Questions & Answers About the JDI

The Jewish Democratic Initiative launched in June 2017. It was the 50th anniversary of the Israeli victory in the Six Day War. It was also the 50th anniversary of a darker consequence: the start of the "Occupation", meaning the seizure and demolition of growing swathes of Palestinian villages and agriculture in the West Bank and the imposition of a military regime over millions of non-Jews.

It was an issue to which a majority of Jews had paid scant attention. June 2017 was a wake-up call, a moment of realisation that we had been silent for too long. We were reminded of the important role that South African Jews had played in the struggle for human rights and justice in this country, and we sought to honour this in our attitudes towards Israel/Palestine.

In June 2017, the JDI, together with Jewish organisations around the world, petitioned the Israeli government to restart the stalled peace negotiations with a greater sense of commitment towards finding a just and equitable solution.

We strive for an inclusive and tolerant South African Jewish community, focused on social justice and open to a diverse range of approaches to societal challenges.

We value open debate and dialogue within our South African community to enrich our contribution to the constitutional values of freedom, equality, dignity and Ubuntu. We stand for the ethical values of Judaism, including empathy for the strangers among us. We provide a home for those increasingly alienated by the closeminded bigotry of so much of the mainstream South African Jewish community.

We are an umbrella organisation accommodating a range of views. We have principles, but we are not dogmatic. These are difficult, indeed horrifying times, in which we struggle with our relationships to Israel-Palestine. Some of our members quote the forgotten ideals set out in the founding documents of the State of Israel; some say that the chauvinistic tendencies of contemporary Zionism are the problem; some say that political Zionism's failure to acknowledge the presence and the rights of its Palestinian population, a wilful blindness to the presence of another population, was always the problem.

We express no preferences for one state or two state or confederal or any of the other solutions that have been proposed. Instead, we are united on one thing. Following the example of South Africa, which we regularly present as a model, we call for an honest and equitable negotiated settlement in which all parties are represented.

Negotiations will be difficult, are likely to require painful compromises on all sides, may take months or years, but are the only viable solution. And South Africa itself is proof of that. This country has a great many problems today, but it is not locked in a perpetual, ever more hideous, civil war.

The JDI is a moderate, centrist organisation whose calls for basic human rights, the rule of law and ethnic and religious equality are the supposed baseline values of a state that continues to claim to be "the only democracy in the Middle East".

The reason we may appear "radical" is that Jewish communities in Israel and in this country have moved so far to the extreme right, have become so intolerant of the slightest dissent, so unashamed of voicing Islamophobic and racist opinions, and so willing to uncritically and unreservedly support the gross excesses of the worst government in Israel's history.

We have no power to change events in Israel, but what we can do is call out our local community leaders for their silence and complicity. And if other groups like ours across the global diaspora put similar pressure on their community leaders (and indeed, we are part of a global network of similar organisations called JLink) then perhaps there will one day be real push back from the fifty percent of world Jewry who do not live in Israel.

The JDI has always been and always will be horrified by the mass murder or kidnapping of civilians. October 7th was the greatest tragedy in modern Jewish history — a barbaric act of terrorism in which Hamas deliberately targeted innocent men, women and children. We condemn it in the strongest possible terms. Nothing can justify it, excuse it, or contextualise it away. It was an atrocity.

We have never expressed support for Hamas, a chauvinistic and fanatical group whose values do not at any point align with our own. But it is worth noting that the Hamas indifference to human life, intolerance of dissent and religious zealotry is not dissimilar to that of members of the Israeli government. Netanyahu, Smotrich, Ben-Gvir and Hamas, in their mutual pursuit of perpetual war, need one another.

Any country has the right to defend itself militarily against armed incursions. Which does not mean that there are no limits upon how a country chooses to defend itself. Israel has managed over the past few years to turn the greatest tragedy to face the Jewish people in modern times into the greatest tragedy facing the Palestinian people. Retaliation has been grossly disproportionate and deliberately so, for many reasons: to deflect criticism of those leaders who failed to prevent the attack; to stall elections and public accountability; to use the opportunity to seize land in both Gaza and the West Bank; and to detain tens of thousands of Palestinians without trial under the guise of security. The war itself was in part a consequence of years of refusing to reckon with the Palestinian "problem" by preferring crude suppression to negotiations.

