So, Israel, the world’s most overworked, overused and abused scapegoat, is the “hidden hand” behind South Africa’s latest xenophobia crisis?
Of course it is … if you believe the latest conspiracy theory to emerge from the fever swamps of South African social media.
But is Israel really orchestrating South Africa’s xenophobic violence – or “afrophobia”, as activists and academics in the refugee and migration space now call it?
And if so, why would tiny Israel have the inclination to find time in its hectic military schedule despite fighting wars back home, including against the Iranian behemoth?
In retaliation, apparently, for South Africa taking it to the International Court of Justice in December 2023, on a genocide-in-Gaza charge. Or so the theory holds.
Israel could be understandably miffed at South Africa lodging its case “urgently” within weeks of a genuine genocidal attack by Hamas on October 7, 2023. That urgency speedily dissipated and South Africa’s case has proved ill-judged. Its own lawyers recently requested and were granted an extraordinary 18-month extension, meaning that its written submissions won’t be complete until 2029.
Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs was unsparing on X: “This case was never about the facts. It has always been a propaganda campaign by South Africa in the service of Hamas, masquerading as a legal process.”
A local pan-Africanist Facebook post claims that Israelis are poised to swoop into South Africa, destabilise it from within by pushing Black Africans “to the margins” and rebuild it “in their own image.” With a little help from friends in “Western powers” (aka the US).
That has led critics to suggest that the conspiracy theory is aimed as much at US as Israeli “hidden hands”.
Accuse Israel of trying to destabilise South Africa from within and you describe precisely what ANC governance has actually done after more than 30 years since “liberation” – from within, by its own hand. The hidden hand has always been home-grown.
If Soviet-Jewish writer and war correspondent Vasily Grossman were around, he’d say: “Tell me what you accuse Jews of and I’ll tell you what you’re guilty of.”
With those words and a novelist’s precision, Grossman captured what psychologists call “projection”. It’s the mechanism by which people and institutions attribute to others the very impulses, failures and crimes they cannot face in themselves.
Their accusations are not random, say psychologists. They are often confessions.
Deflecting attention
Accuse Jews of controlling the world through money and fear, and you may be the one exerting that control precisely by those means. Or you may be helpfully deflecting attention from the real controllers, not all of them Jewish.
A South African example of that projection is a speech by Dr Imtiaz Sooliman, founder and CEO of Gift of the Givers, a charity acknowledged globally for its humanitarian disaster-relief work.
On October 5, 2023, Sooliman addressed an anti-Israel protest in Cape Town beneath a banner declaring “We Are All Hamas”, saying that “they (Zionists) run the world with fear. They control the world with money.”
He tried preempting accountability by saying antisemitism charges are just tools to silence criticism of Israel. And there is much for which the world’s only Jewish state can rightfully be criticised. But, according to some of the world’s leading international-law experts (not all of them Jewish), genocide is not it.
And antisemitic tropes are tropes, whatever cover is thrown over them.
Sooliman’s language feeds into the core premise of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. That’s an enduring publication that the Russian Tsarist secret police fabricated between 1898 and 1903.
It purported to be the minutes of a secret meeting of Jewish leaders plotting world domination through control of global financial systems, governments and media. The Times of London exposed it as a clumsy, plagiarised forgery in 1921.
That did not dent its popularity. If anything, it boosted it after Hitler cited it. Henry Ford distributed 500,000 copies across the US. It is still in print.
Jew-hater’s lexicon
Sooliman’s declaration is one of the oldest tropes in the Jew-hater’s lexicon. It feeds off the original “blood libel” – the term for the claim that Jews kill children to drink their blood in religious ritual dating back to the 12th century.
That both claims retain their power into the 21st century is testimony to Jew hatred’s enduring power. It is, after all, the world’s oldest hatred. Call it “antisemitism”, if you prefer that 19th-century, pseudo-scientific euphemism coined by Jew-haters themselves to make their loathing sound respectable.
Jew hatred has helped to make “Zionist” the preferred code word for Jew among some of the anti-Israel lobby.
