am making might not be of direct legal relevance. But they are strategically important for an ideological struggle for the truth, of which this case and the upcoming trial constitute a significant moment.

These points are the following:

· Antisemitism: 300 per cent rise.

· The antisemitic signified (‘Jew’).

· Claim to represent Jews.

· Elision of Israeli apartheid.

The 300% increase in antisemitism

The Cape SAJBoD paints a context within which the ‘hate speech’ of Jakoet-Harris landed, namely a 300 per cent increase in the incidence of antisemitism in South Africa. Clarifying the objective environment of discourses in South Africa is the basis for assessing the impact or effect of Jakoet-Harris’ speech acts. The complainant needs to demonstrate the 300 per cent increase in antisemitism, which they have not done.

As I will show later Cape SAJBoD and its allies are loyal to the state of Israel. In an environment where since 7 October 2023 there has been an exponential increase in the number of anti-Israel and anti-Zionist protests, it is probable that the majority of the alleged 300 per cent increase reflects these events simply construed as being against the state of Israel. It is important to comment critically on this claim because it provides a context of antisemitic discourses generally in the environment into which the discourse of Ms. Jakoet-Harris then feeds into and allegedly reinforces. SAJBoD is required to substantiate the claim about a 300 per cent increase in antisemitic events by showing the method of collecting this data and also the conceptual categories used to interpret the data — they cannot simply state this as an accepted fact.

In the recent past similar claims by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) about the rising tide of antisemitism in South Africa (and also elsewhere) have raised more questions than provided answers. A 2019 ADL survey concluded that antisemitism in South Africa was rising because of surveyed perceptions of Jewish South Africans’ greater loyalty to Israel and overemphasis of the holocaust; but,

o 47% of respondents had never met a Jew — were they aware what they were being surveyed about?

o Even SAJBoD questioned the ADL survey conclusions, noting that in 2019 there were only 36 antisemitic incidents as against 62 in 2018.

SAJBoD said this was despite widespread anti-Israel sentiment in the country, which was ironic because following the IHRA and JDA definitions one would have expected a rise in SAJBoD’s number of antisemitic events surveyed. Jewish journalist Jeremy Gordin commented that the ADL survey counted anti-Israel protests as instances of antisemitism thereby mixing up the survey of anti-Zionist/anti-Israel data with antisemitic data i. e. perception of Jews as genetically incompatible with and culturally unassimilable to Gentile societies.[5]

The key points of the ADL survey, greater loyalty to Israel and overemphasis of the German genocide of the Jews, are empirical questions, not statements to be judged normatively as indicators of antisemitism. It could well be the case that some Jewish leaders and members of SAJBoD are Mossad assets (as reported by Al Jazeerah) in which case their primary loyalty would be to Israel. There is a reputable scholarly work that criticises the (Zionist) exceptionalisation of Jewish suffering and the German genocide of the Jews (the shoah, or act of God).[6] Jewish Israeli psychoanalyst Iris Hefets has argued that this exceptionalisation is an instrumentalisation of the meaning of the German genocide of the Jews. Instead, the scholar Michael Rothberg and others (following anti-colonial activist Aime Cesaire and United States (US) civil rights activist WEB Du Bois called for the mutual enrichment of understanding both colonial genocides and genocides in Europe (like that of the Jews).

It is insufficient to identify people who question what they perceive as the ‘overemphasis’ on the ‘holocaust’ as antisemites — there are reputable scholarly and politically progressive arguments that make the same point.[7]

The whole question of the extent of antisemitism in broader South African society is crucial to the complainant showing the prolific discourses that Ms. Jakoet-Harris was feeding her particular discourses into. They have to demonstrate by empirical reference how Ms. Jakoet-Harris’ statements reinforced existing and gathering numbers of antisemitic discourses in the public domain.

The antisemitic signified (‘Jew’)

The actual words or signs expressed by Ms. Jakoet-Harris are important as reflections of her intentions and her meaning, which might or might not have much of an impact on the general social discourses in her community of followers (36 000) and thereby have an effect (or little impact) on discourses in other social groupings and extending into the broader society.

I read all the posts that the complainant has submitted but did not watch the video attached to statement 5 ‘The one girl look like she smaak a ding by Abu Wednesday’. There is also reference to Annexure MJH1 which was not included in the affidavit I read.

