How to normalise ethnic cleansing — with the help of false binaries, AfriForum and anti-Semites

7 Apr 2025

Back in mid-February, Israel-Palestine expert Norman Finkelstein told Daily Maverick that South Africa could expect to suffer an intensifying ‘dirty tricks campaign’ as evidence of Israeli war crimes in Gaza mounted.

In the past few weeks, to deflect from the atrocities, Finkelstein’s predictions have become fact — not only has Israel recruited noted European anti-Semites to its cause, it has successfully exploited the Afrikaner far-right too.

Fascists and other useful bigots

“The anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies.”

These words, believe it or not, were an entry in the diary of Theodor Herzl, Zionism’s founding father. On 26 March 2025, more than a century after the words had been committed to the page, the Israeli musician and writer Jonathan Ofir would make a persuasive case for the fulfilment of Herzl’s prophecy.

Ofir, it turned out, was writing about a conference on anti-Semitism that was about to kick off in Israel, under the aegis of the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. As the culmination of Israel’s “Diaspora Week” — led by the country’s diaspora affairs minister, Amichai Chikli — the event’s explicit message, meant to be heard and understood by Jews around the world, was as bold as it was clear:

If you’re feeling unsafe, if the global rise in anti-Semitism is making you nervous, if you’re worried that the neofascists and the Islamists are coming for you in the night, worry no more — we, in Israel, have got your back.

Except, unfortunately, that Chikli and the conference organisers appeared to have no-ones’ backs; not even their own.

“An Israeli conference on anti-Semitism is falling apart,” Ofir informed his readers, “because they invited too many anti-Semites.”

Say what?

Yes, it was indeed true, every last word; and perhaps more than that, it was the perfect metaphor for the end of the first quarter of 2025, a year that was promising to rip the heart out of every definition and hard historical certainty that the Jewish mainstream of the post-Holocaust era had ever known.

Ofir, to make the point, quoted from one of the most conformist news outlets of the modern Jewish state, The Times of Israel:

“The conference guest list includes controversial European right-wing politicians Jordan Bardella, president of the far-right French National Rally party founded by noted anti-Semite and Holocaust denier Jean-Marie Le Pen; Marion Marechal, a far-right French member of the European Parliament and Le Pen’s granddaughter; Hermann Tertsch, a far-right Spanish member of the European Parliament; Charlie Weimers of the far-right Sweden Democrats party; and Kinga Gál, of Hungary’s Fidesz party.”

As reported, the wake-up call for the event organisers (ie, the government of Israel) had been when Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, had pulled out of the conference on 19 March, a week before it was scheduled to begin. This, according to The Times of Israel, had forced President Isaac Herzog to offer a “compromise” — the ADL, after all, was the primary organisation for the combating of anti-Semitism in the United States.

But what the newspaper did not report was that, since the inauguration of President Donald Trump, Greenblatt had been making excuses for the far-right proclivities of Elon Musk.

Famously, on inauguration night itself, after Musk had shown the world the practiced precision of his “Sieg Heil” salute, Greenblatt had dismissed it as “an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm.” Now, from the very same man who had once compared the Palestinian keffiyeh to a Nazi swastika — a comparison more in keeping with the Zionist script — all of a sudden people like Bardella, Tertsch and Weimers were too much?

The answer, it seemed, was wrapped inside the hypothetical question.

Greenblatt had not suddenly grown a nose for the genuine anti-Semitism of the European far-right; just like the Israeli government wasn’t suddenly coming to the rescue of a genuinely frightened Jewish diaspora.

On 18 March, it turned out, the day before Greenblatt’s announcement of his intention to withdraw from the conference, the Israeli military had shattered the Gaza ceasefire with a series of scorched-earth attacks — fully greenlit by Trump — that had wiped out entire families and killed dozens of infants and other children.

Greenblatt and the Israeli government, in this context, were simply doubling down on the ruse that the conference had ever been what it claimed.

“What the entire affair has made clear is that none of this is about anti-Semitism for real,” Ofir wrote. “Chikli’s goal is to fight those who criticise Israel.”

As Ofir helpfully explained, Chikli was the same cabinet minister who had penned an open letter to Pope Francis in December 2024, slamming the pontiff’s “all-too-mild suggestion to study whether Israel was indeed committing genocide”.

Before signing off by calling Francis “a dear friend of the Jewish people”, the minister had straight-out inferred that His Holiness’s “trivialisation of the term ‘genocide’ ” was tantamount to Holocaust denial.

But no smear campaigns against the pope, no self-exploding conferences on anti-Semitism, no last-minute cancellations or speeches about “moral clarity” were about to mask the stench of the mounting evidence.

Between March 18 and early April 2025, as reported by B’Tselem, Israel’s most incorruptible human rights organisation, more than 1,000 Palestinians would be killed in “indiscriminate bombings” of the Gaza Strip, more than 300 of them children.

“For a month now,” B’Tselem stated, “[the Israeli military] has been starving the population and blocking any entry of supplies and aid. Flour has run out. Since the war began, Israel has killed more than 1,000 members of medical, defence and aid teams in Gaza. Recently Israeli soldiers killed 15 medical and aid personnel and buried them in mass graves.”

