Tlhabi calls Israel supporters ‘indoctrinated’, ‘pathetic’

South African Al Jazeera presenter Redi Tlhabi targets the Jewish State in multiple tweets a day, but on 30 July she took this a step further, targeting all of Israel’s supporters. 

Commenting on a video in which Israel’s defence minister, Israel Katz, said that he had ordered the Shin Bet to declassify settler violence as terrorism, Tlhabi ignored the many supporters of Israel who have spoken out against such violence. 

“Israel’s indoctrinated supporters sound so pathetic with their ‘Israel just wants peace … Israel never kills children … Israel never bombs hospitals … the most moral army…’,” tweeted Tlhabi to her almost 700 000 followers on X. “Their leaders are telling us what their evil grand plan is! And we should not be quiet.” 

This isn’t the first time Tlhabi has attacked “Israel’s supporters”, which includes most of the South African Jewish community. Earlier this year, she tweeted that Israel’s “murderous soldiers” are “filth”, as is “everyone who cheers them on”. She often calls the Jewish homeland a “terrorist state”. 

When Roedean School refused to play a tennis match against King David High School, Tlhabi said the Jewish community was lying, calling the outrage “the typical play book” and saying, “This is a battle for the soul of South Africa.” 

She said the Jewish community has been shown “so much grace”, implying that Jews aren’t part of South Africa; that the community “seeks to cause mass hysteria and division”; and that “Israel’s supporters” are “always sowing fear, hate, and paranoia”. 

The 30 July tweet follows a pattern of Tlhabi painting Israel as an extremist, “genocidal” society, ignoring its diversity, protest culture, democracy, and the fact that it is fighting terrorist organisations. 

Tlhabi has targeted others who have been affected by terrorism. 

In July, she called to racially profile the family members of 9/11 victims who are demanding that New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani be banned from the 25th anniversary memorial. “What is the race – or religion – of the family members making this demand?” she asked on X. Tlhabi lives in Washington, DC. 

In May, after the vehement denials of The New York Times “dog rape” libel, Tlhabi retweeted a post saying, “This is Hasbara [Israel advocacy] season! $730 million gets the creative juices flowing: Every Zio and his Shabbos goy are burning the candle at both ends to get their share …” 

Norman JW Goda, a professor of Holocaust Studies at the University of Florida, told the SA Jewish Report, “If Tlhabi bothered to read newspapers, or to talk to actual Israeli or Jewish journalists, she would know how dismayed so many of Israel’s supporters are by the settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank.” 

The harshest critics include The New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, Israeli journalists such as Haviv Rettig Gur and Yossi Klein Halevi, and scholars such as historian Benny Morris. “These are not obscure names,” says Goda. “These writers have a massive audience among those who have supported the war against Hamas, but who think poorly of the Netanyahu Cabinet, and they and their readers are hoping for a change of government with the October election [in Israel].” 

Even The Jerusalem Post, hardly a left-wing newspaper, has been critical of Katz, says Goda. “The problem is that Tlhabi is a propagandist, so reading informed work and thinking about it before posting on X are not part of her skills set,” he says. “Does Tlhabi even know that Katz was speaking to a limited group of supporters in his own Likud Party?” 

Tlhabi flattens the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in other ways. For example, when conflict flares between Israel and the Palestinians, she repeats the phrase “return the hostages and all this is over”, implying that Israel promised to end the entire conflict with the Palestinians if the hostages were returned, which it never did. 

On Tlhabi describing Israel’s leaders as having an “evil grand plan”, Goda says, “The notion that all bad events are part of an ‘evil grand plan’ hatched by Jewish leaders and supported by all Jews comes from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the most important antisemitic text of the modern world. 

“Thanks to Tlhabi and many others, the Protocols have sadly enjoyed a revival as of late, tailored for our own times,” says Goda. “We live in an age where too many people believe in such antisemitic conspiracy theories, but Tlhabi does a lot more than believe in them; she helps to disseminate them.” 

Preeminent Holocaust scholar Dr Michael Berenbaum told the SA Jewish Report that while Tlhabi is correct that the decision not to use administrative detention to counteract settler violence is a significant one, “she goes on to needlessly attack Israel’s supporters, and to suggest a conspiracy of Israel having an ‘evil grand plan’.” 

He believes most Jews and “Israel supporters” don’t agree with Katz regarding settler violence. Tlhabi’s tweet “treats the Jews as sinister, it builds on antisemitic tropes, and it would be regarded by antisemites as confirming their understanding of Jews”, he says. 

National chairperson of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies, Professor Karen Milner, says Tlhabi “peddles in antisemitic tropes of Jewish power, greed, conspiracy, and lying”. 

Tlhabi, she says, “has an unhealthy obsession with the Jewish State, which goes far beyond criticism, in a manner that serves only to enhance her own credentials, rather than engaging and seeking genuine solutions”. 

South African Zionist Federation chairperson Craig Pantanowitz says Tlhabi’s post is a “vicious, hate-filled rant” masquerading as journalism. “By describing Israel’s supporters as ‘indoctrinated’, ‘pathetic’, and accomplices to an ‘evil grand plan’, she deliberately collapses millions of diverse people, including South African Jews, into one sinister, morally-contaminated collective.” 

The reference to an “evil grand plan” is especially revealing, says Pantanowitz. “It draws directly from the oldest antisemitic conspiracy trope of Jews and Zionists secretly conspiring to deceive and control the world.” 

Pantanowitz says this isn’t “an isolated lapse”. He says that Tlhabi has repeatedly described Israel’s supporters as “brain-dead”, “brainwashed”, “psychotic”, and incapable of independent thought. 

“She has amplified claims about Zionists controlling media spaces, manipulating information and suppressing the truth; reposted comparisons between Zionists and Nazis; and promoted inflammatory allegations from activist accounts as established fact,” says Pantanowitz. “She doesn’t investigate claims; she selects whatever reinforces her fixation, broadcasts it as truth, and dismisses every challenge as further evidence of the conspiracy. That isn’t intellectual seriousness. It’s the closed-loop reasoning of a propagandist.” 

Pantanowitz says Tlhabi is entitled to criticise any Israeli government or policy, but “she isn’t entitled to disguise antisemitic tropes and collective hostility as courageous journalism. Her obsession with Israel has destroyed her objectivity, corroded her judgement, and consumed the credibility she spent decades building. She is no longer illuminating the subject; she is exposing herself.” 

The SA Jewish Report asked Tlhabi a number of questions: If she really thinks all “Israel supporters” support Katz and settler violence; why she said Israel’s leaders have an “evil grand plan”; what she meant by that; and why she never retracted her statements about the Roedean scandal, when it was clear the Jewish community wasn’t lying. 

In a tweet on X, Tlhabi made it clear that she wouldn’t respond. “You DO NOT get to ask ME anything. And deadlines? You? Giving me time frames?” she wrote. 

This was days after she stated, “I always find it particularly loathsome when people who are in the business of asking others for comment on matters of national importance pull a ‘no comment’ when they are under scrutiny. What do you mean you have nothing to say? Your business is media. Your business is ‘comment’. Always. Say something. Anything!”