Anti-Palestinian hostility raises urgent questions about institutional influence, dehumanisation and moral consistency
Another week. Another rabid racist behaves with obscene vulgarity on a Norwood Street. Triggered by nothing more than the flutter of a Palestinian flag. This innocuous object prompted a torrent of bare buttocks, racism, islamophobia and bigotry. For good measure, it added the accusation of tax evasion.
Wendy Kahn and the South African Jewish Board of Deputies (SAJBD) would no doubt rush to instruct us on proper logic. “Do not turn one bigot into a community.” (Mail and Guardian, 2 October 2026)
The convenient fiction of the lone bigot
Kahn and the SAJBD argue that bigots do not represent a community. But when the leadership of the SAJBD and the South African Zionist Federation bend over backwards to minimise anti-Palestinian animus at home, while providing political and ideological cover and justification for a state committing mass slaughter, the connection is glaring.
The outbursts of Rodney Plett and Gavin Katz do not occur in a vacuum. They are fuelled by an uninhibited petulance, arrogance and impunity, where human sanctity and rights apply selectively — depending on whose children are dying.
The issue is not whether Plett or Katz stand as representatives of an entire community. They cannot be. Nor is every Zionist answerable for every act committed in the name of Zionism. But the principle of individual responsibility has to be invoked consistently, not selectively applied to shield political commitments and institutions from scrutiny.
Kahn is entitled to insist that individual misconduct should not be imputed to an entire community. But that principle cannot require Muslim organisations to account for the conduct of individuals while treating Zionist ideology and its institutional advocates as beyond examination. Nor can the condemnation of an individual’s behaviour and language settle the question of the political beliefs that the individual invokes or expresses and the source of them.
Condemn the individual, protect the ideology
There is a difference between collective guilt and collective responsibility. The former presumes culpability on the basis of identity. The latter asks individuals and institutions to account for their political commitments, political conduct and public advocacy. To examine how an ideology legitimises, normalises or excuses the dehumanisation of others is to insist that political beliefs are subject to scrutiny. That principle must apply to everyone.
Kahn implored, in her column, that Plett’s previous road-side broadside must be framed as a tragic, isolated glitch in a tranquil universe. It was an attempt at an elegant defence — constructed on the assumption that no second “isolated” glitch would dare present itself so soon.
Enter Katz, who decided that Grant Avenue was in need of another high-octane street trail outside The Ahsan Store. Kahn’s formula for this too, would be that every public rant is a lone rogue actor operating vacuously. This view is crumbling under the weight of Katz’s viral footage on top of that of Plett’s. When an entire worldview reduces streetscapes into contested battlegrounds over flags and religious identity, calling these incidents “isolated anomalies” isn’t a defence. It is an exercise in hypocrisy and wilful blindness.
The assertion here is not that every Zionist is responsible for Plett’s or Katz’s intemperance. It is to ask what political ideas they invoked to justify hostility towards Palestinians — and yes, Muslims. What is the role of the institutions that promote and defend those ideas. Should they be exempt from scrutiny when this hostility becomes publicly visible?
Collective blame for some, immunity for others
While Kahn argues against collective blame, she reproduces in practice the logic she asks others to disavow. She demands that Muslims must absorb, explain and apologise for the conduct of individuals, while insulating Zionism and its institutional ecosystem from analogous accounting.
Kahn insists Plett’s racist, anti- Muslim outburst is an isolated act by an individual and that it is “libellous” to suggest a connection to the SAJBD, to Zionist organisations or broader ideological currents. Yet she treats Zionism as an element of Jewish identity, when it is not.
Kahn condemns Muslim organisations for failing to denounce particular incidents (a graphic by the Cape Town Ulama Board, a criminal assault on a rabbi, swastikas at a demonstration). But why should Muslims or Muslim organisations denounce the acts? They were not done in the name of Muslims or Islam? To Kahn Zionism is as an abstract, protected “movement for self-determination”, while any suggestion that it might shape subjective behaviour, shape language and set moral horizons is dismissed as “caricature” and “libel”.
By contrast, discrete acts by others are mobilised as evidence of Muslim communal moral deficit.
Katz’s demand for the removal of a Palestinian flag, proudly asserting his zionism and general abuse, and Plett’s invocation of Gaza, calling Aziz an Arab c*** and telling him that “Israeli’s are killing you all, you p***”, were a symptom of an ideological ecosystem that normalises dehumanisation. Kahn reframes it as an accusation of “collective guilt”. That is a category error. To say that an ideology has effects is not to say that every adherent is personally guilty of every act. It is to say that the ideology is not morally neutral and cannot be shielded from scrutiny because it is woven into communal identity.
