The Roedean Affair: Institutional power and media complicity manufacture consent for Zionism

The Roedean School / King David Linksfield saga reveals how media framing, institutional power and antisemitism claims shape the Zionism debate in South Africa.

By IQBAL JASSAT

Over many decades of advocacy, one learns the role of narrative framing and the impact it has on public opinion.

Zionist hasbara (propaganda) has an expressed policy to ensure that framing deliberately obscures facts, disregards context, and shields Israel’s war criminals from accountability.

To therefore frame the recent dispute involving Roedean School and King David Linksfield as ‘antisemitic’ is lazy, utterly inadequate and misleading.

The subsequent controversy that raged over the cancelled tennis match and the unfortunate so-called ‘resignation’ of Roedean’s principal is a textbook case of how institutional power, media complicity, and the cynical weaponisation of antisemitism are deployed in South Africa to silence dissent and manufacture consent for the violent political ideology of Zionism.

What began as an act of conscience by young learners, reportedly uncomfortable with normalising relations with an institution that allegedly promotes Zionism amidst a genocide in Gaza, was systematically reframed by a coordinated network of lobby groups and pliant media outlets.

The narrative was swiftly and decisively stripped of all political context and repackaged as a simple, ugly tale of antisemitism.

With some marginal exception, it appears that this narrative became dominant, stopping short of establishing or interrogating whether or not it was a deliberate and dangerous lie.

It raises the question whether the media’s selective outrage is a profound indictment of its moral and journalistic bankruptcy? Or is it a case of lazy journalism? In either case it should neither be tolerated nor excused.

Media platforms who rushed to publish condemnations, focusing on the supposed ‘blatant prejudice’ and the ‘devastated’ feelings of the King David students, failed to articulate the reasons for the reservation by Roedean learners.

Surely such indignation was silent on the far greater violence that in all probability prompted the students’ unease in the first place: the industrial-scale slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza, a reality that has led South Africa to charge Israel with genocide at the International Court of Justice.

Indeed, this glaring omission is the heart of the story. The media did not only fail to find the context; it actively ignored it.

There was no probe on King David Schools’ institutional framework to establish whether its educational mandate is inseparable from Zionism and the State of Israel.

Take, for instance, the public comments by Jo Bluen, which shed light on her experience at King David Linksfield.

She wrote on Facebook that as a former head girl there, she experienced ‘their tyranny’ and is ‘deeply unsurprised but profoundly horrified that King David is prepared to sacrifice its own children at the altar of a wild and violent Zionism that is deeply racist and misogynistic’.

And in expressing solidarity with Mrs Phuti Mogale, the principal of Roedean, who they claim has ‘resigned’, Bluen says it is ‘no mistake that the headmistress targeted is a black woman’.

‘Zionism is also patriarchal white supremacy,’ proclaimed Bluen.

To delink King David Linksfield from Israel is to ignore the Zionist regime’s pariah status in the world. And to believe that young students, whether from Roedean or elsewhere, do not possess agency to respond to heinous carnage caused by Israel in Gaza is misplaced.

Neither they nor South Africans as a whole are insulated from the fact that the Israeli military is and has been engaged in what the world’s highest court has deemed a plausible genocide.

It thus brings us back to the question about why, instead of investigating the students’ legitimate ethical objections, their voices have been silenced.

Instead the media chose to amplify a narrative that falsely conflates Jewish identity with Zionism.

To view this as an accidental error is to give credence to a core strategy of the pro-Israel lobby. It serves to shield Zionist institutions from political critique and to falsely brand any and all solidarity with Palestine as antisemitic.

The goal is to make the price of speaking out against Israeli apartheid so high that most will choose the comfort of silence.