A Cancelled Tennis Match Exposed South Africa’s Anti-Zionist Lie
The controversial dispute between King David and Roedean schools may now be settled, for all intents and purposes, but it feels like its implications are going to reverberate for a while yet.
The controversial dispute between King David and Roedean schools may now be settled, for all intents and purposes, but it feels like its implications are going to reverberate for a while yet.
For those who haven’t been following the news over the past week, the whole matter began when students from the Roedean Senior School cancelled playing a girls tennis fixture against their counterparts at King David High School. Not exactly the stuff of headline news, one might think, but this simple cancellation would quickly reveal itself to be anything but simple, and would lay bare a simmering antisemitism that exists not just in one particular, prestigious private school, but in a national culture where harmful lies about Zionism, Jews, and the Jewish State have been propagated and normalised - most especially by academic institutions and the country’s ruling political party.
It has also revealed the pernicious nature of a pair of otherwise conflicting ideologies, how they have infiltrated, indeed captured, key parts of our shared reality, but are nonetheless not the will of the vast majority of “normal”, fair-minded, sensible people.
Now, it has to be said: thank God it was a cancelled tennis match that has turned out to be the crucible of what will hopefully be a national moment of soul-searching and not, oh I don’t know, the mass murder of innocent Jews at a religious celebration on a very public beach. Indeed, there are – if I dare make such a sweeping generalisation – few South African Jews who aren’t extremely grateful to be living in a country where overt, and most especially violent, antisemitism is much, much less prevalent than in most diaspora communities across the world.
But things can change and they can change especially quickly in a country that having spent three decades propagating a culture – and a legal system – with a zero tolerance policy towards bigotry of any kind, has started to create a space for the acceptance, even virtuousness, of one particular bigotry: anti-Zionism. And as this controversy between King David and Roedean has proven, the membrane between anti-Zionism and antisemitism, if it exists at all, is very thin indeed.
Lies, Damn Lies, and Gaslighting
When Roedean first cancelled that tennis match last week, accusations of antisemitism by the South African Jewish Boards of Deputies and Education were quickly met with firm denials by Roedean – who stated, unequivocally, that the cancellation was nothing more than a scheduling conflict and that they had given King David written notice in advance, informing them of this. Roedean further insisted that antisemitism was absolutely antithetical to the school ethos, that they had played King David in various sports for years with no issues, and that they agreed to forfeit the fixture granting King David the win.
The last two points were true, the rest, sadly, were anything but. A leaked phone call between (now former) Roedean headmaster, Phuti Mogale, and King David principal, Lorraine Srage, revealed quite clearly, what was going on. There was no scheduling conflict. Mogale, sounding, to be fair, quite flustered and embarrassed, asked Srage if King David has been facing pressures from within its community and without over inter-school sporting events and when the latter answered in the negative, Mogale admitted that, “we are facing pressure from our community and our constituents regarding just not playing against King David”.
When Srage pressed her on the matter, whether it was because King David was a Jewish school, after some humming and hawing about the armed guards at the King David campus being traumatising to the girls, Mogale admitted as much. The reason for the pressure? “They are saying, Mogale continued, “because of the stance that the government took [regarding Israel], we are supposed to support that.” She insisted that she had told these community members that Roedean is an apolitical school, but the pressure was still on. Still, she promised that she would “have a discussion with these people in our community,” and that the school would be honouring the fixture.
This took place on Monday 2 Feb, the day before the match was supposed to happen, but when the day arrived and without hearing otherwise, the King David girls arrived at Roedean, only to discover the local team was nowhere to be found. Srage contacted Mogale again to find out what was happening, only to be told that the Roedean players were in “geography workshops” and would not be joining the King David players on the tennis courts. Another lie.
A few days after these leaked calls rebuffed virtually all of Roedean’s claims, rightly or wrongly, Mogale resigned from her post and the school issued an apology to King David and the Jewish community, acknowledging the “hurt” it had caused and the dishonesty of its initial explanations, promising an independent investigation into the matter on their side. Indeed, in the middle of writing this, the head of the school board, Dale Quaker, also just resigned from his position. King David and the Jewish Board of Education accepted the apology and both schools seem ready to move on.
Great. As they should.
But there’s just too much to unpack about the incident and far too much that is of continued relevance for the rest of us to close the door on it just yet. We should at least try to learn some serious lessons from it, because it clearly has plenty yet to teach us.
