As the saying goes, “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing”. Too easily it can lead to people presuming to make authoritative pronouncements on issues they barely understand, and getting things dead wrong.

When the issue concerns a particular religious and ethnic community, moreover, making sweeping statements that seriously misrepresent the nature, beliefs and activities of that community is not only presumptuous, but often defamatory and sometimes even dangerous.

Such is Alexander O’Riordan’s baffling and frequently incoherent attempt to draw linkages between what he refers to as “Settler terrorism” in the West Bank and the actions and ideology of certain Jewish organisations in South Africa, specifically the Jewish youth movements (“Terrorism in Israel has a new face, and it’s not what it used to be”, Daily Maverick, 11 September 2023).

Also bizarre is his portrayal of the Community Security Organisation (CSO), a body comprising professionals and volunteers who work to enhance security at Jewish installations and events, but which O’Riordan portrays as being both emblematic of and a vehicle for a new culture of violence that the Jewish youth in South Africa is supposedly embracing.

This ridiculous caricature, aside from being palpably untrue, is demeaning to Jewish South Africans in general, and is at least borderline inflammatory.     

Far from subversive

One can only wonder at how someone with O’Riordan’s academic credentials could have placed so sinister a spin on the CSO. Far from being somehow subversive and dangerous, the CSO is a legitimate, above-board organisation not unlike neighbourhood watches and the many other community-based anti-crime bodies that have been established over the years.

As the security arm of the Jewish community, it ensures that children are safe at school, that prayer services are uninterrupted by violence, crime or terrorism, and that communal events and installations are properly protected. Indeed, the model of community responsibility and volunteerism it embodies is an example to our society and is being copied by many other communities.

The ANC itself has on many occasions called for just such volunteerism to assist in addressing some of the more pressing problems in our land.

Radical anti-Israel fringe groups have often sought to smear the organisation by levelling all kinds of lurid and defamatory accusations against it, but O’Riordan at least ostensibly writes from an independent scholarly perspective. That makes his peculiar notions about the organisation and what it represents all the more perplexing.

What exactly is the basis for his referring to the emergence of “a new Jewish identity… shaped by being armed and willing to use violence to defend one’s interests” or that “to be a Jew means to carry arms and defend the community interests”?

The community 

It is an egregious insult, indicative both of how little the writer knows about the community he presumes to comment on and a mindset on his own part that comes dangerously close to being outright conspiratorial.

Conspiratorialist thinking also features in O’Riordan’s take on the Jewish youth movements. These, as anyone familiar with the Jewish community knows, engage in a wide range of activities for the benefit of the Jewish youth, from educating on Jewish culture, religion, history and identity to promoting leadership development, creating social spaces and ensuring that the youth are active members of the broader community (such as through involvement in social upliftment initiatives on behalf of underprivileged sectors of society).

They have traditionally been one of the pillars of Jewish communal life in South Africa and one of the reasons why that community has long been regarded as being among the most well-organised and vibrant in the diaspora. 

O’Riordan however, sees them as tools of “Israel and its political elites” which use them as recruitment vehicles for “settler terrorists”. In this regard, he writes about largely secular Zionist youth movements being able to “infiltrate synagogues and temples and use them as recruiting grounds for youth activists in support of Israel”. It is impossible to ignore the sinister spin he puts on all of this.

Most of the article relates to what O’Riordan believes is happening in Israeli society, and much of it appears to be as confused and arbitrary as what he writes about South African Jewry.

However, engaging with those aspects of his piece is beyond the scope of this response. Taken as a whole, O’Riordan’s reasoning is so hopelessly muddled and his understanding of the dynamics of Jewish communal life so limited that it is often hard to conclude exactly what he means to say. 

The writer is in fact achieving little beyond spreading poorly researched, incoherently argued and factually incorrect drivel about the Jewish community in South Africa, its communal organisations and its youth. DM

David Saks is the Associate Director, SA Jewish Board of Deputies.