UCT’s Gaza fallout: donor exodus, legal firestorm and a council under siege

Key topics:Lawsuit challenges UCT Council’s handling of the 2024 Gaza resolutions.Major donors and funders allegedly pulled or froze support after the fallout.Questions are raised over governance, fiduciary duties and political ideology at UCT.Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox every morning on weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa's bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..By Marika Sboros.There was a time not that long ago when becoming a member of the University of Cape Town (UCT) Council was considered a privilege. The position carried prestige as a pinnacle of civic duty. These days, membership of UCT’s supreme governing body looks more like a masterclass in incinerating millions, potentially billions, of endowment Rands while whistling a catchy political tune. That’s after allegations of serious breaches of fiduciary duties and perjury by some Council members in their impugned decision-making – decisions which caused not just major financial loss but a haemorrhage of funding from high-profile, philanthropic foundations and international government agencies. The litany of allegedly dodgy dealings preceding that haemorrhage is documented in an ongoing lawsuit against UCT Council in the Western Cape High Court. It was launched in August 2024 by one of UCT’s own – head of historical studies Prof Adam Mendelsohn – after Council voted to adopt the Senate’s proposed “Gaza Resolutions” in June 2024.The court hearing concluded on October 30, 2025, before a three-judge bench with the promise of a ruling “early in the new year”. .A quarter into 2026, no ruling is in sight. The resolutions enforce an academic boycott of Israeli academics and reject the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism in favour of the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (JDA).The JDA lends itself more easily to political boycott. The IHRA is a gold standard adopted by more than 47 national governments, including the US, Canada, the UK, Switzerland,26 of the 27 EU countries and over 13000 organisations and institutions. Top global universities that have adopted the IHRA definition include Harvard and Columbia in the US, and Oxford and Cambridge in the UK.The JDA has been adopted by UCT and a few universities with a dual approach. In a twist of institutional irony, by adopting the JDA, UCT breached a clause specifying IHRA compliance in a funding agreement with its major philanthropic donor, the Donald Gordon Foundation (DGF) that it had itself drafted.That makes Council’s rejection of the IHRA definition look less like a principled stand and more like a messy divorce from its own legal handiwork.Court documents on public record paint a combustible portrait of some Council members who wouldn't recognise a conflict of interest if it slapped them in the face with a 150-page answering affidavit..What lies behind UCT’s battlefield against ‘pesky’ Jews?: Marika Sboros.Leading this modern-day bonfire of the vanities are Adv Norman Arendse SC, Chair of Council’s executive committee (Exco), and Dianna Yach, Exco member in June 2024. Mendelsohn claims that their governance skills and behaviour were so legally and financially inflammable that he is seeking costs against both personally, and similarly against Exco members Reeza Isaacs (deputy Chair) and Malcolm Campbell. The move, known in legal terms as “punitive costs”, is not unusual. After all, if you play revolutionary activist with someone else's hundreds of millions of Rands, you should be prepared to cover part of the legal fees when the revolution turns out to be an unlawful mess..Mendelsohn’s lawsuit cites UCT Council as the first of 32 respondents, Arendse as the second, Campbell as the 6th, Isaacs as the 9th, and Yach as the 31st. He claims that all wilfully withheld from Council crucial information signalling clear and present warnings from high-profile donors. In particular, they appear to have ignored DGF’s loudly “barking dogs” warning of significant financial and reputational damage if the resolutions were adopted. When Council adopted the resolutions and the financial fallout happened precisely as DGF trustees had predicted, it was devastating. The largest single, overnight loss was the DGF’s withdrawal of its R200-million gift for UCT’s Neuroscience Institute. This became the “canary” for UCT’s donor gold mine. The DGF permanently withdrew from negotiations for a future landmark project – a new teaching hospital valued at between R400-million and R500-million. The project is now earmarked for Stellenbosch University.The DGF also demanded a refund of the first R20-million tranche paid towards the R200-million donation for the Neuroscience Institute..In November 2024, the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation suspended its annual funding of R6.5- to R7-million per annum to UCT. The foundation’s final donation in 2024 was in support of 259 undergraduate and 29 postgraduate disadvantaged UCT students on its Dell Young Leaders programme. There are