Lobbyists these days deploy it as a swear word and a deliberate strategy to avoid detection of hate speech online. Social media platforms are slow to close the loophole because the distinction between legitimate criticism of Israeli government policy and antisemitic conspiracy theory dressed up as political commentary is notoriously difficult to police at scale.
But perhaps the most common and ironic example of projection in modern times is how the genocide accusation against Israel routinely slides into an accusation against Jews simply for being Jewish. There can be no worse an accusation to make against victims of actual genocide than to wrongly accuse them of being perpetrators of it.
That is projection in its most naked form.
Hamas’s charter is explicitly genocidal towards Jews. Hamas political bureau member Ghazi Hamad declared on Lebanese TV on October 24, 2023, that October 7 was “just the first time and there will be a second, a third, a fourth” until Israel’s existence is “finished”.
And while this is a South African story, it sits in a very long, very dark global tradition. It includes the latest mutation of Jew hatred with documentation over 900 years old.
Jew hatred has caused pogroms, mass expulsions of entire communities from countries Jews had lived in for generations, and the systematic murder of six million Jews.
The accusations change. The consequences for targets stay the same.
Bleakly notes
Post-October 7, Jews are being savagely attacked worldwide and killed just for being Jews. And as the title of US author Dara Horn’s book bleakly notes, People Love Dead Jews.
October 7 is where nine centuries of Jew hatred, unchecked and unashamed, has ultimately led.
Yet some critics still deny Hamas’s atrocities on October 7. They say Israel “had it coming”, that it was a “false flag” or “psyop” (pyschological operation), in which Israel staged the massacre of its own civilians to gain sympathy and justify genocide on Palestinians in Gaza.
That is Holocaust denial in real time.
It raises the question of where this conspiracy theory linking Israel to xenophobic violence began.
Mzoxolo Mpolase, managing editor of Political Analysis South Africa, did some forensic work in an article on May 27 on his website. He traces the conspiracy theory to a single January 2026 post in the Times of Israel’s open blog section, a platform for third-party contributors with no editorial endorsement implied.
The author is Grant Gochin, a South African diplomat, writer and wealth advisor based in California. Gochin argued that African states are trapped by colonial borders and that South Africa should fragment into smaller sovereign entities. That was his opinion, nothing more, as Mpolase notes.
That’s where the chain of evidence ends.
Gochin posits no funding channel, instruction or organisational relationship between Israel, its government’s policy and South Africa’s xenophobic or afrophobic protests.
Seth Mandel, writing in Commentary Magazine on June 11, 2026, identifies an “emerging, seemingly iron rule” about accusations against Israel that may help to explain the real dynamic behind the conspiracy theory.
“Pay attention to the when, and you’ll figure out the why.” He could have been channeling Grossman.
“Wild accusations”
Mandel gives four notable items, including a column that appeared in the New York Times on May 11, with “wild accusations that Israel is training dogs to rape Palestinian inmates, along with uncorroborated allegations of state-sanctioned abuse”.
On May 12, a major commission released a two-year catalogue of evidence showing that Hamas used mass rape and sexual torture as a key weapon of its military strategy on October 7 and after. That made the timing of the Times piece, in preempting the results of an actual investigation into Hamas, “suddenly clear”, as Mandel notes.
Grossman saw the mechanism in 1960. Mandel documented it in real time.
It’s disturbing, then, that South African government ministers at the highest levels have helped to spread the hidden-hands conspiracy theory.
Foreign Minister Ronald Lamola gave the keynote address at a symposium co-hosted by DIRCO (Department of International Relations and Cooperation) and the South African Institute of International Affairs in Cape Town on May 25, 2026. He condemned the xenophobic violence strongly and took care not to mention Israel by name.
He undid that good work by saying that “with the current geo-political environment, and South Africa’s role in the international space, including our case at the ICJ, you cannot exclude state and non-state actors trying to erode the human-rights standing of South Africa.”
That was a dog whistle with a foghorn attached.
