In early February, a group of girls from King David High School in Johannesburg travelled to another prominent girls’ school in the city for a tennis match.
When they arrived at Roedean Girls High School, they found no one at the courts.
Almost immediately, Bruce Nozaic, the deputy principal of King David, posted a voice note claiming that the game did not take place “because the kids who will be walking onto the courts are Jewish”.
It was not long before claims of antisemitism dominated the narrative.
Roedean was largely taken to task by the mainstream media and made to answer allegations of antisemitism.
After some panicked damage control from Roedean, the school apologised. Its principal resigned. The school board chair stepped down soon after.
King David High School, along with larger Jewish Zionist institutions in South Africa, promptly accepted the apology and the shake-up there.
“We feel relieved. We had no interest in having long, protracted public spats with other independent schools. We want to resume normal relations. It was important to stand up to antisemitism. Now we just want to get our community and kids back to where they are meant to be – playing sport,” Rabbi Ricky Seeff of the South African Board of Jewish Education (SABJE) said.
But many involved acknowledge that the incident has not been resolved. The reason the Roedean students decided not to play the tennis match against King David has been swept under the rug.
So what happened? And what does it tell us about Zionism in South Africa?
The genocide in Gaza
Over the past two and a half years of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, there has been a reckoning among many South Africans, especially young people, about ending ties with companies and institutions seen to be complicit in the murder and forced displacement of Palestinians.
With the South African government leading the charge against Israel at the International Court of Justice over alleged violations of the Genocide Convention, many young South Africans have been moved to contribute to efforts to hold Israel accountable.
These actions have included speaking boldly on Palestine, painting murals and participating in or encouraging boycotts of Israeli products.
In other words, the boycott of the match with King David had nothing to do with antisemitism and everything to do with the school’s proximity to Israel.
This issue began more than a year ago, when parents of several tennis players expressed their discomfort over a game held at King David in 2024.
Students from Roedean went to King David High School for a tennis match, only to find it set up like a military base, with security officials carrying military-grade weapons outside the gates.
Inside the campus, the school was festooned with Israeli flags, including posters of Israeli hostages held by Hamas.
The tennis players from Roedean reported the incident to the school and requested that February’s fixture be forfeited.
The students did not make a spectacle of their boycott. There was no media involvement. It was a quiet, student-led refusal rather than a public protest.
So how did such an obvious case of boycott in a country with a history of student uprisings, and a history of having faced boycotts itself, become neutered by claims of antisemitism and shrouded in controversy?
And how was the school whose students asked to conduct a boycott made to apologise and effectively offer up its Black headmistress as a sacrifice for refusing to play against a school supporting apartheid and cheerleading a genocide?
The problem, as it would appear – and as the mainstream media would have us understand it – primarily stems from Roedean’s inability to communicate why the school could not honour the tennis match. It stuttered and tangled itself in half-truths and baffling explanations about scheduling conflicts and academic workshops when it could have spoken plainly about the issue.
It would cost them dearly.
A leaked recording
In the days preceding the forfeited tennis match, Phuti Mogale, the now former principal of Roedean Girls High School, called Lorraine Srage, the head of King David High School, “to pick your brains”, as she put it, over a matter at the school.
Mogale fumbled and struggled to articulate why members of her community were opposed to playing King David, but said enough for Srage to understand, asking whether the school had faced similar dilemmas elsewhere.
“We have not had any pressure whatsoever from any other school,” Srage replied. “All our fixtures have gone ahead. Especially in the last two and a half years, we have had no pressure whatsoever… and so are your parents objecting to us playing you?”
“Yes, they are basically saying because of the stance the government took, we are supposed to support that. I keep having to remind them that schools are apolitical first and foremost, particularly in South Africa; we do not take a stance like that,” Mogale told her counterpart.
“So it is not just a Jewish day school issue?” Srage asked.
“At the moment it is presenting itself as a Jewish day school issue, but it is going to get bigger than that – there are other schools they just do not want to play against,” Mogale replied.
Unbeknownst to Mogale, Srage was recording the conversation, and her phrasing about the boycott “presenting itself as a Jewish day school issue” was enough for Srage to pull the antisemitism card.
In other words, when Mogale called Srage to talk through an issue she had no prior experience dealing with, she believed she was calling a colleague who would engage in good faith about keeping politics out of school sport.
It is unclear why Mogale made the call, or whether she had been advised to do so, but when she did, she called the head of an institution built to protect Israeli interests.
Mogale had walked straight into a trap.
The story of King David
King David High School in Johannesburg is not merely a school. It is the endpoint in a network of Jewish Zionist schools, from nursery to high school, built with a purpose – to inculcate a love for Israel among Jews in South Africa.
Some years ago, the school network was described as “the largest in the southern hemisphere”. It hosts 2,700 students and employs 385 educators across at least 10 schools.
From its inception in 1948, the year the state of Israel was created, the school was built on the foundation of Zionism.
