The role of media in whitewashing apartheid – A critical analysis

IN recent weeks, the Sunday Times writers have not so much reported on the Middle East as performed ideological ventriloquism for Israel’s defenders. What began as a murmur has grown into a discernible editorial drumbeat — measured, rehearsed, and with each successive article, increasingly brazen in its pro-Israel slant.

First came S’thembiso Msomi’s dispatch from Tel Aviv, a piece that foregrounded the trauma of Israelis on 7 October while relegating Palestinian suffering to the editorial equivalent of a footnote. Questions about who funded Msomi’s trip have been met with calculated silence from the Sunday Times, a silence as telling as any byline.

That was followed by Richard Gumede’s entreaty urging South Africa to “restore relations with Israel” and abandon its genocide case at the ICJ, a plea pitched in the tone of strategic realism but echoing the logic of capitulation.

Most recently, Rowan Polovin, chair of the South African Zionist Federation, offered readers the binary choice of aligning with “the West” (read: Israel and its patrons) or descending into irrelevance and state failure. Four weeks, three paeans to a nation under mounting legal and moral scrutiny. One wonders: is this editorial drift, or a quiet editorial coup?

The Sunday Times’ decision to provide a platform to Polovin, national chair of the South African Zionist Federation, is as disturbing as the content of his article. That a major South African publication would print a piece laced with ethnic supremacism, historical distortion, and neocolonial nostalgia is not merely irresponsible journalism; it is complicity in the normalisation of a repugnant ideology.

Polovin speaks not as a dispassionate analyst but as a determined apologist for Zionism, a political ideology condemned by virtually every major human rights organisation as structurally racist.

Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have both found that Israel practices apartheid. In their reports, the comparison to South African apartheid is not metaphorical; it is a factual designation. Zionism, in its present form, is apartheid on steroids — an aggressive settler-colonial ideology built on the privileging of one group and the systematic erasure of another.

It is a repugnant creed, fundamentally incompatible with the values of our Constitution, and should be pronounced as such.

That the head of the South African Zionist Federation would attempt to whitewash such a regime while speaking to a South African audience, a people who have suffered under the boot of racial domination, reveals not merely cynicism, but arrogance and contempt.

Like the Gumede article, Polovin begins by extolling the benefits of alignment with the United States. But one must ask: prosperity for whom? The US has, for decades, destabilised entire regions in pursuit of its geopolitical and corporate interests. From the CIA-backed coup in Iran (1953), the overthrow of Allende in Chile (1973), and the illegal invasion of Iraq (2003), to the destruction of Libya (2011) and interventions across Central America and the African continent — including in the Congo, Angola, and Somalia — the US record is one of regime change, proxy war, and pillage.

South Africans should remember that it was the CIA that tipped off the apartheid government, leading to Nelson Mandela’s arrest in 1962. Years later, Mandela would declare: “We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.”

To claim, then, that South Africa must embrace Washington to avoid “irrelevance” is to mistake dependence for sovereignty, and subjugation for progress. It also smuggles in a deeply flawed cosmology — one in which the US is presumed to be the gravitational centre of the world, with all other states orbiting in obedient deference.

This arrogance reached farcical heights during US President Donald Trump’s recent pilgrimage to the Gulf, where he was greeted not by diplomats, but by pharaohs in draping robes — Saudi, Qatari and Emirati despots whose loyalty is purchased through weapons deals and real estate contracts. This is the empire that Polovin and Gumede beckon South Africa to join.

Even more grotesque is Polovin’s attempt to portray Israel as “the Middle East’s only democracy”. For whom, precisely? Not for the millions of Palestinians subjected to military law, movement restrictions, home demolitions and extrajudicial killings. Not for the children in Gaza, whose mangled bodies are now seared into the moral conscience of the world.

Israel is a democracy for Jews in the same way apartheid South Africa was a democracy for whites. It is a regime that defines rights, security, and citizenship through ethno-nationalist lenses. To deny this is not to preserve democracy. It is to defile the concept entirely.

And now, in the full light of day, with the world watching, Israel has unleashed a campaign that even Holocaust survivors have recognised for what it is. The language used by its leaders, “human animals”, “erase Gaza” — is not the rhetoric of defence. It is the lexicon of annihilation.

That such language echoes the dehumanisation once used to justify the oppression of black South Africans should be a chilling reminder of where supremacist ideologies ultimately lead.

Polovin’s accusations of South Africa’s “pathological hostility” to Israel are not arguments, they are projections. It is not hostility to Jews that animates South Africa’s stance, but hostility to apartheid, to colonial domination, and the logic of ethnic supremacy.

The International Court of Justice genocide case against Israel is grounded in law, not sentiment. And contrary to his claims, there is no legal right to defend an occupation. The 1973 UN General Assembly Resolution (A/RES/3103) explicitly recognises the legitimacy of armed resistance against colonial and racist regimes.

Polovin’s lament over South Africa’s refusal to applaud Trump’s Abraham Accords is equally hollow. These were not peace deals. They were transactions brokered between despots and a president who conducts foreign policy as if it were a licensing agreement for real estate deals and a failed casino.

The Accords bypassed the Palestinians, bypassed justice, and rewarded autocracies for normalising ethnic domination in exchange for US protection. South Africa’s refusal to embrace that theatre is not evidence of “ideological poverty”. It is evidence of moral clarity.

That Polovin, like Gumede, urges South Africa to withdraw from the ICJ case, restore full diplomatic ties with Israel, and adopt a “dehyphenated” approach to the conflict is not foreign policy; it is capitulation to apartheid. To appease a demagogue like Trump, twice-impeached, morally bankrupt, and openly hostile to international law, is not pragmatism. It is cowardice dressed up as strategy.

His invocation of “minority protections” for Afrikaners, meanwhile, is more than insidious. It parrots the ugliest strands of Trump-era grievance politics, the narrative that those who once ruled are now being persecuted. It is a fraudulent inversion of history and reality, one that seeks to obscure enduring structural inequality by painting privilege as victimhood.

Polovin accuses South Africa of endangering its economic future by confronting Israel and challenging the West. But he fails to mention the growing global consensus against Israeli impunity reflected not only in the ICJ case but in repeated condemnations by the UN secretary-general, multiple special rapporteurs, and nearly every humanitarian organisation operating in Gaza.

South Africa’s alignment with BRICS+ and the Global South and the increasing number of Western countries is not a retreat from relevance. It is a declaration that sovereignty, justice, and multilateralism matter. It is an affirmation that the postcolonial world will no longer beg for scraps from imperial tables.

South Africa’s foreign policy may be imperfect, but its refusal to abandon the cause of Palestinian freedom is not a liability. It is an affirmation of principle in an age of moral cowardice. In Palestine, the world is not divided between “the West” and irrelevance. It is divided between those willing to trade justice for racial privilege and profit, and those who still remember what it means to resist.

Polovin and Gumede may believe the world begins and ends in Washington and Tel Aviv. South Africans shaped by struggle and schooled in justice know better.

* A variation of this article was offered to the Sunday Times. “In the proofs provided to the author, they gutted the piece, including deleting my criticism of the Sunday Times for publishing a piece laced with ethnic supremacism. I subsequently withdrew the piece from the Sunday Times.” — Motala

** Ziyad Motala is a Professor of Law and the Former Director of the Howard University and University of Western Cape Comparative and International Law Programme. The views expressed here are his own.

*** The views expressed here do not reflect those of the Sunday Independent, IOL, or Independent Media.