Chief Rabbi Goldstein abuses legal and religious concepts in attack on Ramaphosa

On 21 May 2025, President Donald Trump’s Oval Office was yet again turned into the set of a reality television show livestreamed into the homes of many millions of viewers all over the world.

The meeting between the US president and South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa quickly shifted gear from the initial pleasantries to spectacular political theatre as Trump played video material purporting to be evidence of a “white genocide” in South Africa.

This included footage of Julius Malema in a packed football stadium chanting “Kill the Boer, kill the farmer” and a “cemetery with 1,000 white crosses” that turned out to be a memorial commemorating the murder of two farmers.

As this political theatre was taking place in the White House, a real-time genocide was unfolding in Gaza with Israel’s relentless bombardment, its humanitarian blockade of food, water and medical aid and its refusal to comply with international court rulings.

In the face of these developments, and an intensification of international pressure and criticism of Israel, South Africa’s chief rabbi, Warren Goldstein, decided it was time to respond.

In his Facebook video message Goldstein accused Ramaphosa of many things, including allowing a “South African genocide” to take place. Although the chief rabbi refrained from using the term “white genocide”, and acknowledged that all South Africans are victims of violent crime, he appeared to endorse the key talking points of Trump’s Maga movement and South African right-wing, white nationalist agendas.

This played right into the accusations of “white genocide” plied by right-wing Afrikaner organisations to discredit the South African government’s transformation policies, especially its land reform and employment equity programmes.

But the chief rabbi went much further than these white nationalists.

In his relentless attack on the South African President, he insisted that the “shame” and “humiliation” that Ramaphosa had experienced in the Oval Office on 21 May 2025 was “divine retribution” for South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ).

This is how the chief rabbi described how God choreographed what happened in the White House meeting:

“As I watched the White House spectacle unfold, as I watched President Ramaphosa literally squirm in his seat, visibly uncomfortable, humiliated, as President Trump accused him of genocide in his own country, I couldn’t help but think, I’m not a prophet and I do not presume to know the will of God, and yet the thought kept crossing my mind – this moment, this humiliation, felt biblical. It felt like divine retribution. It felt like justice for a different earlier sin.

“Because Ramaphosa and the ANC stood on a different international stage and falsely accused the Jewish state, the State of Israel, of genocide, a lie, a libel, a defamation of an entire nation. And now, in front of the whole world, they themselves are being accused of genocide. This time a true genocide demonstrated by the cold, brutal facts of a murder rate spiralling out of control. The blood of countless victims on their hands and their total inability to protect South Africans of any race or background.”

In this wide-ranging video message Goldstein held Ramaphosa personally accountable for Malema’s chants of “Kill the Boer, kill the farmer”, claiming that he “has never publicly condemned the chant as hate speech, not even in the Oval Office when he had every opportunity and motive to do so”.

This was followed by an assault on the South African Constitutional Court for not ruling that Malema’s chants are hate speech: “This judgment casts a shadow on the integrity and legacy of the Constitutional Court and makes a mockery of their role as the guardians of human rights in South Africa.”

Although the violent crime statistics in South Africa are truly shocking, Goldstein’s claims of a “South African genocide” radically dilutes and relativises the legal definition and meaning of the term.

This constitutes a dangerous trivialisation of genocidal catastrophes, including the Holocaust. It thereby threatens to undermine the very precise meaning of genocide, a concept which was introduced into international law after the Holocaust by Raphael Lemkin, a Jewish Polish lawyer.

Lemkin’s concept helped establish the 1948 Genocide Convention, which legally defines the act of genocide. As the son of a German Jewish refugee whose entire family was murdered in Auschwitz and Riga, I appreciate the importance of Lemkin’s precise definition of genocide. Using the notion of a “South African genocide” to refer to a violent crime crisis undermines this precision.

Most international law experts would agree that Hamas perpetrated horrific war crimes against civilians in Israel on 7 October 2023.

At the same time, there is currently a growing consensus among Holocaust and genocide scholars that the Israeli military is indeed perpetrating genocide in Gaza.

This assessment draws on the very specific criteria that Lemkin used to define the crime of genocide which, according to the Genocide Convention, consists of any of five “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”.

These acts include killing members of the group, causing them serious bodily or mental harm, imposing living conditions intended to destroy the group, preventing births and forcibly transferring children out of the group.

In terms of this very precise definition, genocide is a crime of special intent (dolus specialis) that deliberately targets a protected group. How can the unacceptably high violent crime levels that impact on all South Africans possibly constitute genocide in terms of this definition?

Just as legal concepts need to be used with precision, one would also expect that the use of religious concepts needs to meet stringent definitions.

It is therefore surprising to discover the flagrant abuse of religious concepts by the chief rabbi when he claimed that the shame and humiliation experienced by Ramaphosa in the White House was “divine retribution” for an earlier sin – taking Israel to the ICJ.

I will quote a lengthy passage from the video that conveys the lengths to which the chief rabbi was prepared to go to stretch the meanings of both “genocide” and biblical notions of divine justice:

“… It felt like what our sages called Midah Keneged Midah, measure for measure, a precise justice, a reckoning. And as that thought took hold, another verse came to mind. I kept hearing the words of Genesis in 12:3: ‘Those who bless you will be blessed, and those who curse you will be cursed.’

“President Ramaphosa and the ANC cursed Israel, and now it feels as though they are being cursed. You can feel it in the air, in the sense of decay and despair, you can feel the weight of a divine curse settling on this Presidency… In the heavenly court, you will stand accused of presiding over the human suffering of all those who were murdered on your watch. The King of All Kings will ask you what you did to stop the carnage, the genocide… and you will be held eternally accountable for every moment of human suffering you caused through your callous neglect, through your omissions and commissions…”

What is happening here? Why is the chief rabbi, the spiritual leader of South African Jews, so brazenly abusing the specific definitions and meanings of legal and religious concepts to denounce the President and the Constitutional Court?

Is it simply to score political points? How will such divisive speech, which is uttered on behalf of the whole Jewish community, make Jews any more secure in South Africa?

It is quite conceivable that the chief rabbi – like so many other defenders of Israel’s actions in Gaza – is becoming increasingly defensive and desperate as international public opinion and Western governments become more critical of Israel’s actions in Gaza.

The chief rabbi’s false and unconsidered accusations and condemnations appear to be a radical displacement and distraction from the horrific realities of a genocide unfolding daily in Gaza. DM