The complaint is that the significance of Ms. Jakoet-Harris’ statements are that Jews are evil, wicked (they harvest the organs of Palestinians), and that therefore their businesses should be boycotted, their women sexually assaulted and raped by Palestinian men, and they should be exterminated.

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I summarise the content of Ms. Jakoet-Harris’ statements as follows.

1. She refers to the German genocide of the Jews and juxtaposes it to that of the plausible genocide in Gaza and asks why bodies of the dead in one but not the other can be shown.

2. She refers to the shop owner (Sara Feldman, who appears to have told a person wearing Palestine regalia that she felt uncomfortable with her in her shop) as complicit in the Gaza genocide.

3. There is a comment calling on God to make ‘them’ extinct.

4. She has a picture of a star of David being thrown into a rubbish bin.

5. She refers to the Jewish chiefs of Instagram, Facebook, Google as being likely to prevent anti-Israel and anti-Genocide comments directed at the state of Israel from social media.

6. She gave a reason for the consumer boycott strategy as the fact that those being boycotted — presumably either Zionists and or sympathisers — are being greedy and presumably therefore they would hurt in their pockets from a fall in sales.

7. She relates a story about Israelis benefitting from organs removed by the state of Israel from the bodies of Palestinians and reflects that this might provide for more harvested organs than would be permitted under Jewish law in respect of deceased Jews.

Two of the above statements should be evaluated on the basis of factuality.

1. Regarding the harvesting of organs Mondoweiss reported that Israel returned 80 Palestinian bodies in December 2023 which Gaza authorities claimed were missing vital organs. In November 2023 EuroMed reported that according to the EuroMed Human Rights Monitor, medical professionals in Gaza reported that Palestinian bodies returned by the Israel Defence Force (IDF) were missing hearts, corneas, kidneys and livers. They claimed that the IDF had confiscated corpses from a mass grave that they had dug at Al Shifa hospital. A Newsweek report from November 2023 questioned whether the organ harvesting practice was going on currently, as it could not be effectively hidden, but noted that this had happened in the 1990s.

The Guardian reported in 2009 that during the 1990s the state of Israel had harvested organs from deceased people — both Israelis and Palestinians — without family permission. Independent investigative journalist Jonathan Cook reported on the 1990s controversy around organ theft, criticising some unsubstantiated conclusions drawn by the original Norwegian investigation but pointing to the fact that unauthorised ‘harvesting’ of organs had taken place. The upshot of the above is that across a range of media, and time, in the public domain, the question of Israel’s organ harvesting was a news item fact, and Ms. Jakoet-Harris’ comment has a real reference and cannot simply be written off as the promotion of a blood libel against Jews by nefarious folk with Ms. Jakoet-Harris wittingly/unwittingly conveying the sentiment. Her stated intention (in her answering affidavit) in putting up this and other posts was outrage at the actions in Gaza which the ICJ was to rule as ‘plausible’ genocide, the facts of which were being made available at the end of 2023 through social media. The complainant produced no track record of Ms. Jakoet-Harris making claims of Jews engaging in organ harvesting, in order to indicate her animus to Jews underlying her behaviour, and her stated motivation should be taken at face value, because it is up to the complainant to produce countervailing evidence (our consistent everyday behaviour, at least in a free and open society rather than a totalitarian state, is to give the benefit of the doubt to others that we spontaneously interact with).

2. Regarding the identities of the chiefs of the big tech social media companies: Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg and Google’s founder Larry Page are of Jewish descent, while Kevin Systrom’s (Instagram owner’s) religious/ethnic background is unknown. In any event it is a well-known fact that the Israel lobby, exemplified by the America Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is very influential in US politics, funding Israel-friendly election campaigns and funding the opposition to candidates who are critical of Israel or are anti-Zionists. AIPAC’s influence has been documented in detail by Mearsheimer’s and Walt’s ‘The Lobby’, and the role of AIPAC has been reported extensively over the years partly because AIPAC advertises the fact that it wields this enormous influence over US policy makers using funds to persuade candidates standing for election as well as funding campaigns against candidates critical of Israel. In the just completed US presidential election, Miriam Adelson, widow of billionaire Sheldon Adelson, a self-proclaimed Zionist and supporter of Israel, donated $100 million to Donald Trump’s campaign. Al Jazeera reported that since 7 October 2023 big tech companies have disproportionately censored Palestine solidarity post content while simultaneously permitting pro-Zionist hate speech and incitement to violence. Ms. Jakoet-Harris was acting and posting within a politicised Palestine solidarity movement environment where these facts about the Israel lobby in the US and big tech censorship of Palestine solidarity views, are well known. Her comments about the likelihood of Jewish-owned tech companies censoring posts critical of Israel and Zionism generally, can be explored as a reflection of this reality rather than her being infected by an antisemitism virus.