The term "genocide" is a legal term and should not be treated as a casual figure of speech or a political slogan. Jews tend to think of the Shoah whenever the word "genocide" is invoked, but the term was invented several years later and sets a lower bar than gas chambers and death marches. The argument is too complicated to be dealt with fully here. Let us instead say that the JDI supports the arguments of the renowned Holocaust scholar Omar Bartov, Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University, who argues that Israel's military campaign exhibits clear patterns of intent to destroy Palestinian society through starvation, forced displacement and the systematic destruction of essential infrastructure. "Making life impossible has become a central strategy — not an accidental consequence — of Israeli policy."

Antisemitism has undoubtedly spiralled alarmingly in the past few years, with Bondi Beach and attacks on US synagogues as some of the more shocking examples. Antisemitism has been with us for more than two thousand years, often inflamed as official policy. The question is why antisemitism, always lurking below the surface, has spiked so dramatically since a specific moment, October 2023.

The obvious answer is that Israel's brutal and disproportionate retaliation has caused the world to forget that this all began with the massacre of October 7th. On social media, on the streets, in cities around the world, fairly or unfairly, the word "Israel" has become a synonym for the word "genocide", and the word "Zionist" has become shorthand for the word "Jew". The old tropes about evil, greedy Jews are re-emerging. And it is those of us in the diaspora, unable to hide ourselves behind the guns of the Israeli Defence Force, who are most vulnerable to an antisemitic backlash.

Does Israel care? Not really. The more frightened the diaspora Jewish communities, the more likely they are to rush to Israel for safety.

The JDI works inside the local and international Jewish communities, and we do not have affiliations with groups outside those communities, neither BDS nor any of the Palestinian solidarity groups. Our aim is to reach Jews who are having second thoughts about their allegiances. Our methods are education and information, as described further below.

We do not favour blanket boycotts of Israeli academics or cultural organisations. We prefer the approach of the African National Congress during apartheid's latter days, which allowed individuals or organisations to be considered on their merits. We boycott organisations which actively choose to work with or to supply the illegal settlements in the West Bank, or which supply munitions used against civilians in Gaza. But we engage with those Israelis who share our values. Given South Africa's own troubled legacy of censorship, we support free speech, including the free speech of those whose views we disagree with.

The JDI is by no means a wealthy organisation, and we are entirely supported by donations. Much of that comes from private individuals, often anonymously. It is however public knowledge that our major supporter has been the Mauerberger Foundation Fund, a rare Jewish philanthropic foundation with the courage to defy the mainstream Jewish consensus and stand up for "human rights, meaning all human rights, which includes Palestinian human rights." The foundation has over many decades supported peace initiatives, bridge-building, grassroots public health, empowerment and education in Israel-Palestine.

We support the many peace movements that attempt, often at considerable cost to themselves, to build bridges between people. Groups that bring Jews and Arabs face-to-face on mutual projects provide an essential antidote to the bigotry that is increasingly widespread in Israeli society. If the country is to have any future at all, it will begin with the tireless work of the peace makers. We also admire the work of those courageous organisations which meticulously document human rights abuses, or which challenge those abuses before the courts. We regularly update our audiences about the activities of these groups and each month we choose one to honour.

The benefit is community. We provide a home for Jews who have questions about the behaviour of Israel's leaders and the silence of our local community leadership. These Jews find themselves holding their tongues to keep the peace with colleagues, friends, relatives or teachers who may be hostile to their views. We provide a safe space in which they may freely express those opinions.

Education and information. We aim to open people's minds to the dire situation within Israel-Palestine, and to remind them of their responsibility as Jews to speak out.

Some of our members have held dissenting views for many years and are acquainted with the troubling facts of Israeli history, society and politics. More recent arrivals, even those who have made the effort to keep up with events in Israel, have encountered only a narrow and one-sided perspective. There is almost no capacity for self-critique within the dominant Israeli or local Jewish cultural ethos. Recent Jewish history is understood in triumphalist terms, with Israel's problems caused by hostile outsiders rather than by the actions of its own leaders.