The Lie of Anti-Zionism and the (Ir)Responsibility of the ANC
At the heart of this whole story is something that Jews have been saying repeatedly, that if there is any difference between anti-Zionism and antisemitism, it’s all but entirely negligible. In response, Jews have been told either that it is, at best, just overblown paranoia or, at worst, a cynical attempt to vilify anyone who dares to criticise Israel.
But, of course anti-Zionism has never meant criticising the Israeli government, its policies and the implementation of these policies, no matter how harshly. This is the straw man that is constantly raised in defence of anti-Zionism, but no one – least of all Israelis – would suggest that simply lambasting the government of Israel makes one anti-Zionist, let alone antisemitic.
Anti-Zionism is, very simply, the assertion that out of all the ethno-states in the world, only Israel does not have the right to exist. No such claim is ever made about China, India, Saudi Arabia, Ireland or the vast majority of countries in the world that are defined by a particular culture or religious identity, only Israel. It’s also involves holding Israel to standards that no other country is held to and even its most honest mistakes are used to demonize it.
Anti-Zionism isn’t merely about criticising specific actions of Israel’s military, but is about saying that any Israeli defence against an invading force is a de facto war crime and every unfortunate civilian casualty in a war that it did not start is an act of genocide. And, most pertinently for the case at hand, anti-Zionism is blaming not just the people of Israel for the actions of the government, but all Jews around the world who dare to align with their historical and national homeland. Which is, for the record, the vast, overwhelming majority of Jews.
This is why it is so telling that the excuse the “community members” and “stockholders” of Roedean used to justify their refusal to allow their children to play with and against Jewish children is that they were only following the “stance” of the government.
Now, maybe I’m forgetting something, but I don’t believe this government, even its ruling party, ever called for anything approaching the boycott of Jewish schools. But just because the ANC has never been explicitly antisemitic and has certainly never legislated anti-Jewish laws, doesn’t change that it is unabashedly and shamelessly anti-Zionist.
In response to Hamas’ massacre on 7 October 2023, rather than offering even the tersest word of sympathy towards the innocents who had lost their lives or to South Africa’s own loyal Jewish community with its strong, frequently familial ties to Israel, the ANC had its head of DIRCO call Hamas’ leaders to sympathise with their plight – not even the Palestinian people, but the radical Islamist terror group that had just brought war onto their heads. And, after years of falsely accusing Israel of Apartheid, it immediately blamed Israel for the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust and immediately accused the country of war crimes and genocide the minute it started to strike back against Hamas.
Despite South Africa’s robust constitution promising equality for all its citizens and both a culture and a legislature that outlaws hate speech and bigotry, it has been an unspoken rule that as long as you cloak it as anti-Zionism, anti-Jewish hatred isn’t just acceptable, but it effectively has the ANC’s seal of approval. Best of all, it made it possible to gas-light Jews for having the temerity to suggest that hatred of their national homeland may, in fact, be hatred for them too.
At least, that is how it has been. The Roedean vs King David saga may, in fact, offer hope, not just for Jews and Zionists, but to all decent, fair-minded people who actually believe in the ideals on which the New South Africa was formed three decades ago.
There have, inevitably, been the usual defences of Roedean’s actions, ironically and with zero self-awareness, by those who still have the temerity to claim that anti-Zionism has nothing to do with antisemitism and that King David deserved to be boycotted for being “Zionist”. But the façade has started to wear extremely thin. People whose minds aren’t entirely captured by this pernicious ideology can see quite plainly that shunning South African kids for perceived crimes committed by the government of a country half a world away is identifiably, certifiably insane – and any ideology that suggests otherwise is clearly doubly so.
Certainly, this is reflected in how a great number of Roedean alumni have come forward to unequivocally condemn their alma mater, calling it a betrayal of the values that it and they once so proudly represented. But that the response, in general, seems to mostly fall in line with those alumni tells us everything we need to know about what most South Africans really think of antisemitism and the toxic ideologies that has excused it for far too long.
Ilan Preskovsky is a Johannesburg-based freelance writer, who has covered everything from international politics to Jewish culture/ religion to film and TV reviews. His work has been featured online on the likes of News24, Popverse and BizNews, and in print in Business Day, Jewish Life Magazine and the Star, among others.
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