Her point about SAJBoD being inconsistent with regard to the showing of pictures of the dead in the current (plausible) genocide and the German genocide of the Jews and Sarah Feldman’s alleged complicity in genocide, are a reasonable viewpoint, that should be taken at face value. A review of Prof. Brazerman’s (Harvard Business School) book ‘Complicit — How we enable the unethical’ says there are ordinary types of complicity that we are all likely to be involved in, unless we are careful. This concern, rather than animus towards Jews qua Jews is a reasonable inference of Ms. Jakoet-Harris motivations in addressing Feldman. It resonates with the late Archbishop Tutu’s well-known statement that if you are neutral you are facilitating the oppression and killing meted out by the powerful to the powerless. Likewise, calling on God to make ‘them’ extinct could be a reference to the perpetrators of the genocide rather than all Jews and the star of David in the Trash Can could signify the making extinct of the apartheid state of Israel (just like the apartheid state of South Africa is extinct).

Whether this would be the signification for her 36 000 followers and others who heard her views, is an open question, depending on the interpretive framework those listeners/readers would bring to their reading of her discourse. To some extent that is beyond her control, but one might argue that behoves her to be very clear in the words and images that she chooses, but on the other hand freedom of speech also means the right to decide how to express oneself (within certain broadly defined constitutional limits), and this means the right to use a wide range of emotional and symbolic expressions of meaning.

The Complainant needs to show how the comments and images posted are congruent with and reinforce broader anti-Israel and anti-Zionist discourses, that unequivocally mark out Jews qua Jews as the cause of the current mayhem in Israel/Palestine. Clearly, and assuming there is no incriminating evidence in the video attached to statement 5, and the signification of the words in statement 5 itself, the complainant appears to have failed to establish this.

Claim to represent Jews

The Affidavit by the Cape SAJBoD implies that it represents Jewish South Africans domiciled in the Cape. The affidavit demanded an apology from Ms. Jakoet-Harris to the South African Jewish community for her hate speech — this implies that she make the apology to and through the Cape SAJBoD as representing the interest of that community. The mission statement on the Cape SAJBoD website states clearly that it represents Western Cape Jewry.

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The South African Jewish Board of Deputies (SAJBoD) is an umbrella organisation, one of the affiliates of which is the Cape SAJBoD — there are also affiliates in Gauteng, KwaZulu Natal, Pretoria and Port Elizabeth.

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Through its regional affiliates the umbrella organisation claims to represent South African Jewry as a whole (estimated to number between 52 300 and 75 000 people).

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Under this section dealing with the nature of the organisation, we need to interrogate the Cape SAJBoD’s as well as SAJBoD National’s claim to represent Jewish South Africans. This raises another question, namely is there any other constituency that the SAJBoDs represent? The answer to this, as we shall see, is yes, it is the state of Israel. So the SAJBoDs have an internal South African constituency and an external constituency, a foreign state, Israel. The latter point is important when considering whether the SAJBoDs are acting in good faith to defend Jewish South Africans from antisemitism, or whether they are mainly influenced by their accountability to the state of Israel.

1. Internal constituency:

The assumption that it represents Jewish South African citizens, legitimates SAJBoD National’s and the Cape SAJBoD’s claimed function of resisting the occurrence of antisemitism by reinforcing its self-identity as an organisation acting in good faith to defend the interests of its members/constituents. But, SAJBoD National’s and Cape SAJBoD’s status as ‘representative’ of Jewish South Africans’ needs to be demonstrated as it is by no means clear.