Prominent refugee and migration academics and activists have amplified it. Chief among them is Julie Eccles, a public face of Kopanang Africa Against Xenophobia (KAAX).
KAAX is a broad, grassroots civil-society coalition claiming to advocate for pan-African solidarity and constitutional rights for everyone, regardless of nationality or legal status.
Everyone, apparently, except “Zionists”, in Eccles’s book.
She appeared on a Salaam Media televised panel on June 3, with Sharon Ekambaram, KAAX co-founder and head of Refugee and Migrant Rights at Lawyers for Human Rights, Prof Loren Landau, professor of migration and development at Wits and Oxford, and Mthunzi Mdwaba, a controversial businessman and legal academic.
The panel’s topic was Xenophobia in South Africa: Is There a Hidden Hand Stirring the Chaos?
“Whatever his vision is”
On live TV, Eccles named a “hidden hand” who she described as “an Israeli billionaire” and “dyed-in-the-wool Zionist”. She said he has donated “at least R40-million to Action SA”, a party that “doesn’t even have a seat in parliament”, and “talks openly” about turning South Africa into “whatever his vision is”.
She got most of that wrong, whether by default or design. Neither reflects well on her or KAAX.
Action SA has six seats in Parliament. The billionaire is the South African – Durban-born – Martin Moshal, currently living in Australia.
He is the largest known donor to opposition parties in South Africa, and has given millions to the DA, Action SA, the IFP and BOSA, which suggests he is meaningfully invested in South Africa’s democratic process. He is known to be private, media-shy and not to talk openly in public about anything.
The billionaire is also a philanthropist.
Eccles goes by the anti-Israel lobby’s rule book of injecting Jewish figures as shadowy puppet masters into local disputes and manufacturing foreign conspiracies where no logical connection exists.
Mdwaba declared himself “happy” that Eccles had “mentioned Israeli elements”. That was his dog whistle to signal Israel as a hostile actor behind the violence.
Landau, whose reputation at Wits and Oxford universities rests on rigorous, evidence-based analysis could have challenged and corrected Eccles’ claims in seconds. He said nothing about her misrepresentations. Neither did Ekambaram.
Salaam Media, which claims to be committed to “humanitarian journalism”, could have included at least one dissenting voice on the panel. There were none. The question in the panel title was rhetorical, the answer decided before the cameras rolled.
That is not journalism. It is propaganda.
The ANC’s support for the Palestinian cause is a backdrop to the conspiracy theory. It remains rooted in its history of solidarity with anti-colonial liberation movements, regardless of how violently extreme. The apartheid smear against Israel drives much of its rhetoric. Some South Africans who actually lived under apartheid recognise and reject it as a propaganda weapon.
Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East. Its Arab citizens vote, sit in the Knesset and serve on the Supreme Court. That is not apartheid policy by Israel’s government.
Rightly criticise Israel
And while there is much for which one can and should rightly criticise Israel, legal scholars internationally, not all of them Jewish, will tell you that apartheid and genocide are not it.
South Africa remains no stranger to strains of afrophobic violence. Since “liberation” in 1994, there have been at least six major waves of such violence against Black African migrants. The worst came in May 2008, when 62 people died, some burning alive to death in the streets, and over 100,000 were displaced.
The response from some ministers, including President Cyril Ramaphosa, since October 7 has been to wear a Palestinian scarf in public and ignore deepening potholes in the country’s literal and figurative roads.
The formula for scapegoating Jews has not changed globally in 900 years.
The accusation is always a confession. The charge is always a mirror. And the target is always the same.
US Representative Ritchie Torres put it bluntly X in 2024, when Iran’s Supreme Leader praised American campus protesters against Israel: “When … the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism and antisemitism .. praises you, you have become useful idiots on the wrong side of history.”
South Africa’s hidden-hand theorists may think they are on the right side of history by demonising Israel and Jews who support it.
If they keep going – and they most likely will – their place is secure as useful idiots on history’s wrong side.
[Image: engin akyurt on Unsplash]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
If you like what you have just read, support the Daily Friend