'Propaganda masquerading as strategic realism'

Ziyad Motala

There is a certain predictability in the Sunday Times’ editorial arc of late, an increasingly tired soliloquy in praise of empire, veiled in the language of pragmatism and national interest. But even by its declining standards, the paper’s recent conduct reveals something altogether more disquieting: an abdication of journalistic integrity in favour of ideological alignment with Zionist hasbara and Washington’s punitive caprice.

For months, the Sunday Times stonewalled a public inquiry, refusing to disclose that its columnist, S’thembiso Msomi, had taken a trip to Israel and written an article in April 2025, a reverent portrayal of Israeli resilience masquerading as impartial analysis, which was funded by the South African Jewish Board of Deputies.

This silence was not inadvertent. It was calculated. Only this past Sunday, after a formal complaint was lodged with the Press Council, did the paper grudgingly acknowledge this inconvenient fact. The admission came in the form of a subdued notice buried deep within the paper, accompanied by the usual euphemisms of “clarification” and “apology.” One suspects the intent was plain: to bury the admission and hope the public would move on, none the wiser.

This is no minor infraction. The Press Code is unambiguous: publications must disclose when a third party finances the cost of news gathering. Failure to do so compromises not only the perceived neutrality of the journalist but the editorial independence of the publication itself. The Sunday Times, one of South Africa’s prominent newspapers, violated this basic tenet of ethical journalism and only confessed months later when cornered.

But Msomi’s subsidised propaganda piece is merely the tip of a much larger ideological iceberg. For some time now, the Sunday Times has become a dependable sanctuary for pro-Israel apologetics and the exculpation of American imperial tantrums. William Gumede’s April 27 supplication for normalisation with Israel was not just intellectually lazy; it was ideologically revealing. That his organisation, Democracy Works, has itself been the recipient of funding from several dubious foreign entities raises questions about whether we are reading South African analysis or something concocted in the backrooms of Tel Aviv and Washington, D.C.

Not to be outdone, Peter Bruce, in a piece on July 18, urged the ANC to “re-engage” with Israel, as though genocide were a minor irritant to be filed under diplomatic collateral. This week, William Gumede once again joined the chorus with a patronising lecture about South Africa’s “anti-American” posture, couched, of course, in the language of concern for ordinary South Africans.

He argues that the ANC’s refusal to grovel before Donald Trump’s grotesque “America first” foreign policy is somehow an affront to rational diplomacy. It is a line of reasoning so bankrupt, so wilfully ahistorical, that one wonders whether Gumede has mistaken State Department press releases for political philosophy.

To Gumede, the refusal to embrace the punitive actions taken by the United States against its adversaries, China, Russia, and Iran, is symptomatic of ideological recklessness. That these are states with whom South Africa has longstanding economic and strategic ties is brushed aside. That they are themselves frequent targets of American hostility for daring to act independently of Washington’s diktats is of no concern. And that Donald Trump’s America is perhaps the least principled, most corrupt and least coherent United States government in recent memory is something Gumede conveniently omits.

Let us be clear. No state, regardless of its alliances or ideological pretensions, should enjoy impunity for violating international law or trampling on human rights. Those who commit war crimes or persecute their people must be held accountable without exception. Yet to invoke China, Russia or Iran as stock villains to deflect from the horrors in Gaza is not only evasive, it is intellectually bankrupt.

Any person possessed of even modest moral clarity can see what is unfolding there: a sustained campaign of collective punishment, bolstered by the silence and acquiescence of the self-styled democratic West. Only a fool believes the United States has a principled interest in human rights. The historical record is unambiguous. So long as the foreign despot salutes the American flag and pledges fealty to Washington, tyranny becomes tolerable, and repression conveniently overlooked.

It is particularly rich that Gumede offers up corruption as one of the United States’ primary concerns with South Africa. One must ask: Is this the same United States whose president auctioned off foreign policy to the highest bidder, made his inaugural visits to the gilded palaces of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi, and returned with real estate contracts for his family? Is this the America whose transactional foreign policy includes deals with murderers and autocrats in exchange for arms deals and hotel licences? If so, Gumede’s invocation of corruption is not just misguided. It is obscene.

Equally revealing as what the Sunday Times chooses to publish is what it deliberately leaves out. While major newspapers across the globe devoted front pages this Sunday to the deepening famine in Gaza, where Israel stands credibly accused of weaponising starvation against a besieged population, the Sunday Times offered not a single article on the subject.

Instead, readers were served yet another polemic lamenting South Africa’s supposed diplomatic “missteps” for refusing to placate the unplacatable. At the very moment when two respected Israeli human rights organisations, B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights Israel, joined the growing international consensus that Israel is committing genocide, the Sunday Times chose to publish yet another piece dismissing South Africa’s ICJ application as nothing more than political “lawfare.”

This posture is part of a broader pattern of editorial capture. In an earlier column by Rowan Polovin on May 18, the Sunday Times provided a platform for the chair of the South African Zionist Federation to distort history, sanitise Israeli apartheid, and peddle neocolonial binaries between the "West" and global irrelevance. Polovin’s article was not journalism. It was propaganda masquerading as strategic realism, replete with the ugliest strands of ethnic chauvinism and settler-colonial nostalgia.

This is not journalism. It is ideological mimicry.

The Sunday Times’ descent into apologetics for Zionist repression and American belligerence reflects a broader pattern among certain elite opinion-shapers in South Africa. They dress up subservience and Israeli apartheid as realism, and fealty to empire as prudence. But the effect is the same: the slow domestication of South African political discourse in service of foreign powers whose only consistent principle is the ruthless preservation of their interests.

In an age when facts are politicised and justice is routinely subverted, affectations of neutrality serve only to mask complicity. The Sunday Times has not simply abdicated its duty to inform. It has aligned itself with the architects of obfuscation, giving comfort to power, to oppression, and Israeli apartheid, something unimaginable in a democratic South Africa bending to the whims of Donald Trump.

* Ziyad Motala, Professor of Law, Howard Law School

** The views expressed in this article are necessarily those of The African, IOL or Independent Media.

*** NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: An earlier version of this piece was submitted on multiple occasions to the Sunday Times, addressed to Makhudu Sefara, Mike Saluma, Gabriella Bekes, and Juliette Saunders. Regrettably, none of them acknowledged receipt.