This point is important because if Ms Jakoet-Harris can be shown to have engaged in discourse which arguably has the effect of reinforcing racist views of Jews qua Jews (i.e. is antisemitic) then the question arises as to which group the remedy should be addressed: Jewish South Africans as a whole or the Cape SAJBoD? But I am not implying that she wrote/uttered antisemitic words which taken together had an antisemitic meaning for other antisemites, thereby reinforcing their discourses — as mentioned in the previous section the Cape SAJBoD has not demonstrated this in its affidavit.

The Cape SAJBoD’s About Page indicates that there are 16 000 Jewish South Africans domiciled in Cape Town. According to an article in the SA Jewish Report, the Cape SAJBoD comprises 12 representatives three of which are elected every two years (in a public ballot) by voters on the Cape Town communal register. The other nine members are elected at the board’s conference by its myriad of affiliated organisations (see diagram below).

The percentage of the 16 000 Jewish South Africans living in and around Cape Town, who are listed on the Cape Town communal register, is unknown. Also unknown is the percentage of these registered voters which actually voted in recent elections. These figures are important for determining how many of the 16 000 actually voted, and therefore the extent to which the three delegates can be said to represent Cape Jewry.

A further question is whether the two-yearly public ballot qualifies as free-and-fair elections. One of the conditions for this would be the for minority views (like anti-Zionism) to be freely expressed, heard and debated within the many affiliate structures of the Cape SAJBoD. Steven Friedman, a public intellectual and practising religious Jew, has pointed out that there is a long Jewish tradition which rejects a Jewish state as a form of idolatry (and therefore as blasphemous).[8] However, the hegemonic view within the SAJBoD affiliates is that anti-Zionist views are taboo: in a 2016 presentation to the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on International Relations then SAJBoD president Mary Kluk said that they regarded SA Jews for a Free Palestine (SAJFP) as an antisemitic organisation. The reason is that SAJFP are anti-Zionist. Nor is SAJFP the only Jewish anti-Zionist formation in South Africa. Others are:

o ‘Not in my name’ and ‘South African Jewish Voices’ (led by ex-ANC Minister, Ronnie Kasrils).

o Jewish Voices for Just Peace (which emerged in 2014 during Operation Protective Edge, Israel’s then umpteenth attack on and invasion of Gaza).

o 2 scholars and 100 alumni protesting the Zionist curriculum of Herzlia school, in 2018.

o Concerned South African Jews (numbering some 200 that signed a petition during Israel’s 2023 onslaught, protesting the genocide).

While the numbers of Jewish South Africans taking an anti-Israel and anti-Zionist stance is very small, their existence calls into question Cape SAJBoD’s and SAJBoD National’s locus standi as the representative of all Jewish South Africans.

Besides the directly elected three Cape SAJBoD representatives, there are a further nine elected at the organisation’s conference (presumably held every second year to coincide with the public election). Votes in these elections are cast by delegates representing the range of affiliate organisations, which raises the question as to how representative these organisations are of the 16 000 Jewish South Africans living in and around Cape Town. Steven Friedman claimed that Jewish elites who dominate the types of organisations referred to above, elect representatives from these organisations to sit on the national board and its affiliates structures.[9] These constituent organisations are best described as voluntary organisations and represent SAJBoD National’s and the Cape SAJBoD’s constituency rather than its constituency being all Jewish South Africans.

2. Israel, the external constituency:

Complicating the question of representativeness further is the interest that the SAJBoD National has in defending Israel against criticism, by frequently conflating antisemitism with anti-Zionism, which is the context within which the current Cape SAJBoD charge of antisemitism is levelled.

The bottom line that establishes SAJBoD National’s — and therefore the Cape SAJBoD’s — fealty to Israel is SAJBoD National’s affiliation to the SA Zionist Federation (SAZF). Evidence for this is on the SAZF website, under ‘affiliates’, a screenshot of which follows.

At the same time the Cape SAJBoD lists the SAZF as one of its affiliates.

The following Cape SAJBoD affiliates are self-defined Zionist organisations for whom the bottom line is Israel’s existence as a Jewish nation state: United Herzlia Schools,[10] the United Jewish Campaign (which includes the project Israel United Appeal),[11] Zionist youth organisations Bnei Akiva, Habonim Dror, Netzer and SA Union of Jewish Students, the SAZF itself, the Womens International Zionist organisation, the Union of Orthodox Synagogues (under the umbrella of which Chief Rabbi Warren Goldstein ministers — Goldstein is a committed believer in a Judaism central to which is the Jewish state, Israel) and the Union for Progressive Judaism.

