South African Jews hopeful teetering coalition will be forced to temper anti-Israel stance
Some community leaders believe the solution to domestic challenges and a diplomatic crisis with the US begins with the Jewish state – but will the government agree?
Zev Stub is the Times of Israel's Diaspora Affairs correspondent.
After years of tension between South Africa’s ruling African National Congress (ANC) party and the country’s Jews, matters seemed to be approaching a boiling point in recent months, leading many within the Jewish community to reconsider their futures there.
“Many of South Africa’s current diplomatic challenges are directly related to the ANC’s anti-Israel position,” said Benjamin Shulman, executive director of the Middle East Africa Research Institute.
For decades, South Africa’s government has been seen as a highly vocal critic of Israeli policies, with a record spanning from “Zionism equals racism” charges at the Durban Conference in 2001 to its December 2023 case at the International Court of Justice accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza. It’s a position not shared by most of the country’s residents, members of the Jewish community say.
“What’s interesting is that even though the government is so anti-Zionist and has caused Israel so much damage, it hasn’t expressed itself as antisemitism within the country, even after October 7,” said Rabbi Doron Perez, a South African native serving as the executive chairman of the Mizrachi World Movement in Israel.
“The average South African has warm feelings towards Jews and is certainly not anti-Israel,” Perez said. “For the most part, it’s just a political position adopted by the ANC.”
That posture is now being tested. The ANC, which has ruled the country’s parliament with an absolute majority since the end of apartheid 30 years ago, won only 40% of the vote in last May’s election. That forced it to form a national unity government with other parties, many of whom embrace pro-Western and pro-Israel policies.
There are indications that coalition politics, combined with a recent crisis in the country’s diplomatic relationship with the United States, may force its notoriously anti-Israel leadership to finally tone down its rhetoric.
“Growing tensions with the United States have pushed this issue right up to the top of the national agenda, and we could see things start to change with the new government,” said Shulman.
South Africa’s relationship with the United States hit a low point in March when Washington expelled the country’s ambassador, Ebrahim Rasool, for calling US President Donald Trump a “white supremacist.” That followed an executive order issued by Trump in February to cut all funding to South Africa, accusing the government in Pretoria of supporting Hamas and Iran and pursuing domestic policies that harm the country’s white population.
Meanwhile, a proposal to name a street in Johannesburg after a Palestinian terrorist is exacerbating the situation. South Africa’s largest city will decide in October whether it will rename Sandton Drive in the country’s economic hub after Leila Khaled, a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine who was involved in two high-profile airline hijackings in the 1960s and 1970s. It’s a move that many see as an intentional provocation against the US, whose consulate is located on that street.
The ANC’s political rivals are fighting back. Earlier this month, members of the unity government visited Israel for a fact-finding mission, a move seen as an act of diplomatic nose-thumbing against the ANC and perhaps a statement that Pretoria’s road to reconciliation with Washington needs to start in Jerusalem.
“The ANC has angered the Americans by openly engaging dictatorships in Iran, Russia, China, Venezuela and other countries, but there is a sense that the Trump administration is tying its frustration with South Africa to its anti-Israel positions above anything else,” Shulman said. “If President Cyril Ramaphosa wants to mend his relationship with the US, he can start there.”
Growing hostility
According to Rowan Polovin, chairman of the South African Zionist Federation (SAZF), South Africa’s Jewish community of some 50,000 has long felt antagonized by the government’s anti-Israel rhetoric. However, things got much worse after the Hamas terror group invaded Israel on October 7, 2023, sparking the ongoing Israel-Hamas war. Some 1,200 people in southern Israel, most of them civilians, were slaughtered in the massacre, and 251 were kidnapped to the Gaza Strip.
“The week after October 7, President Ramaphosa came out with the ANC leadership donning keffiyehs and pledging their solidarity with the Palestinians,” Polovin said. “That took their hostility to a whole new level.”
A turning point came in December 2023 when the South African government took Israel to the International Court of Justice, charging that Israel’s military campaign against Hamas in Gaza was an act of genocide.
Israel recalled its ambassador to South Africa, Eliav Belotsercovsky, at the end of 2023, and since then, the embassy in Pretoria has been headed by a chargé d’affaires.
“They sought to delegitimize Israel’s right of self-defense against a terrorist entity that calls for Israel’s destruction, accusing the victims of genocide after they had experienced an actual genocide,” Polovin said. “That has really affected us as a community.”
Government officials have also threatened to arrest any citizen of the country who returns to South Africa after joining the Israel Defense Forces. While no such incidents have been reported to date, it’s a threat that weighs heavily on Jews with family members in Israel, Polovin noted.
Fortunately, increased anti-Israel rhetoric from within the government hasn’t trickled down to anti-Jewish hatred at the local level, community members say.
“Most South Africans are supportive of Israel. We don’t feel antisemitism in our lives on a daily basis,” Polovin said. “People walk around wearing our hostage bands and Star of David signs, and no one is worried about being attacked. We don’t feel hatred the way they do in Europe. We have good relations with many Christian groups around the country, including the Zion Christian Church, the largest church in the country with over 10 million members.”
Jewish institutions are openly supportive of Israel, and the country’s Zionist youth movements are particularly strong, noted Dafi Forer-Kremer, director of Israel Center South Africa and the head of the center’s South Africa Aliyah Department, which facilitates immigration to Israel.
“This is a very proud community,” Forer-Kremer said. “We aren’t afraid to stand for Israel or demonstrate. Virtually every event our community has held since October 7 was connected to Israel. There’s no fear here.”
Even college campuses, which are hotbeds of anti-Israeli protests in the United States, are relatively tame in South Africa, Shulman noted.
“They just had the annual Israel Apartheid Week, and it was basically a non-event. We haven’t experienced the kinds of things happening at American schools,” he said.
A strong-rooted community
While the South African Jewish community is small in size — it comprises less than 0.1% of the country’s population of 63 million — it is well-connected and firmly established with strong communal institutions.
The community’s two largest institutions — the SAZF and the South African Jewish Board of Deputies — both trace their histories to the period around the turn of the 20th century when the community began growing rapidly, noted Dorron Kline, CEO of Telfed, an organization representing South Africans in Israel.
About 120,000 Jews lived in the country at the community’s peak in the 1960s, but waves of political instability and violence, including the end of apartheid in 1994, led many to seek new homes in Israel or elsewhere, Kline said.
“Every time there was an uprising in the country, there would be a large spike in immigration to Israel,” Kline said.
Today, South Africa is home to more than 50,000 Jews, with about 30,000 in Johannesburg and 15,000 in Cape Town. Communities tend to be tightly knit and well-organized, with plenty of community institutions and schools, Polovin said.
About 300 Jews move to Israel every year from what is “probably one of the most Zionist communities in the world,” Kline said. That figure has remained stable even after October 7, Kline noted, although it now includes fewer families and more young singles.
In total, some 25,000 South Africans have moved to Israel since 1948, with the largest community, in Raanana, numbering about 4,000 first-generation immigrants, Kline said.
“If you count second- and third-generation immigrants, we are more than 100,000,” he added.
Those numbers include 130 families that lost their homes or were evacuated after October 7, as well as 13 families that have lost family members in the war, Kline noted. Most of those were the children of immigrants, including Cpt. Daniel Perez, who was killed and his body abducted by Hamas on October 7.
“We are talking about a community that is strong and supported by the general populace of South Africans,” said Rabbi Doron Perez, Daniel’s father. “The ANC party has tried to win points with voters by attacking Israel, but it has only hurt itself, and now it is starting to pay the price.”
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