Closet Nazis and mangled ambulances

On 31 March 2025, the same day that the first news reports began to appear in the Western press about the mass slaughter of the Palestinian paramedics — an atrocity that would reveal its full horrors in the coming days, as more of the details emerged — one of America’s most influential pro-Israel media commentators, Ben Shapiro, and one of South Africa’s most effective white-right activists, Ernst Roets, released a pre-recorded video conversation.

The pair had agreed, or so it seemed, to keep their dialogue calm and reasonable.

“I think it’s that part that is puzzling to people,” said Shapiro, thoughtfully, as the discussion reached its crux, “because they’ve been taught the miracle story, they’ve seen the movies about Nelson Mandela, they’ve seen the films and TV shows about the great moment when apartheid ended, and there’s sort of been a ban, publicly, on talking about the problems that exist in South Africa post that.”

A ban? Publicly? As in, nowhere in the public domain? As in, nowhere in the public domain after 1994 had anyone ever spoken about South Africa’s problems?

Shapiro, to the profound surprise of the many journalists who had covered the Arms Deal, State Capture and general corruption — often at significant cost to their personal relationships and safety — wasn’t joking.

“To mention that there are some fairly significant problems in South Africa,” he continued, explaining why absolutely nobody had published a negative word about the country in three decades, “is seen as some sort of endorsement of apartheid itself, which is a false binary.”

Of course, to take him at his word would be to believe that Shapiro had never been guilty of issuing a few false binaries of his own.

Like Greenblatt, Shapiro — who had accompanied Musk on a visit to Auschwitz in January of 2024 — had assured his Zionist fanbase that the world’s richest man was incapable of Nazi sympathies.

Because why, he asked, would a Nazi visit Auschwitz?

“No-one honestly believes that Elon Musk was giving a Nazi salute,” Shapiro stated on his show, shortly after Trump’s inauguration, “but they have to characterise their opponents as Nazis, it’s the only way.”

Who were “they”? According to Shapiro, they were the “post-World War Two left” — anybody who was not a Communist, he scoffed, was a Nazi.

Unfortunately for Shapiro, the facts would soon catch up with him. In late March 2025, around the time he was recording his bizarre discussion with Roets, Democracy Now released an explosive segment — featuring The Guardian’s legendary former South Africa correspondent, Chris McGreal — that revealed Musk’s family ties to apartheid and neo-Nazi movements.

And then, on 1 April, a set of facts began to surface that told an even more inconvenient story.

As reported by the Associated Press, the bodies of the executed Palestinian paramedics had been found alongside “mangled ambulances,” which had apparently been “plowed over by Israeli military bulldozers”.

The Israeli analyst Ori Goldberg, perhaps one of the bravest dissenting Jewish voices of the past 17 months, would summarise best what happened next: “Can’t get over the IDF killing 15 paramedics in Rafah, attempting to bury them and their ambulance, claiming they were ‘terrorists’ and then shooting to kill the rescue team sent in to find their missing friends. Not surprised, just stuck. Can’t seem to move on from here.”

In this horrific context, by Daily Maverick’s reckoning, the cultivation of AfriForum by the world’s most sophisticated Zionists was a stroke of formidably cynical genius. Because not only had Roets, a former deputy CEO of AfriForum, been skilfully played by Shapiro; Kallie Kriel, the current CEO, had been skilfully played by Joel Pollak.

“Israel should take South Africa to the [International Court of Justice],” Pollak, editor-at-large of the US’s far-right Breitbart News, had tweeted on 28 March. “ ‘Kill the Boer’ and phrases that accompany it, such as ‘Kill the farmer,’ and ‘shoot to kill’, are clear incitement to genocide.”

On 29 March, Kriel had endorsed the sentiment with two words: “I agree.”

It was all becoming just as Israel-Palestine expert Norman Finkelstein had predicted, back when Daily Maverick interviewed him — in mid-February 2025 — on the strengths and potential pitfalls of South Africa’s genocide case against Israel:

“So right now, the first step is to dirty South Africa’s reputation by claiming it is carrying on in a discriminatory or racist way against whites. It will get progressively dirtier as the case moves through the ICJ.”

On 4 April, to use Finkelstein’s term, it got dirtier still. Eyal Yakoby, one of the most influential pro-Israel voices on X, amplified the false news — published in South Africa on IOL — that the South African government may have had “prior knowledge” of the Hamas attack of 7 October.

“The ICJ case should be tossed if this is true,” stated Yakoby. “South Africa should be sent to The Hague.”

From the perspective of sanity and conscience, it was the word “if” that seemed to settle the matter — mainly because there were no “ifs” about what the Israeli military was doing in Gaza.

“Clinics have been bombed and hundreds of thousands of people displaced,” B’Tselem added in its report of 3 April.

“The Israeli chief of staff Zamir is planning to conquer Gaza, the defence minister Katz is forming a bureau for ‘voluntary emigration’, and Netanyahu has declared Israel is seizing territory. With US support and tacit approval from the EU and the rest of the world — Israel is carrying out ethnic cleansing in the Gaza Strip.” DM

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Fascists and other useful bigots

Say what?

Closet Nazis and mangled ambulances