Antizionists target Jews on 7 October

In a week in which the community is mourning the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, antizionist agitators chose to target South African Jews with protests and hate. 

Three years to the day since Palestinians hunted, murdered, burned alive, tortured, mutilated, dismembered, raped, beheaded, and abducted Israeli civilians of all ages, local extremists chose to protest outside Holocaust centres around the country. 

Organised by South African Jews for a Free Palestine (SAJFP), they carried a shroud with the names of Palestinian children killed in Gaza. There was no mention of the children and other innocents who were slaughtered or taken hostage on 7 October. 

The executive director of the South African Zionist Federation Cape Council, Joshua Schewitz, describes “a week-long programme built around the anniversary of the 7 October massacre, culminating in an effort to appropriate a sacred site of Jewish remembrance and recast the meaning of the day itself”. 

“Their campaign ends on the doorstep of a Holocaust memorial. Cape Town can judge that,” he says. 

Yet the community has held firm. “We want to be unequivocal: 7 October will not be erased. It will not be appropriated, rewritten, or inverted,” says Daniel Bloch, executive director of the Cape South African Jewish Board of Deputies (SAJBD). 

Jewish leadership also took to the streets in seven South Africa cities on 7 October 2026, confronting denialism by placing seven documented, undeniable facts directly on the public record, as they stood in public spaces. 

“This nationwide action is a direct answer to the intimidation experienced here at home,” said the SAJBD. “Over the past three years, South African Jews have faced organised boycotts, harassment, and aggressive attempts to silence anyone who speaks out. The Jewish community is stepping into the public square to make it clear that our community will neither hide nor be intimidated.” 

Bloch says that antizionists’ targeting of Holocaust centres and Jewish institutions, the exclusion of Jewish victims from events purportedly concerned with human suffering, and the deliberate decision to stage protests on 7 October itself cannot be dismissed as coincidence. 

Whatever political position one holds, “7 October began with the murder and abduction of innocent people. That truth cannot be edited out of history,” he says. 

The harassment and gaslighting of the community included a protest on Sea Point Promenade on Saturday, 3 October, which was both Shabbat and Simchat Torah, just like the day of the 2023 massacre. About 1 000 people gathered in an attempt to intimidate the many Jewish Sea Point residents. One local man said he’d heard protesters shouting, “Hamas is Cape Town and Cape Town is Hamas”. Protesters chanted, “Cape Town is not Tel Aviv, the Zionists, they must leave.” 

Hezbollah and Islamic Republic of Iran flags were flown, and one speaker shouted “Fuck Israel”, echoing posters with the same slur. A man wore a shirt that read “I am Hamas”, his face covered with a keffiyeh. Another poster stated “It’s Zionism versus Judaism, Islam, Christianity & humanity”. 

Others read “Zionist Israel – a threat to world peace”, “Zionism = terrorism”, “Zionism is racism”, and “Cape Town is not Tel Aviv”. Protesters dressed in orange prison jumpsuits and masks of the faces of Israeli politicians. Protesters chanted, “We don’t want no Zionists here.” 

The Sea Point protest was the culmination of a Cape Town tour by extremists George Galloway and Yvonne Ridley, who were brought to South Africa in the first week of October as part of the attempt to target the Jewish community at its time of grief. 

Galloway is a divisive British politician and former member of Parliament who has made homophobic statements and supports Russian President Vladimir Putin. He has lived in Russia since 2024. Galloway described South Africa taking Israel to the International Court of Justice as “a special step” and said, “Israel has never been so hated as it is today.” 

Ridley is a British journalist who was captured by the Taliban in 2011 and later converted to Islam. In Cape Town, she said that “there is a growing Zionist presence in the Western Cape. Zionism is a hungry animal that just spreads out and eats anything in its path and destroys everything in its path. You will have to stand up and stop this growth.” 

She likened the “growth” of Zionism in the Western Cape to Japanese knotweed, an invasive plant that damages buildings, ruins landscapes, and resists removal. 

Several other antizionist events took place around the country. On Tuesday, 6 October, at the University of the Western Cape (UWC), protesters shouted, “Resistance is justified”, and held signs saying “Fuck Israel” and “Glory to the martyrs”. 

Schewitz says that Galloway and Ridley spent their tour telling the people of the Western Cape “which of their neighbours to distrust” while their own track records show their support of tyrants and extremists. 

“The Jewish community lives here. It helped build this province, it has stayed through every chapter of this country’s history, and it will still be here long after they have flown home to the regimes they admire,” he says. 

The Jewish community is “owed the same dignity and democratic participation as every other South African”, he adds. “It will not take lectures on belonging, nor be likened to a weed, from people who treat this country as a cheap backdrop for a publicity tour.” 

Schewitz says that the “J” in SAJFP “means little if it cannot acknowledge the worst day for the Jewish people in generations. Its presence appears to lend Jewish legitimacy to hostility directed at Israel and, by extension, at its own community.” 

He says that UWC students “glorified terrorism, and UWC must say whether it accepts such messaging on its campus. St George’s Cathedral hosted the finale of the 7 October antizionist procession, and the cathedral’s leadership owes Cape Town an explanation.” 

Bloch says Hezbollah flags and clothing bearing the words “I am Hamas” “are not innocuous symbols of solidarity. They carry an entirely different and deeply disturbing message, particularly to a Jewish community preparing to commemorate 7 October.” 

Language portraying Jews or Zionists as an “invasive, contaminating, or destructive presence echoes dehumanising tropes directed at Jews for generations”, he says. 

Milton Shain, an antisemitism expert and emeritus professor of history at the University of Cape Town, says that “choosing to protest at the very time that decent people recall with revulsion the 7 October attack is an act of painful insensitivity”. 

But it hardly comes as a surprise, says Shain. “Within six hours of the world waking up to wanton violence, murder, and rape in the south of Israel, permission was sought by antizionists in London to march against the Jewish State. Sydney and New York, too, saw huge protests against Israel on 8 October.” 

Initially, Shain thought a 7 October protest outside local Holocaust centres was a prank. “Surely antizionist Jews would not choose that day to vent their hatred of the Jewish State?” he says. 

“Instead of seeking a solution to a complex problem, SAJFP only enhances division. By all means, protest. But why choose a day on which the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust took place?” asks Shain. “These are protests of hate. Instead of recognising the barbarism of 7 October, SAJFP is celebrating murder, torture, and rape.” 

Movement Against Antizionism founder Adam Louis-Klein told the SA Jewish Report that “attempts to turn the Gaza war into a ‘Gaza genocide’, to replace and invert the history of Jewish suffering, is a central antizionist tactic”. 

He says the root of the problem is “antizionist violence, committed with the explicit intent to annihilate Israeli national identity and existence. A full reckoning with antizionism means recognising 7 October as a genocide, and the antizionist hate movement as built on genocide inversion.” 

Says Bloch, “We will not surrender the memory of 7 October victims, and we will not allow their suffering to be erased in service of somebody’s political narrative. The facts remain. The victims matter. And we will remember.”