All the above affiliates are also affiliated to the SAZF, reflecting the strong organisational links between SAJBoD, Cape SAJBoD and the SAZF, the common theme being the primacy and central function of the state of Israel to Jewish life and culture.

Within this framework of a common identity, key SAJBoD National office bearers have campaigned and litigated against speech critical of Israel and anti-Zionist in its content (i.e. calling into question the constitution of Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people).

· In 2008/2009 SAJBoD National called for an apology from then Deputy-Minister of Foreign Affairs Fatima Hajaig for saying that ‘Jewish money’ prevented western European states from censoring Israel for its attack on Gaza (through Operation Cast Lead).[12]

· Responding to the same attack, Bongani Masuku, then the international relations officer of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) delivered a protest speech at the University of the Witwatersrand during which he threatened Zionists with ‘harm’. SAJBoD National successfully litigated against Masuku in the Equality Court, and the case went on appeal through the Supreme Court of Appeal and ultimately to the Constitutional Court, which ruled in 2022 that a part of that speech was antisemitic.[13]

· According to Al Jazeera a 2015 SA State Security Agency Report identified SAJBoD office bearers as likely assets of Mossad, Israel’s external intelligence agency — meaning they communicate information as surveyors of the South African social environment vis-a-vis Israel.

· In 2019 SAJBoD National met the Stellenbosch University administration in the wake of protests against Israeli academics attending a December 2018 conference on Trauma held at that university — their joint statement condemned alleged intimidation by the protestors and committed the parties to academic freedom.[14]

· In 2021 Mary Kluk, then SAJBoD President, Mark Pozniak, then SAJBoD Vice Chairman, and Wendy Khan, then SAJBoD National Director, participated in an on-line webinar reflecting on the protests against Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians at the 2001 World Conference against Racism Held in Durban — the gist of this discussion was that these protests against Israel represented an ‘antisemitic hatefest’.[15]

· In 2022 David Saks, then Associate Director of SAJBoD National, described a speech by Mandla Mandela (Nelson Mandela’s grandchild) branding Israel as a pernicious influence in Africa, as inherently antisemitic because it denied the Jewish people their right to self-determination.[16]

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Elision of Israeli apartheid

The SAJBoDs assume that Israel is a normal, democratic society, which is singled out for criticism that no other country faces. They allege that this special criticism is driven by an antisemitic animus. However, Israel is in no way a normal, democratic society but rather an apartheid society, a description which is vehemently denied by officials of the SAJBoDs — and decried as yet another symptom of antisemitism. It is therefore important to establish the factual basis for the description of Israel as an apartheid society. I mention this because of South African apartheid (historical) and the memory and commitment to right the wrongs of this past system as well as of colonialism, contained within our constitution and bill of rights. It is important to clarify this for the Equality Court.

There is concurrence about Israel’s apartheid regime by eight reputable organisations between 2004 and 2022, and also by 11 eminent persons between 2004 and 2014.

The eight reports are the following.[17]

· B’Tselem, Forbidden Roads: Israel’s discriminatory road regime in the West Bank, August 2004,

· Association for Civil Rights in Israel, The State of Human Rights in Israel and the Occupied Territories, 2008 Report, page 17.

· Human Sciences Research Council, Occupation, Colonialism, Apartheid? A Re-assessment of Israel’s Practices in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPTs) Under International Law, A report of the Middle East Project in the Democracy and Governance Programme of the Human Sciences Research Council, Cape Town, 2009.

· UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia, Israeli Practices towards the Palestinian People and the Question of Apartheid, 2017.

· B’Tselem report, This is apartheid — a regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, 12 January 2021.

· Human Rights Watch Report, A Threshold Crossed — Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution, 27 April 2021.

· Amnesty Report, Israel’s Apartheid against Palestinians — A look into decades of oppression and domination, 1 February 2022.

· Al Haq Report, Israeli Apartheid: Tool of Zionist Settler Colonialism, 29 November 2022.

The 11 eminent individuals who have made similar comments about Israeli apartheid, are the following.

· Michael Ben Yair, The War’s Seventh Day, Haaretz, 2 March 2002.

