The shunning — Jewish identity and belonging in a time of genocide in Gaza

Daily Maverick

4 days ago

When the history books are written, the month of July 2025 is likely to go down as a turning point – a month when precisely engineered famine and the indiscriminate slaughter by tank- and rifle-fire of the starving left the world in little doubt that Israel was committing a horrendous genocide in Gaza. But would this also be the month that enough Jews saw the truth?
The influence of affluence
'I tend to find Islamophobia unspectacular,' writes Hanif Abdurraqib, in an essay published on 13 July 2025 – the day of my 52nd birthday – in The New Yorker magazine. 'That doesn't mean I don't also find it insidious and of serious consequence.'
I read the lines on my phone, while waiting for my lunch to arrive, in an eatery in the central suburbs of Johannesburg on 14 July. They are the opening lines to the fourth paragraph of a piece titled 'Zohran Mamdani and Mahmoud Kahlil are in on the joke: What it feels like to laugh when the world expects you to disappear'. The central conceit of the piece is the first in-person meeting between Mamdani, the 33-year-old Democratic nominee for mayor of New York, and Kahlil, the 30-year-old Columbia graduate and pro-Palestine activist who has recently been released from a notorious ICE detention facility in Louisiana.
I have ordered the bagel-dog, my favourite item on the menu, and while waiting for it to arrive I am reading the essay for the second time. The first reading, to my surprise, has loosened a layer of suppressed emotion. It may be because I am visiting my hometown after more than a year away, it may be because I am back in this restaurant (once my local) after more than two years, it may be because I am still overwhelmed by the new friends who have sent messages of love and support (and the old friends who haven't) on my birthday – it may be all of these things or none, but my hard anger at my people is morphing into the softness of sadness and grief.
I am not supposed to identify with the sentiments of Abdurraqib, but I do. Although I know it is scandalous to alter the signifier in the first line of the fourth paragraph, I can't help myself.
I tend to find anti-Semitism unspectacular.
There are many reasons that this mental edit feels transgressive and emotionally charged. For starters, Abdurraqib is writing about a form of racism that is routinely downplayed in New York. He notes that Mamdani's beard had appeared 'thickened and lengthened' in the campaign brochures of losing candidate Andrew Cuomo, and that Cuomo 'was not repeatedly asked questions' about the safety of Muslims in the city. The inference, as almost all of his readers will know, is that Mamdani was repeatedly asked questions about the safety of Jews.
And so to replace Islamophobia with anti-Semitism makes me guilty of the same offence. The voice in my head is uncompromising – here goes another Jew, it says, telling us that the racism directed at his people is more important than the racism directed at anyone else. But still, the voice adds, it's not as if the world's Muslims are collectively on the hook for the slaughter in Gaza. It's not as if the history books, when they seek to explain the child amputees and the hunger games and the mass death, will look for answers in the ethnic pathologies of the victims.
So again, I tend to find anti-Semitism unspectacular. The global explosion of Jew hatred is, for me, a direct consequence of the actions of the Israeli military since October 2023, which were (at least at the very beginning) a direct response to the Hamas assault of 7 October. On this issue, I know, I represent the views of a small minority of my people – and on this issue, more than anywhere, is where my anger is turning to grief.
Take, for instance, the situation in Australia, where I have many expat South African cousins. For their adopted community, after 7 October, things deteriorated so quickly that the appointment of a government-sponsored 'anti-Semitism envoy' was required. I didn't pay much attention at the time, except to note that the appointee – a corporate lawyer named Jillian Segal – had a history of pro-Israel advocacy. As it was to many observers, it was therefore obvious to me that Segal would place her community further at risk by conflating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism.
In the second week of July 2025, just before my visit to Johannesburg, the foreseen circumstance had come to pass.
My bagel-dog has arrived, it's as good as it ever was, and between bites I switch to a tab on my phone that has been open since 11 July. It's an opinion piece in The Guardian by Louise Adler, a retired Australian book publisher, who has ripped into Segal's plan 'to weaponise anti-Semitism' in her country. I scroll through the passages in search of a particular sentence. If memory serves, I am looking for the words that perfectly articulate the duplicity in the fact that the plan makes no mention of Gaza.