Asserting that she and the SAJBD condemned Plett is not a moral achievement. It is insufficient. It treats condemnation of language as the endpoint of responsibility, rather than the starting point. Plett tied his threats to Israel’s violence in Gaza.
Second, it demands that this minimal gesture is satisfactory and that people, Muslims particularly, should be apologetic for not being more grateful for this condemnation. The subtext is clear: absorb the injury, accept the SAJBD’s self-characterisation and move on. Any attempt to locate the incident within broader ideology is framed as divisive and “defamatory”. This is a curious morality — one is offended by language but not the sentiments behind it, that apologises for the behaviour and language but feels nothing for the mass murder of innocents.
Public display: Gavin Katz’s demand for the removal of a Palestinian flag in front of a Norwood storefront in Johannesburg and Rodney Plett’s verbal abuse in the same suburb are a symptom of an ideological ecosystem that normalises dehumanisation. Photo: Screenshots
A race and a religion — Zionism’s convenient conflation
To the SAJBD, Zionism is at once a political ideology and an inseparable part of Judaism. This allows them to defend Zionism as a legitimate national movement and treat criticism of Zionism as an attack on Judaism as a religion and Jews as people. The result is a moral and conceptual shell game.
When it suits the argument, Zionism is a political project that can be defended on its own terms. When challenged, it becomes a non-negotiable element of religious identity, rendering any criticism or contestation as “demonisation” of the religion and the community.
This is an absurdity. Jewish identity, like Muslim identity, cannot be reduced to a single relationship between religion, culture, ethnicity and politics. Jews disagree about Zionism. To treat “Zionism as an indispensable expression of Jewish identity is not simply describing Jewish identity. It is advancing a contested political and theological inter-pretation. Since when is subscription to a belief system synonymous with a racial identity? Or a religion a political ideology, and a “national movement” divinely ordained?
By contrast, Kahn’s logic is that beliefs, behaviours and actions by anyone with a Muslim name or claim, must reflect on Islam. Muslim organisations must condemn other Muslims’ misdeeds. The fact that Islam, as a religion, does not coincide with a race, an ethno-national project or an exterminationist political ideology and policy programme is treated as irrelevant. Palestinian sympathisers are held to a standard of collective moral performance that Zionism is exempted from.
The real test: Gaza, displacement and dehumanisation
Kahn writes as if the central moral question is whether one bigot’s words should be imputed to a community. That framing is a moral evasion. The issue Kahn sidesteps: How can a community claim moral authority while supporting, legitimising or remaining complicit in a project that has murdered well over 100 000 Palestinians in Gaza, 30 000 of them children — and displaced most of Gaza’s population, alongside decades of displacement and dispossession in historic Palestine, expanded illegal settlements and entrenching apartheid?
Defamation, libel and legalism
Kahn invokes the words, “libellous”, “defamatory” and “no basis in reality” to describe arguments that posit that Zionist narratives and institutions help produce the ideological conditions in which racism becomes thinkable. This is strategic but misplaced. It hints at “legal threat”.
The SAJBD helps craft and police narratives that dehumanise Palestinians. The narratives shape beliefs validating Israeli impunity. This is not libellous. It is pointing out that the condemnations of ill-tempered and bad-mannered individuals while refusing to interrogate the conditions and beliefs that enable them, is moral cowardice. Saying this is an interpretation of ideology, power and behaviour. To label it “libel” is to use legal language as a cudgel against political and moral criticism.
The SAJBD claims to reject collective blame only to embrace it. They wish to reserve the right to inflict and justify catastrophe abroad while demanding moral deference at home. If Kahn and the SAJBD wish to stand against racism, islamophobia and ethno-supremacy, then they must repudiate the idea that any people have a divinely or historically ordained right to dominate another. You cannot demand immunity from moral scrutiny while defending a system rooted in dispossession and decimation. They must break with political projects that rely on displacement, segregation and military rule over others. They should, in their ethical reflection, unequivocally and unambigously condemn without qualification and reservation, the mass murder of Palestinians in Gaza, the Israeli settlement expansion in the West Bank and the general displacement of Palestinians, and not just the aberrant and intemperate language and behavior. Anything less would be moral cowardice.
This is the bare minimum required for “civil harmony” and “mutual understanding”. Anything short of that will be seen for what it is — a demand that others absorb injury, stay silent and accept a moral order in which Zionism is beyond critique while everyone else is on trial.
Ebrahim Fakir conducts research on politics and governance.