Operated under SABJE, a pillar of pro-Zionist Jewish life in the country, it positions Israel as its north star. “As an organisation, we are committed to the State of Israel, her continued success, legitimacy and the vital role she plays in the lives of Jews in the diaspora,” the board states.
Its constitution defines Jewish education as “the continuation of Jewish and Zionist Education based on traditional and customary Orthodox lines and the recognition of the centrality of the State of Israel to the Jewish People”.
The school’s code of conduct likewise says it aims to develop Jewish youth who are “committed to the survival of the Jewish people and to the welfare of both Israel and South Africa”.
The Israeli national anthem is played at school assemblies. Students are taken on trips to Israel where they, like participants on Birthright trips from the US, get to cosplay as Israeli soldiers.
The school routinely hosts Israeli national days, such as Yom Yerushalayim, or Jerusalem Day, in which students are shown footage from the 1967 war and what is described as the “liberation of the Old City”.
Students also participate in the Israel Quiz, which the Jewish Report has said helps “educate and instil a love of Israel, perpetuating the Zionist values of our schools”.
Even the school’s sports houses are named Herzl, Ben-Gurion, Weizmann and Bialik after some of Israel’s founding fathers.
‘Deliberate distortions’
Over the years, several alumni have spoken out about what they describe as the school’s whitewashing of history and current affairs.
“As a pupil of this school in the 90s, I was taught Zionist history, including deliberate distortions of the truth such as the idea that the State of Israel was ‘a land without people for a people without land’, and that Israel boasted the world’s ‘most moral army’, a claim that has since been proven so completely out of touch with reality that it has seemingly been abandoned as a hasbara talking point,” former student Daniel Friedman wrote in a 2025 letter urging the school to change course.
Srage, the first woman to head King David, has been at the school for 45 years. She began as a physical education and history teacher, later headed the history department, and in 2015 was appointed by the board to lead the school.
In 1992, as South Africa moved towards shedding apartheid, she took students to Israel for three months on an ulpan, an intensive Hebrew language course.
More recently, Tom Johnson, the school’s senior deputy principal, said Srage’s family in South Africa and Australia had moulded his Zionism and love for Israel.
“She is without doubt the greatest professional asset to the South African Board of Jewish Education,” he said.
In other words, King David’s decision to cry antisemitism was not “a lazy response“, as one columnist put it.
It was a deliberate attempt to conflate Zionism with Judaism and obscure the students’ democratic right to boycott. It was precisely what King David was designed to do.
“King David reinforces the antisemitic myth that all Jews are Zionists, silencing all of its students who question this or who dare to criticise Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians,” South African Jews for a Free Palestine wrote in an open letter this week.
“We support these students and their rejection of injustice. Roedean’s parents, teachers and administration should do so as well,” the group added.
It was not until a second call with Srage, the day after the forfeited fixture, that Mogale appeared to grasp the recklessness of having sought assistance from the very institution her students had requested to boycott.
In a recording of their second conversation, shared widely on WhatsApp, Mogale informed Srage of her concerns that a staff member from King David had made accusations of antisemitism against her school.
Srage did not respond as a colleague. She doubled down.
“The allegation is quite founded in the fact that you did not want to play us because we are a Jewish school. It did not come out as anything else,” Srage replied.
Later in the call, she added: “We are consulting with our lawyers as well. Because this is setting a precedent of school sport. Schools by the Constitution of [Schools Association of South Africa] are non-political.”
Fault lines in South Africa
Weeks after the incident, debates continue in the South African media over who bears responsibility for the debacle between the two schools. Little attention, however, has been paid to the legitimacy of the King David school network itself.
How is a school that espouses allegiance not just to another state but to a settler-colonial ideology allowed to function without scrutiny in South Africa?
How are students meant to navigate the contradiction between loyalty to a state that defeated apartheid, at least theoretically, and another that continues to function as an apartheid and genocidal state?
Instead of being lauded for opening a long overdue conversation, the students have seen both the mainstream media and Roedean itself miss an opportunity to lift the bonnet on Zionist influence over education in South Africa.
“To go play at King David School is like playing against a school still flying the apartheid flag,” one Roedean parent told me. “The learners did the South African thing – they just sat out.”
The parent, who asked to remain anonymous given the potential reprisals against her daughter from both the school and Zionist groups in Johannesburg, said it was outrageous how Srage had reframed the discussion.
“It is more a Zionist school than a Jewish school. It seems they want the right to be racist and the right to call anyone who calls them out antisemitic,” she said.
The Zionist Jewish community has good reason to believe it can get away with it. For now, at least.
More than 450 South Africans have reportedly fought for Israel since the genocide in Gaza began in late 2023. The lack of political will to hold them accountable notwithstanding, incidents like the one at Roedean offer a glimpse into shifting winds in South Africa.
They also reveal the capture of private institutions in a country that should know better.
Roedean is a prestigious school. King David’s swift escalation sends a warning to others that such dissent will not be tolerated.
The furore around the abandoned tennis match may not have landed as it ought to have, but it has opened a debate that can no longer be easily contained.
Source: MEE