We hold public events, we host discussions with local and international speakers, often Israeli or Palestinian, we screen documentaries that have grabbed headlines abroad but are not widely available in South Africa, and we provide a daily news clipping service covering pertinent events in the Middle East and in the South African Jewish community.

Our biggest event in 2025 was a weekend-long "Jewish Festival of Dangerous Ideas". Over Zoom we hosted prominent international speakers including on the left, Peter Beinart, author of Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, and in the political centre, Sir Mick Davis who had just established an international liberal Zionist network called the London Initiative. There was Yuli Novak, head of the human rights NGO B'Tselem which was about to release a meticulously researched but damning report the very next day, and there was a powerful address from former Israeli ambassador to South Africa Alon Liel.

We also flew out a Palestinian journalist with a waspish pen, Hanan Majadli, who visited both Johannesburg and Cape Town. We screened a movie about the daily work of the Israeli-Palestinian peace movement Combatants for Peace and we exhibited a photographic essay about Palestinians living under the occupation. There was an interactive workshop in the form of a timeline of Zionist history laid out in a long line across the floor, with people invited to recall the moment they first identified with Israel and the moment they first began to ask questions.

But perhaps the main point is this: we brought together several hundred people in Johannesburg and Cape Town to meet one another, talk, eat and schmooze amongst themselves and perhaps form the beginnings of a community.

We hold at least one event each month, usually a panel discussion with one or more invited speakers who may disagree with one another. For example, on the vexed topic of whether the Gaza catastrophe can be defined as a genocide, we invited diverse speakers: the Holocaust historian Professor Amos Goldberg who said it was most certainly a genocide, the Israeli human rights lawyer Professor Sigall Horovitz who said there was insufficient evidence of intent to make for a winnable case, and the director of the Holocaust and Genocide Centre in Johannesburg, Tali Nates, who talked about how poorly international law deals with genocide. Law lecturer Caitlin Le Roith, who says it is a genocide, discussed how Israel has repeatedly managed to evade international sanction.

We have hosted highly regarded movies including the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land about the destruction of villages in the West Bank, which left the audience in a state of numb shock. We have screened Israelism, the story of passionately Zionist Americans who are obliged to reassess their most deeply-held beliefs on encountering the reality of the West Bank Occupation, and The Viewing Booth, about how social media disinformation causes people to doubt even verified information.

We publish a news clipping service called Chadashot which links to interesting and immediate news and opinion about Israel-Palestine from sources that may be unfamiliar or inaccessible to our audience, including videos and essays from experts. We put out more than 100 items each month, or 1,200 in a year. Chadashot is a sobering crash-course in the affairs of Israel-Palestine, an education even for those of us compiling it. We are repeatedly confronted with issues we may have complacently taken for granted, only to discover that the reality is uncomfortably different.

The Jewish community in this country is estimated at around 45,000. We have 850 people signed up to receive our email communications, 250 subscribed to Chadashot, and 950 followers on Instagram, a number which can on occasion jump to 1,700. Even if we allow for overlapping audiences, with some people following us on all three, we are nonetheless reaching more than a thousand people, or one Jew in about forty.

We are thus, as the Board of Deputies likes to say, an insignificant minority. But it's an insignificant minority that is growing. An insignificant minority that is attracting some serious, respected, influential people. We provide a home for people disillusioned with the leadership of the Jewish community, who may have become indifferent and apathetic, but who have finally found somewhere to turn. Perhaps these are people like you.

We would love to have more people actively participate. It's not necessary to encumber yourself with the burden of sitting on a management committee. You may have skills that are useful, you may have occasional free time. We need help with catering and with organising with the front office and tech at events. We need help with social media and our website, which we would like to grow into a must-visit resource on Israel-Palestine, Zionism, the peace movements, the movies, the books, the issues, the culture, and so on. We need more participation from the youth. If you can help, please pop an email to us at info@jdisa.org.