Political parties must face ruthless accountability at the ballot box for allowing their representatives to fraternize with a genocidal regime.
By Iqbal Jassat
For those who survived the bloody decades of South African apartheid, the stench of state-sponsored propaganda is unmistakable.
In the 1970s and 80s, as the white minority regime choked under global isolation, it launched the infamous Muldergate scandal—a desperate, multi-million-dollar psychological warfare campaign.
They bought off foreign journalists, funded clandestine front organisations, and rolled out the red carpet for corrupt international politicians on choreographed “fact-finding” tours. The strategy was simple: weaponize luxury to manufacture a smokescreen, hiding the horrific reality of forced removals, state-sanctioned torture, and racial subjugation.
Decades later, that exact same apartheid script is being deployed on South African soil. Except this time, the checks are being cut by the Zionist lobby, and the target is our own national conscience.A disgusting and treacherous trend has taken root within our borders.
Mainstream South African journalists from prominent newsrooms quietly slipped away on all-expenses-paid junkets to Israel. Shamefully, a gutless delegation of opposition Members of Parliament embarked on a similarly lavish propaganda tour, chauffeured and chaperoned by Israel’s chief local cheerleader, Rabbi Warren Goldstein.
Funded by apartheid apologists like the South African Friends of Israel (SAFI), these trips are not “educational.” They are a direct assault on our democracy. They are highly calculated exercises in hasbara—state-sponsored brainwashing—designed to buy South African silence and weaponize our public figures to sanitize a genocide.
The sheer cynicism of the timing is staggering. These media and political mercenaries hopped onto luxury flights precisely while the South African government was standing before the International Court of Justice (ICJ), presenting a mountain of undeniable evidence exposing Israel’s systemic slaughter in Gaza.
While our country fulfills its profound historical duty to defend universal human rights, these journalists and politicians chose to wine and dine with the executioners.
By accepting these blood-drenched freebies, South African media professionals traded basic journalistic integrity for a free vacation. When reporters allow themselves to be handled by a regime actively slaughtering tens of thousands of Palestinians, flattening hospitals, and deliberately starving millions of children—and then hide the funding from their readers—they are no longer journalists. They are public relations agents for a rogue state. They are human shields for war criminals.
The politicians who joined Rabbi Goldstein’s disgraceful circus have committed an even deeper betrayal. To stand grinning next to Israeli President Isaac Herzog while Israeli bombs rain down on refugee camps is an act of unmitigated moral bankruptcy. It is a spit in the face of our own liberation struggle.
Rabbi Goldstein has spent months viciously slandering South Africa as a proxy for foreign terror, yet these pathetic opposition MPs chose to follow his lead, effectively endorsing a far-right, anti-South African agenda aimed at legitimizing colonial occupation.
Let us strip away the polite vocabulary: these junkets are an attempt to purchase South African complicity. The Zionist lobby knows the immense moral authority South Africa commands globally. If they can corrupt our journalists into writing soft-focused filler pieces, or get our MPs to pose for photo-ops in Tel Aviv, they can broadcast a lie to the world that Mandela’s children are divided.
They are using our own people to validate the destruction of Palestine.
As citizens of a nation that shattered apartheid through the power of international solidarity, we cannot sit idly by. We bear a heavy, non-negotiable historical debt. We must weaponize our outrage, refuse to be co-opted, and aggressively dismantle this influence machinery.
South Africans must rise up and unconditionally reject any complicity in whitewashing Israel’s monstrous crimes of apartheid and genocide.
Political parties must face ruthless accountability at the ballot box for allowing their representatives to fraternize with a genocidal regime.
We must aggressively turbocharge the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement. Israel must be rendered a complete global pariah, just as white South Africa was.
When the history of the Palestinian liberation is finally written, let it be known that the masses of South Africa refused to be bought, refused to be silenced, and stood unyielding against the Zionist propaganda machine. We must drag this complicity into the light and crush it.
Iqbal Jassat
Executive Member
Media Review Network
Johannesburg
South Africa