· Meron Benvenisti, Founding a Binational State, Haaretz, 22 April 2004.

· Roee Nahmias, Israeli Terror is Worse, Ynetnews.com, 29 July 2005 (about Shulamit Aloni).

· Jimmy Carter, Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, New York, 2006.

· Shulamit Aloni, Indeed, There is Apartheid in Israel, ynet.co.il, 5 January 2006.

· Chris McGreal, Worlds Apart: Israel, Palestine and apartheid, 6 February 2006, and, Brothers in Arms: Israel’s secret pact with Pretoria, 7 February 2006.

· Dinah A Spritzer, British Zionists drop Haaretz Columnist, Jewish Telegraph Agency, 8 August 2007.

· Ezra HaLevi, Haaretz Editor Refuses to Retract Israel Apartheid Statements, israelnationalnews.com, 5 September 2007.

· Haaretz, Where is the occupation, 7 October 2007.

· Haaretz, Our debt to Jimmy Carter, 15 April 2008.

· Yossi Sarid, Yes It is Apartheid, Haaretz, 24 April 2008.

· Amos Schocken, Citizenship Law Makes Israel an Apartheid State, Haaretz, 27 June 2008.

· John Dugard, Apartheid and Occupation under International Law, Hisham B Sharabi Memorial Lecture, 30 March 2009.

· Haaretz, The Price of Deception and Apartheid, 27 November 2013.

· Times of Israel, Meridor Compares Likud Policies to Apartheid, 19 November 2013.

In contrast, the SAZF’s reaction to the claim about Israeli apartheid is to deny it, indeed to trivialise the claim. As an affiliate of the SAZF these views can reasonably be imputed to SAJBoD. Ben Levitas, then of SAZF, writing in The Cape Argus during 2013 referred to the claim as a malicious fabrication. This is typical of the reaction of Zionists and Zionist organs, including SAJBoD, an affiliate of the SAZF. Many of the office bearers of SAJBoD have recycled into official positions on the SAZF and vice versa.

Conclusion

This article has examined the affidavit submitted by the Cape SAJBoD charging that Mariam Jakoet-Harris violated the prescripts of PEPUDA by uttering antisemitic hate speech on social media and assessed this charge to be wanting because without foundation.

In reaching this conclusion I examined the claim by Cape SAJBoD of a 300 per cent rise in antisemitism during Jakoet-Harris’ postings on social media. Demonstrating the incidence of antisemitism is an important pillar of SAJBoD’s case for clarifying the risks of antisemitic hate speech. I concluded that SAJBoD failed to substantiate this with objective references. In the course of my assessment I referred to other recent contradictory Zionist assessments about the incidence of antisemitism in South Africa.

I then explained, based on considerable referenced research, the definition of antisemitism that informs SAJBoDs’ claims, namely an immutable semiotic code that Zionists use to tendentiously render speech acts as antisemitic. The point is that SAJBoD’s definition is not an objectively verifiable one.

Thirdly, using commonly accepted criteria for representative democracy I examined the SAJBoDs’ claim to represent South African Jewry (including Cape Jewry). It is unclear how representative Cape SAJBoD is of the estimated 16 000 Jewish people living in and around Cape Town, because there are neither published patterns of registered votes as a percentage of this population nor of votes cast as a percentage of registered voters. Only 25 per cent of the Cape SAJBoD representatives are elected by public ballot, with the remaining 75 per cent elected by voluntary organisations which are likely to be dominated by Zionist-inclined elites that do not permit a free and open dissemination of ideas about the desirability of a Jewish nation state, thereby undermining a cardinal principle of democracy, namely free speech.

Finally, I referred to evidence of the consensus amongst human rights organisations, politicians and journalists about the apartheid nature of the Israeli state. I juxtaposed this with the Zionist assumption that Israel is a normal, democratic state. The Zionist narrative perforce elides the point of Israeli apartheid because admitting this would call into question its definition of antisemitism as well as its assumption of the alleged rise in antisemitism.

Whether the Equality Court will consider these four points remains to be seen. Regardless, they are central to the truth of the matter between the Cape SAJBoD and Mariam Jakoet-Harris.

Paul Hendler, Stellenbosch, 26 August 2025.

References

[1] See my article ‘Jewish right not to be invested in Israel……’, under sub-heading ‘Rejection of a Jewish state is antisemitic’.

