News24 opinionista attacks local ‘Zionists’

Local academic, Oscar van Heerden, has made it clear in his regular opinion pieces on News24 that he wants Israel and its population to be obliterated, he doesn’t want peace in the Middle East, and he supports terrorism. News24 is South Africa’s most popular online news source.

South Africa, according to his most recent piece on 24 March, isn’t “fighting the Americans here [in South Africa’s declining relationship with the United States]. No, we are, in fact, fighting the Zionists both abroad and domestically. Their proxies are the White House, the United States Congress, some local political parties, the [South African] Jewish Board of Deputies (SAJBD) through their chief rabbi [in fact the two are separate entities], among many others.”

Regardless, News24 continues to publish his extremist pieces on a regular basis. Van Heerden is a senior research fellow for African diplomacy and leadership at the University of Johannesburg.

He regularly employs classic antisemitic tropes that Israel, Zionists, and Jews are controlling the world, have global proxies, and act against the well-being of society.

David Saks, representing the SAJBD, says, “In attacking the representative Jewish leadership in such inflammatory and defamatory terms, Van Heerden engages in clear-cut incitement to hatred against the broader Jewish community. His articles are replete with toxic antisemitic stereotypes, including that Jews are disloyal to their host countries, and that in pursuit of their own ‘selfish’ and ‘immoral’ ends, they use excessive power behind the scenes to undermine the common good.”

Van Heerden says “the Zionists” have “decided it is time to teach South Africa a lesson they will never forget. Sanctions, executive orders, removal from preferential trade agreements, and so much more to come. According to Trump and the Zionists, South Africa is now fair game. Our collective brains trust is needed to outsmart this Zionist fox.” He also calls Israel a “regional ogre”.

Saks says that “typical of Jew haters through the ages, Van Heerden portrays Jews as an unwelcome element in society, people who everyone else needs to distrust and shun. His ‘us’ and ‘them’ language serves to further ‘other’ the community, portraying it as not being part of the broader South African population, and as being alien, hostile, and harmful. This is most notable in the comment, that ‘we are fighting the Zionists both abroad and domestically’.”

South African Zionist Federation spokesperson Rolene Marks says Van Heerden’s “intellectually bankrupt” articles on News24 are “propaganda”.

In addition, she says, “His characterisation of the US-Israel relationship as merely ‘transactional’ cynically echoes age-old antisemitic tropes about Jewish financial influence controlling political power. By suggesting that Israel simply ‘purchases’ American support rather than earning it through shared values and strategic alignment, he weaponises dangerous stereotypes about Jewish money manipulating governments, a centuries-old canard used to fuel hatred and violence against Jewish communities.”

This superficial analysis “masquerading as scholarly insight reveals a profound intellectual dishonesty, ignoring seven decades of deep-rooted co-operation across Republican and Democratic administrations founded on shared democratic principles, intelligence co-operation, and technological innovation,” says Marks.

In September 2024, News24 fired local columnist Howard Feldman after he tweeted about Israel’s “pager operation” because, according to editor Adriaan Basson, “News24 can in no way be associated with writers who glorify violence.” However, Van Heerden has made it clear that he supports terrorism, describing terrorist entities like Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran as legitimate “resistance movements”.

He writes that Hamas’s 7 October attacks were done “in pursuit of their liberation”. In a 31 March piece for News24 titled, “Israel’s actions are shaping a new world order,” he gleefully reports that “Zionism has entered its last phase. Hamas is still alive and well and continues their resistance campaign. Hostages remain in captivity. Iran continues with its nuclear weapons programme. As for wanting to show that Israel is on top in the region by breaking all the resistance movements such as Hezbollah, Hamas, and Iran, well, I think we can comfortably say just because you kill their leaders, does not result in crushing these resistance movements.”

Van Heerden clearly supports Hamas’s objectives of 7 October 2023, writing that “Hamas’s objectives at the start of the war were twofold. One, make the war as expensive for Israel as possible, and two, isolate Israel regionally and internationally. It’s safe to say that both these objectives have been attained.” He says it’s unfair that when discussing the Middle East, that “we’re told we must first condemn the atrocities of Hamas and what they did on 7 October 2023”.

He sees the murder and wounding of Israelis as a success, writing, “Since this war started, more than 1 139 Israelis have been killed, and of these, 891, at last count, were soldiers, and 8 730 were wounded. The Israeli economy has taken a hit. This is the beginning of the end for the state of Israel.”

In response to questions from the SA Jewish Report, Basson referred the matter to News24’s public editor, Professor George Claassen, who says that Van Heerden’s columns are “protected comment as set out by Section 7 of the South African Press Code. The two columns are definitely not propagating violence.”

Not only does Van Heerden want to see Israel and its citizens obliterated, he wants an end to peace prospects in the Middle East, writing that “the Abraham Accords also now lie in ruin”.

Van Heerden repeats the antisemitic trope that Jews are separate from society, saying that the Jewish state “tells us time and time again that they are the chosen people and therefore answerable only to G-d”.

Van Heerden writes that Israel’s very existence is the problem, and that it has engaged in “ethnic cleansing” since 1948. He criticises Netanyahu for continuing the war during Ramadan, ignoring that Hamas brutally attacked Israel on Shabbat and Simchat Torah.

Marks condemns Van Heerden’s “deliberate mischaracterisation of Israel’s existential struggle for survival as imperial aggression. This completely erases Hamas’s documented strategy of maximising civilian casualties, its charter explicitly calling for Israel’s destruction, and Israel’s numerous peace proposals that Palestinian leadership has rejected outright.”

Milton Shain, emeritus professor of history at the University of Cape Town, says, “Van Heerden’s crude and simplistic understanding of US foreign policy needs to be called out. The Zionist lobby doesn’t drive US foreign policy, as he suggests. This argument was put to bed many years ago by Christopher Hitchens and Noam Chomsky, both hostile to Zionism, when they savaged The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy,  by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. Hitchens went so far as to detect the smell of antisemitism in the Mearsheimer and Walt account.

“Sadly, one also detects an unpleasant smell in Van Heerden’s ravings,” says Shain. “Allusions to ‘the chosen’ are problematic, as are suggestions that South African Zionists are a disloyal ‘fifth column’. I’m shocked that News24 can publish such unadulterated nonsense.”

Marks notes that “Van Heerden’s libellous accusation that Israel’s self-defence measures amount to ‘state-sponsored terrorism’ constitutes dangerous incitement that flies in the face of established international law. Article 51 of the United Nations Charter explicitly recognises every sovereign nation’s inherent right to self-defence against armed attacks. His deliberate omission of Hamas’s extensively documented war crimes reveals his true agenda of demonising the Jewish state rather than pursuing truth.”

Claassen says that “News24 has consistently given a right of reply to opinion articles that are critical of Israel’s actions in Gaza, and to columnists who defended Israel vigorously. None of the opinion articles criticising Israel contravened the press code. To refer to Israel as a ‘Zionist fox’ is also protected comment.”

“We will be guided by Professor Claassen’s response,” says Basson.