I get all the way to the bottom before realising I have gone too far. Still, as a takedown of world Jewry's mainstream institutions, the final sentence is equally devastating.
'If the actions of Israel in the past 20 months or indeed the past 75 years doesn't engender any dissent in the diaspora,' writes Adler, 'it's unsurprising that critics of Israel conclude that Jews are to be condemned for their appalling myopia and lack of moral clarity.'
Indeed, I'm thinking, as I am blindsided once more by my grief.
I scroll back up to find what I have missed, musing on the truth that a non-Jew could never have slipped a sentence like that past the editors – Adler, I have discovered, is the child of Holocaust survivors; she was a committed Zionist until a visit to Israel inspired her about-face.
And then, as I take another bite, I see it — the sentence that says it all, hidden in the middle of her piece:
'One might pause to wonder what First Nations people, who are the victims of racism every day, feel about the priority given to 120,000 well-educated, secure and mostly affluent individuals.'
The collapsing foundations of the moral order
The backlash against Adler is inevitable. It will arrive immediately on social media, where she will be called all the usual names – kapo, self-hating Jew, #asajew – but it will take more than a week until she is properly castigated in her country's legacy press. The hatchet-man will be Henry Isaac Ergas, a Jewish recipient of the Order of Australia for his 'distinguished service to infrastructure economics'. In his weekly column for The Australian, Ergas will go for (what he no doubt assumes is) Adler's jugular.
'Adler begins with a trope that would warm any anti-Semite's heart,' he will write. 'Why was the Segal report commissioned? Not because synagogues have been attacked, schools threatened, and individual Jews harassed and assaulted. Rather, it was because the 'Jewish establishment' has 'the ability to garner prime ministerial dinners', mobilise 'a battalion of lobbyists' and 'corral more than 500 captains of industry'.'
This particular tone of ironic contempt, a unique and specific frequency that Zionist Jews reserve for their anti-Zionist kin, will be sustained throughout his column.
In his insistence that Adler is 'blind to her own hypocrisy and hate', Ergas will present the apparently novel argument that the Jewish community of Australia is entitled to the protections afforded every other minority. He will use his powers of rhetoric to assert, contrary to Adler's observation about the First Nations people, that none of this is a 'zero-sum game'. He will acknowledge that 'the conflict in the Middle East' is the source of the latest outpouring of Jew-hate, but he will scornfully reject the suggestion that the Israeli government or military is to blame.
And on the very same day, Friday, 18 July, the same tone of derision will be employed against me – the letter to the editor, written by David Saks of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies, will be published in Daily Maverick under the title, 'Bloom dances dangerously close to 'anti-Semitism denialism' in a hostile UCT campus climate'.
According to Saks, in my recent analysis on the 'legal battle for the soul of UCT', I have claimed victimhood for my fellow 'anti-Zionist dissidents' at the expense of the actual victims, the Zionists.
'This rather clumsy piece of misdirection quickly falls apart when considering the objective evidence of who is trying to censor who,' Saks will conclude.
'On the contrary, it is those who wish to identify as Zionist and express views supportive of that ideology and of the State of Israel who are being bullied, smeared, silenced and sidelined.'
Like Ergas, Saks will refute any culpability on the part of the Jewish state. While it may once have been a riposte that rendered me incandescent with rage, his feature-length oversight will now render me a little more sad, a little more grief-stricken, perhaps even a little more hopeless.
But all of that is three days in the future. Today, Tuesday, 15 July, my last day in Johannesburg, I am in an Uber travelling west across town, on the way to meet my editor, who has been taking almost as much flak from my brethren as I have. If the noise on X is anything to go by, a huge article has just dropped in The New York Times. The eminently credible Dutch historian Rutger Bregman has framed it for his 350,000 followers like this: 'It's becoming easier to find a climate denier among climate scientists than a genocide-denier among genocide scholars.'
The piece is a guest essay by Dr Omer Bartov, a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University in the US. The title: 'I'm a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It.'