[2] Cf. Sand, S 2009 The Invention of the Jewish People, Verso, London.

[3] In 2020 historian and holocaust educator Trudy Gold was reported as saying that ‘antisemitism is a form of racism like any other, but has unique qualities… like any disease, it mutates from time to time, and much of its horror is now directed at Israel’.

See my article ‘Losing a battle in the war of position‘, under sub-heading ‘ Conclusion’. In 2021 The South African Jewish Report, which is unapologetically Zionist, convened an on-line panel discussion of local and US-based Zionist leaders, assessing the 2001 World Anti-racism Conference (Durban) at which there was significant civil society opposition to the policies of the state of Israel. The advertisement for the webinar proclaimed ‘How Durban spawned Global Antisemitism’. The dictionary definition of ‘spawn’ is that the spawn as noun means a mass of eggs; spawn as verb means ‘to produce or deposit spawn, to teem, to come forth as or like spawn’. The text of this advertisement implies that antisemitism spreads through the laying of eggs, and is therefore a natural process, and not one driven by social and state forces. This characterisation is congruent with the signification of antisemitism as a virus.

In 2022 Deborah Lipstadt, then President Biden’s envoy for monitoring antisemitism, identified antisemitism as a virus ‘that cannot be cured….. it adapts to new situations and venues……’.

[4] See my article ‘Constitutional Court’s erroneous signification of antisemitism‘, under sub-heading ‘Reasoning of the CC’, where the constitutional court ruled that the word ‘Hitler’ in a speech by COSATU’s then international liaison officer Bongani Masuku, was a reference code to all Jewish people. Under sub-heading ‘Conclusion’ in the same article I reported that the South African Holocaust and Genocide Centre as amica curiae was the principal advisor clarifying the distinction between anti-Zionism and antisemitism, and could reasonably be inferred to have swayed the constitutional justices to rule as they did.

[5] See my article ‘Assessing the antisemitism experts?’, sub-headings ‘Extent of antisemitism in South Africa?’ and ‘Conclusion’.

[6] Cf. Michael Rothberg Multidirectional Memory, page 176 (2009).

[7] See my article ‘Contesting Zionist Identity Claims’, sub-headings ‘Post-holocaust Jewish identity’ and ‘Multi-directional memory’.

[8] See my article ‘The essentialisation of identity and the identity of essentialism‘, which is a review of Friedman’s book ‘Good Jew-Bad Jew? Racism, Anti-semitism and the Assault on Meaning’ Wits University Press (2023).

[9] Personal communication from Steven Friedman, several years ago.

[10] See my article ‘Enquiry into Herzlia School curriculum‘.

[11] See my article ‘Charge of antisemitism 1‘, sub-heading ‘Assessment of the applicant’s case‘ (part dealing with United Jewish campaign and Israel United Appeal).

[12] See my article ‘ANC talks for Palestine, but walks with Israel‘, sub-heading ‘Hajaig and Jewish money‘. Then President Kgalema Motlanthe and then Foreign Minister Nkosazana Zuma got the deputy Foreign Minister to issue a public apology to SAJBoD National.

[13] See my article ‘Constitutional Court’s erroneous signification of antisemitism‘. The key sign identified by the court as signifying antisemitism was the word ‘Hitler’ used by Masuku to refer to as a friend of the Zionists.

[14] See my article ‘Academic freedom VS academic boycott?‘. SAJBoD National’s interaction and engagement with the university over this issue is spread across the article.

[15] See my articles ‘Losing a battle in the war of position‘ and ‘Making sense of the World Conference against Racism battle of discourses‘. Messrs Kluk’s, Pozniak’s and Kahn’s presence and engagement in this discussion as senior SAJBoD office bearers attests to the centrality of Israel to its concerns.

[16] See my article ‘Is Mandla Mandela an antisemite?‘

[17] For further argumentation that the Israeli state is an ethnocracy (and not a democracy) cf. Jeenah, Na’eem, Pretending democracy, living ethnocracy, in Jeenah (editor) Pretending Democracy — Israel, an Ethnocratic State, AMEC, Johannesburg (2012), pages 3–23.

https://medium.com/@paulhendler_43678/charge-of-antisemitism-2-51c597861478