Backlash against Saltzman has all the features of alt-right antisemitism

Beyond their obviously Jewish surnames, there appears at first glance to be nothing to connect Dis-Chem Chief Executive Ivan Saltzman, Cape Town student activist Jack Markovitz, and satirist Daniel Friedman.

On closer examination, however, one finds that there are indeed important points of commonality. The first is that all three have now been the targets of vitriolic smear campaigns portraying them as inveterate haters and enemies of the white race in South Africa.

The second is that that the fact of their being Jewish, in spite of this being of no relevance whatever to the issues at hand, was in all three cases placed at the very core of their actions.

They were not, in other words, reviled as anti-white race traitors who happened to be Jewish, but held to have acted the way they did precisely because they were Jewish.

Another common feature of the backlash was the unabashed readiness to apply the “collective guilt” principle, whereby the entirety of the Jewish community was held answerable for the actions of a few. Such reasoning is characteristic of racist thinking in general, but certainly Jews are among those against whom it’s most commonly applied.

Back in December 2018, Friedman became the first of the trio to experience such treatment when a doctored video falsely portraying him as making fun of white farm murder victims was released and went viral. A year later, it was Markovitz’s turn, when an interview he gave in support of the Economic Freedom Fighters provoked a deluge of threats and online abuse, including multiple comments on the theme of Jewish leftists inciting anti-white hatred.

Last week, as reported elsewhere in this issue, it was Dis-Chem’s Saltzman who found himself in the firing line. Though the proportion of responses in which antisemitism featured was relatively small, such instances were sufficiently numerous to bring sharply to the fore one of the most persistent and deeply rooted forms of antisemitic sentiment in South African society.

In South Africa, the notion that Jews nurse an implacable hatred for the white race and engage in every manner of twisted behaviour to cause it harm goes back to the early days of the anti-apartheid movement, in which Jews were always disproportionately involved.

Initially, though, the tendency was more to see Jews as a subversive ideological fifth column bent on corrupting the patriotic and Christian values of their host societies than as racial enemies of whites. Over time, however, and particularly since the demise of apartheid and relegation of the once dominant white caste to the political margins, there has been a distinct shift in that regard.

A “stab-in-the-back” mode of thinking has become all but entrenched in white right-wing circles, in which Jews (whether in communist or capitalist guise) are held to have orchestrated the downfall of white South Africa and are now taking advantage of the destruction they have wrought to enrich themselves. This is consistent with the prevalence within this group of “great-replacement” conspiracy theories against the white races throughout the world in which Jews are said to be the malignant hidden hand. As expressed by Jan Lamprecht, a vociferous proponent of this theory, “Jews go to great lengths to hide their crimes and then run away and start the cycle all over again. This is how the world really works. The whites then sit in ruined countries trying to pick up the shattered pieces of their lives.” These sentiments are echoed on white-supremacist platforms worldwide, most disturbingly in the manifestos of those who have carried out mass shootings in synagogues and elsewhere.

This is perhaps where ultra-right white-supremacist ideologies pose their greatest threat to global Jewry. These movements, unlike Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement-aligned organisations that enjoy substantial support in civil society, academia, the trade unions, and elsewhere, have minimal political clout or cultural influence but the ideologies they propagate are another matter. They create a breeding ground for potential mass killers, some of whom may come to conclude that it’s no longer enough to fantasise about Jews getting their eventual come-uppance, and that it’s up to them to take practical steps to make it a reality.

Without underplaying these threats, periodic eruptions of antisemitic sentiment must also be seen in the broader context. In an angry, fearful, and deeply divided society such as our own, it’s all but inevitable that many will look for scapegoats to relieve their frustrations, and that Jews will not infrequently be the targets.

It should also be seen against the wider background of a general breakdown of civil discourse, which results in many other groups – most notably foreign nationals – coming under attack.

Finally, it’s important to remember that just as the Jewish community as a whole can neither be defined by nor held accountable for the actions of its individual members, so should Jews be careful not to conclude that entire sections of South African society have it in for them because of what certain people say and do

• David Saks is the associate director of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies.