Al-Qalam 
By Iqbal Jassat
South Africa’s principled stance in solidarity with Palestine’s freedom struggle and in opposition to apartheid-Israel’s genocidal policies has been explicitly cited by the Trump administration to justify its hostility against the country.
My recent articles have pointed out that Trump’s aggressive sanctions, though due in part to the misrepresentation by some right-wing Afrikaner elements on being “victimised” by the ruling African National Congress (ANC), were fuelled by the settler colonial regime’s lobbyists.
As is widely known, Zionist lobby groups do not operate in isolation. They are connected to influential captains of industry, pro-Israeli political parties, neoliberal media, as well as a number of so-called “think tanks” – largely Islamophobic and belligerently hardline anti-Palestinian.
America is a perfect case study of how the stranglehold of its pro-Israeli lobby groups impacts policies that advance Zionism’s colonial interests via unlimited military aid, financial support and diplomatic cover.
In many ways, though limited in success, South African supporters of Israel have been hard at work to replicate the American paradigm.
Distortion and deliberately fabricated news have always been and remain part of the devious methods used by Israel’s Hasbara (propaganda) outfits to sugar coat the regime’s PR disasters.
But as Kevin Bloom writes in his latest column in Daily Maverick, the prediction made by Norman Finkelstein a few weeks ago has turned out to be true.
Finkelstein foretold that South Africa would be subject to an intense “dirty tricks campaign” as evidence of Israel’s war crimes mounted.
Bloom’s analysis confirms that to deflect from Israel’s 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”.
Under the subtext of “Closet Nazis and mangled ambulances”, Bloom writes that 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.
And within this context, which Bloom correctly describes as horrific, he goes on to explain that by Daily Maverick’s reckoning, “the cultivation of AfriForum by the world’s most sophisticated Zionists was a stroke of formidable cynical genius.”
This, he asserts, is because Roets, a former deputy CEO of AfriForum, had been skilfully played by Shapiro, and Kallie Kriel, the current CEO, had been skilfully played by Joel Pollak.
Bloom’s analysis reveals that Pollak, editor-at-large of the US’s far-right Breitbart News, had tweeted “Israel should take South Africa to the (International Court of Justice)” 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.” The following day, on 29 March, Kriel endorsed Pollak’s sentiment with two words: “I agree.”
Since South Africa’s historic intervention at the International Court of Justice against Israel’s genocide in Gaza, Benjamin Netanyahu and his criminal gang of warlords, in association with Zionist apologists, have been determined to punish this country.
Bloom’s February interview with Finkelstein, whom he regards as a global authority on Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians and one of the most influential political scientists in the world, revealed that the backlash against South Africa from the Trump administration has everything to do with the ICJ case.
Will Zionist Dirty Tricks end anytime soon? Not unless the actors involved in it are exposed and their plots unravelled – in the public domain.
Bloom’s piece is thus a crucial contribution towards it.
*Iqbal Jassat is an Executive Member of the Media Review Network.
