"Contrary to what is often claimed, no credible Jewish leader equate any criticism of the State of Israel with antisemitism, that is, hatred towards people of the Jewish faith and/or ethnicity. Pretty much without exception, all accept, as per the formulation of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, that “criticism of Israel similar to that levelled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic”.
What, then, would be the case when the above-mentioned criticism, rather than being similar to that levelled against other countries, was in fact distinctly hostile and biased? Here, too, there is room to argue that even when the views expressed about Israel are unreasonably negative and fundamentally untrue, this need not automatically point to an underlying antisemitic motive. It might be that many people genuinely do deplore bigotry towards Jews as a people or religious community while at the same time being irrationally prejudiced when Israel, as a country, is concerned. That, of course, does not make unbridled antipathy towards Israel, or any other state for that matter, somehow acceptable. Prejudice is never defensible, whether it is aimed at a particular ethnic, racial, religious or other such group or whether against a particular country. The singling out the world’s sole Jewish majority state for such negative discrimination also inevitably begs the question as to what the underlying motivation might be. However, so long as the target is strictly confined to Israel as a distinct political entity, then it cannot unequivocally be stated to be motivated by antisemitism. Other reasons – ideological, political, even plain ignorance - may well be the determining factor.
All this being acknowledged, it is nevertheless a reality that antisemitic hatred around the world has reached levels not seen for many decades, arguably not since the pre-World War II era. It is further undeniable, from the myriad of reports on attacks on Jewish communities around the globe that have been flooding in since the 7 October 2023 massacres unleashed the current bloody conflict between Israel and its neighbours, that radical anti-Israel sentiment is the primary source of this hatred. Denouncing Israel for its alleged misdeeds, even when taking extreme and overtly biased forms, ultimately falls within the realm of freedom of expression, and no reasonable people would deny this. The problem is when anti-Israel invective crosses over into propagating the kind of hateful stereotypes that have been and continue to be used to defame and incite hostility against Jewish people in general.
And that is precisely what News24 columnist Oscar van Heerden is guilty of. In his opinion piece of 24 March (‘Geo-political turbulence: The complex web of Trump, Israel, and diplomacy’), he combines his now standard anti-Israel vitriol with levelling sundry defamatory, and inflammatory, charges against the representative leadership of the South African Jewish community itself.
What would constitute an antisemitic stereotype? One is that Jews are disloyal to the countries in which they live and routinely go about undermining the welfare of their host societies. From this, it follows that they should be regarded as a hostile, harmful, alien and unwelcome element of society, people to be distrusted, shunned or even removed altogether. Another is that Jews wield excessive power in society through which they manipulate events in pursuit of their own selfish and immoral ends. These themes - paranoid, irrational and profoundly racist - have been a core part of antisemitic thinking down the ages, providing the ideological underpinning of such classic conspiratorial screeds as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Henry Ford’s The International Jew and Hitler’s Mein Kampf, and, in our own day, the founding Charter of Hamas. Inevitably, a great deal of what appears under the guise of simple “criticism of Israel” is heavily influenced by such toxic ideas.
The manner in which van Heerden goes about propagating these vile canards is encapsulated in the following damning paragraph in his article:
I repeat again, when diagnosing the problem and how to respond to it, we are not fighting the Americans here. No, we are, in fact, fighting the Zionists both abroad and domestically. Their proxies are the White House, the US Congress, some local political parties, the Jewish Board of Deputies through their chief rabbi among many others. They have decided it is time to teach SA a lesson they will never forget. Sanctions, aid, executive orders, removal from preferential trade agreements, and so much more are still to come.
Note how Van Heerden frames the issues in “us” and “them” terms. By “we”, he means South African people at large. By “they”, he refers explicitly to the elected, representative voice of the local Jewish community, the SA Jewish Board of Deputies (SAJBD), as well as that community’s most senior religious representative. This is classic “othering”, where a particular portion of the population is told that they do not belong and are unwelcome in their own country.
Van Heerden’s meaning is all too clear: In his formulation, the mainstream Jewish community should be regarded as enemies of South Africa who are actively working to undermine the country’s vital interests and against whom “we” (i.e. everyone else) need to fight against. It amounts to outright incitement against a religious minority, echoing the self-same slanders that Jew-haters have engaged in throughout the ages. Nor is it this writer’s first offence. He has in fact a lengthy track record of combining over-the-top anti-Israel diatribes with malicious digs at Jews in general, including twisting the Biblical tradition of ‘chosenness’ as a way of portraying them as having some kind of mythical superiority complex vis-à-vis everyone else. That itself is a standard antisemitic ploy and a further indication of the “us against them” approach he has adopted regarding Jews and the rest of humanity.
Predictably, van Heerden makes sure to refer to a few Jewish individuals who happen to share his venomously hostile views about Israel as evidence that he is not antisemitic, but far from being any kind of defence, if anything it compounds the offence. It implies that it is only that small minority of fringe Jews who have turned against their own community and added their voices to those who malign and actively seek to harm it who are worthy of any respect, as opposed to the broad majority of Jewry, whose members can be reviled and defamed without reservation.
So far as the specific attack on the SAJBD goes, the accusation that the Board is seeking to cause harm to this country, whether on the international stage or domestically, is a scandalous libel. Indeed, as anyone even marginally acquainted with what the SAJBD actually says and does will acknowledge, the complete opposite is the case. As the representative voice of SA Jewry, the SAJBD has unreservedly devoted itself to contributing to the greater nation building process and its record of service, whether in the field of democracy building, social upliftment, the upholding of human rights for all citizens and sundry other fields, speaks for itself. Van Heerden could easily have ascertained these facts, but preferred to disregard the evidence in order to smear the organisation – and by extension the community it represents - as traitors to their own country. There is no excuse for this. It is unadulterated Jew-baiting, however much it masquerades as moral outrage."
David Saks
Consultant to SAJBD.