As the Uber crosses Jan Smuts Avenue I am scanning the opening paragraphs, where Bartov recalls how, in November of 2023, he believed there was evidence that the Israeli military had already committed war crimes and 'potentially' crimes against humanity, but that 'contrary to the cries of Israel's fiercest critics' he did not yet believe that the exceptionally high bar for genocide had been breached. It was the forced removal of more than a million Palestinians from Rafah in May 2024, he writes, and the subsequent destruction of 'much of Rafah' by August, that for him 'was consistent with the statements denoting genocidal intent made by Israeli leaders in the days after the Hamas attack'.
After reminding readers of a few of these statements – Benjamin Netanyahu's injunction to Israeli citizens to remember 'what Amalek did'; Yoav Gallant's remark about 'human animals'; Nissim Vaturi's social media post about 'erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth' – Bartov gets to the lines that are right now trending on X:
'My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people. Having grown up in a Zionist home, lived the first half of my life in Israel, served in the [Israel Defense Forces] as a soldier and officer and spent most of my career researching and writing on war crimes and the Holocaust, this was a painful conclusion to reach, and one that I resisted as long as I could.'
For me, though, it is the passage another six lines down that delivers the true punch to the gut:
'The continued denial of this designation by states, international organisations and legal and scholarly experts will cause unmitigated damage not just to the people of Gaza and Israel but also to the system of international law established in the wake of the horrors of the Holocaust, designed to prevent such atrocities from happening ever again. It is a threat to the very foundations of the moral order on which we all depend.'
The capacity for self-diagnosis
Bartov, predictably, is accused of arriving at such conclusions for the sole purpose of securing a byline in The New York Times. He is smeared and discredited by one pro-Israel influencer after another. Most imply that he is a traitor, a Jew who has turned on his people; none offers a compelling counterargument, based on the 1948 Genocide Convention, that his conclusions are in any way exaggerated or flawed.
Before leaving for the airport, I stop by once more at the home of my mother. I have come up to Johannesburg, primarily, because of the fallout she has personally endured from my refusal to overlook the fact that our people are guilty of the crime of crimes. Although I can't deny the grief, I assure her that we will not be shunned forever. As evidence that my anger is abating, I do not once curse our community.
There is a book in my computer bag that became an instant bestseller on its publication in February 2025. Written by the Egyptian-Canadian author and journalist Omar El Akkad, its title is a standalone sentence that says a lot about this strange and horrific time – One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This.
On the flight back to my new home in Cape Town, I reread the passages that begin on page 85, where El Akkad mentions the country of my birth, the only country I have ever wanted to live.
'Second,' he notes, 'there is the realisation that of course it would be a country like South Africa that would take this step – a country deeply versed in the ugly mechanics of apartheid, for whose citizens checkpoints and forcefully sealed-off towns are not abstractions, but the very recent past that, from the safety of the present, everyone now claims they always opposed.'
El Akkad, in citing the 'step' taken by South Africa, is commenting on the momentous decision by our government to haul Israel before the International Court of Justice on charges of genocide. At the same time, he is making a deeply uncomfortable point about human cowardice and self-deceit. Mercifully, after a lengthy parenthesis wherein he lays into Palestine's closest Arab neighbours – the reason that their authoritarian leaders would not dare approach the ICJ themselves, he explains, is because 'the capacity for resistance' might 'prove contagious' – he grants the vast majority of my people a free pass.
'Beyond relief and recognition,' he writes, 'there is a more complicated thing – an understanding that the machinery of the West has never had much of a capacity for self-diagnosis. Who does? Who that achieves power of this scale ever does?'
By July 2025, as El Akkad has known for years and perhaps decades, it will be obvious to billions of human beings in the Global South that the scale of power achieved by the axis of Israel, the US and Western Europe is unparalleled in recorded history. Zionism's capacity for self-diagnosis will therefore be close to zero, even if to state it in those terms will be deemed heretical, anti-Semitic and (worst of all) conspiratorial.
But how else does one get away with a live-streamed genocide, week after week, day after day, minute after minute?
On the evening of 21 July 2025, from the couch of my apartment in Sea Point, I open my X feed to see that Alex de Waal, one of the world's foremost authorities on famine, has concluded that Israel – and by implication, Zionism – is now committing an atrocity that not even he (also an expert on Sudan) can statistically match.