no new Dell Young Leaders at UCT in 2026. The Harry Crossley Foundation, funder of student bursaries and research projects in 2024 to the value of R9.375-million, has stopped new funding from 2025. Their reasons? Concerns around “cancel culture” and the increase of antisemitism at UCT. UCT Council appeared oblivious of the fact that ideology does not pay tuition fees, as one critic put it. Other donors followed suit. .UCT had already alienated the university’s biggest international funding agency even before the resolutions were adopted. The US State Department had adopted the IHRA definition of antisemitism as far back as 2010. It began cooling its financial relationship with South Africa in early 2024.In a direct counter-move, the UCT Senate proposed, and the Council later adopted the JDA, explicitly rejecting the IHRA standard. This placed UCT’s June 2024 resolutions in direct conflict with US policy guidelines.The friction culminated in a February 2025 Executive Order that halted federal aid, immediately terminating grants from USAID (US Agency for International Development), amounting to roughly R31 million. Since the freeze began, R172-million has been explicitly halted via “'stop-work” orders on 22 active projects. An additional R265-million remains stalled due to unissued renewals. That left a R1.67-billion portfolio of National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding in an indefinite limbo.In response, in May 2025 the UCT Black Alumni Association urged the university to “prioritise partnerships with Global South nations, BRICS allies and progressive global institutions that share its values”. .Marika Sboros: A very dark side to Sooliman’s Gift of the Givers.By early 2026, the projected risk had solidified into a structural deficit. It has forced UCT into a strategic shift away from American partnerships in favour of survival attempts through European and philanthropic lifelines. Facing the potential decimation of its landmark research into HIV/AIDs and TB, UCT is now trying to bridge this deficit by petitioning the South African National Treasury for emergency relief and turning toward European donors to secure its clinical trials.In lengthy responding affidavits, Arendse and Yach have vigorously denied any and all wrongdoing. In his answering affidavits, Arendse continued to downplay the negative impact of the extensive loss of donor funding after adoption of the resolutions. Yet for an SC who has built his career on the precision of memory and law, Arendse appears to have developed a selective case of legal Alzheimer’s. Luckily, the information age has an infallible memory. .Court papers in Mendelsohn’s case highlight Arendse’s apparently severe bouts of memory dysfunction. In particular, he claimed to be unaware of any certainty that the DGF would withdraw funding.He appears not to have understood the contents of a lengthy letter that he and UCT interim VC at the time, Prof “Daya” Reddy, received from a DGF executive trustee on April 30, 2024. Arendse and Reddy were signatories of UCT’s funding contract with the foundation in September 2023.The letter makes clear precisely what had provoked the DGF’s “barking dogs”. As the trustee wrote simply: UCT had “not upheld its side of the contractual agreement” to have a “zero tolerance attitude to antisemitism as defined by the IHRA”. With surgical linguistic precision, the trustee proceeded to eviscerate the Senate’s resolution rejecting the IHRA as "tendentious, mendacious" and riddled with "untruths" about Israel and Jews. .Humanitarian giants under fire for misusing “genocide” against Israel: Marika Sboros.He made the DGF’s position legal clear: UCT was in breach of contract. This was not a vague threat. It did not require legal expertise to understand it. It was a formal notification that the DGF found itself “impaled on the horns of a dilemma". It had “lost faith” in UCT, the trustee said, but believed in the Neuroscience Institute’s work and wanted to “find a way forward”. He also said that Arendse and Reddy had “opportunity to remedy” the breach of contract. The trustee relayed that sentiment to Reddy in a follow-up email requesting an urgent meeting.In his letter, he even helpfully suggested a way forward for UCT to fulfil its contract with the DGF. That required the university to “actively demonstrate its seriousness in tackling antisemitism head on through the adoption of guidelines, the design and implementation of training programmes and educational campaigns for staff and students and the creation of reporting mechanism and metrics to measure impact”. All that Arendse had to do in the interim, therefore, was his legal duty: to put all relevant facts, including the DGF trustee’s letter, before Council. This letter was not put before Council, as Council member and High Court advocate Kessler Perumalsamy confirmed in a remarkably frank "affidavit of candour" in May 2025. .In his legal filing, Perumalsamy bravely broke ranks with the Council's official leadership to provide what he described as the "correct facts". These flatly contradicted Arendse’s version of