'I've been working in this field of famine, food crisis and humanitarian action for more than 40 years,' De Waal tells Amy Goodman of Democracy Now, 'and there is no case, over those four decades, of such minutely engineered, closely monitored, precisely designed mass starvation of a population as is happening in Gaza today'.
Later that same evening, Cindy McCain, the chief of the World Food Programme, will tell Becky Anderson of CNN about an incident that had happened the day before. 'This is one of the worst tragedies we've seen so far,' she will say, describing how – after Israel had cleared a convoy of aid trucks for entry into Gaza – 60 desperate Palestinians had been slaughtered.
'They were hungry. They were starving,' she will say. 'All of a sudden, Israeli tanks, Israeli guns, Israeli weapons of all kinds started firing on the crowd.'
To pretend victimhood, at this point, is obscene, I'm thinking. And to keep quiet, to overlook, is only slightly less obscene. But one of those two things is what the vast majority of my people are doing; this, unbelievably, is what the vast majority of my people have become.
As a reminder, in his essay for The New Yorker published on my 52nd birthday, Abdurraqib adds a qualifier to his confession that he tends to find Islamophobia unspectacular. 'That doesn't mean I don't also find it insidious and of serious consequence,' he writes.
I have been wondering, while writing this essay, whether the same qualifier applies to me – whether, although I find anti-Semitism unspectacular, I also find it insidious and of serious consequence.
The answer, which genuinely grieves me, is that I don't; I used to, but now I don't. Until the vast majority of my people demand an end to the genocide committed hourly in our name, I now believe, there is nothing – no gun, no army, no flag, no God – that can, or should, save us.
An epilogue of tears
How, then, will we be forced to face what we are doing? When, if ever, do we emerge from our collective psychosis?
One last time, I am drawn back to Abdurraqib.
'I feel most Muslim when I am stunned by a moment of clarity within my own contradictions,' he writes in The New Yorker. 'Beyond whatever disconnects may exist in my faith practice, I still feel deeply connected to the ummah – the body, the community – and the responsibilities that this connection carries. A Hadith that I love, and which underpins many of my actions, states that 'the believers in their mutual kindness, compassion, and sympathy are just like one body. When one of the limbs suffers, the whole body responds to it with wakefulness and fever'.'
To insert myself into his words once again: I still feel deeply connected to Klal Yisrael – the closest Jewish approximation of the Islamic ummah – and to the responsibilities that this connection carries, but 'the body, the community' no longer feels connected to me.
On Friday, 25 July, I get an email from an old school friend, a man I have known since I was six years old. He sold me life insurance once, has been making commission on that sale ever since, but today he announces righteously that he is dropping me as a client.
At least three times a week, it is something – and someone – new. In my community, the response to the suffering of a limb is now simply to cut it off.
But on Saturday, 26 July, for the first time in almost two years, an emotion begins to surface that faintly resembles hope. The Jewish Democratic Initiative has invited me to attend their Festival of Dangerous Ideas, scheduled over two days in dual venues in Cape Town and Johannesburg. The headline speakers (via Zoom) are Yuli Novak, executive director of B'Tselem, the most respected human rights organisation in Israel, and Peter Beinart, the American-Jewish author and journalist, whose book Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza I reviewed for Daily Maverick in March.
In the Cape Town venue it is a full house, with capacity maxed out at 150 attendees. Exiting the lift on the fourth floor, it dawns on me that I haven't been at a gathering of my people like this in a very long time. Everything feels familiar, like a Bar-Mitzvah that never ended. Almost everyone here has been shunned in some way by old friends and members of their family.
In a word, it feels like sanity – and like truth, I will learn, sanity must prevail.
On Monday, 28 July, the day after Novak has presented to us on the venue's big screen, B'Tselem releases a report titled 'Our Genocide'. Along with the Israeli group Physicians for Human Rights, it admits culpability for the crime of crimes. The next day, 29 July, Beinart appears on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, in what is perhaps the most influential Jewish rejection of the Zionist project yet.
'Well, I have lost some pretty close friends over this,' says Beinart, getting straight to the point in his opening remarks. 'But I also don't worry about having to feed my kids. They're not starving. They're not being killed. I have freedom. I really have an incredibly fortunate and blessed life.' DM