events.In response to the ensuing exchange of court papers, the DGF trustee addressed a further lengthy letter on May 22, 2025, to UCT’s Vice Chancellor, its Interim Registrar, Arendse and all Council members. His language was as clear and direct in intent. He carefully rebutted claims Arendse had made under oath. In particular, he rejected Arendse’s allegation of any “uncertainty” about the DGF’s intentions should UCT’s rejection of the IHRA definition become institutional “law”. The trustee pointed out that the DGF’s contractual agreement with UCT was “deliberately concise”, made “no excessive demands” and did not insist on the “extensive list of conditions typically associated with contracts of this kind”. Therefore, Arendse’s claim of “uncertainty” about DGF’s position was, to the trustee, demonstrably false.This precipitated lengthy debate during oral arguments in court during Mendelsohn’s lawsuit. It sparked questions and quizzical reflections from the three-judge Bench, over whether or not the donors actually did warn Council of terminal breaches of funding agreements, and the seriousness of perjury claims against a senior counsel of the High Court. .“To threaten your students and your university because you're acting on the base of Israel, I think you should be stripped of your citizenship and thrown out of the country.”Imtiaz Sooliman.Yach appears similarly affected by selective memory recall in her responding affidavits. That’s likely the result of the myriad of conflicts of interest below the many different hats she wears. Yach is one of two representatives elected by donors to Council and Chair of UCT’s HR and Remuneration Committee. She claims to be a donor in her private capacity as Chair of the Mauerberger Foundation Fund (MFF). Her grandfather, Morris Mauerberger, set up the foundation in the late 1930s. Yach has faced a barrage of criticism over the direction MFF has taken recently. Many see these as straying from the path set by her grandfather’s legacy. At UCT, her job ostensibly has been to nurture and safeguard relationships that keep its academic lights on. Instead, she presided over a "Great Trek" of philanthropy that ended UCT’s relationship with at least two of the country’s most high-profile donor assets.That relationship was strained further when Gift of the Givers founder-CEO Dr Imtiaz Sooliman made a public call on a UCT-hosted platform on October 27, 2025, blatantly directed at UCT donors: .“The second most important point is, which worries me, when people withdraw their money from a South African university, being South African, saying that you take a tax benefit to benefit the students of your country, but now you're withdrawing your money because you're an agent for a foreign government, that makes it a big problem for me. And to me, if you do that, to threaten your students and your university because you're acting on the base of Israel, I think you should be stripped of your citizenship and thrown out of the country.”Yach was seen cosying up to Sooliman in multiple social media posts between this rhetoric and UCT Council’s consideration of Sooliman for an honorary doctorate in December 2025. UCT conferred the honorary doctorate on Sooliman on March 30, 2026, marking a definitive rupture in the university’s relationship with its historical benefactors. For Yach, who serves simultaneously as the UCT Council donor-elected representative, as a member of the UCT Alumni and Development Board and as a major philanthropist, this institutional endorsement creates a paradox. It signals that her donor representative’s role has transitioned from a fiduciary bridge to a symbolic observer of a Council that now views traditional philanthropy as a form of "ransom" to be broken. In the face of UCT’s honouring Sooliman’s rhetoric, it would be understandable for all those donors who have withdrawn funding since the June 2024 resolutions to feel ostracised. UCT presents as loudly celebrating its divorce from legacy patronage in favour of a new, politically aligned identity..In his lawsuit, Mendelsohn alleges that Yach and Arendse actively disparaged donors to Council colleagues.Arendse is accused in court papers of effectively calling donors “hostage takers”. He claims he only reflected on what a “sad day” it would be if UCT were “sort of held hostage or to ransom” by donors. Court papers highlight minutes of Council Exco meetings referencing “donor power”, “donor privilege” and “manipulation by funders (with) a pro-Israel stance”. Yach is alleged to have used language reminiscent of a mob boss to threaten Mendelsohn and his family to persuade him to drop the lawsuit. She claims she spoke solely out of concern for his professional prospects.Collectively, UCT Council Exco members have appeared content not just to bite some donor hands that have fed the university, but to gnaw donor arms down to the bones.Mendelsohn’s argument remains compelling that some Council members held extraordinarily jaundiced views of UCT’s major donors whose perceived ideological views differed from theirs. He claims that they effectively “tricked” Council colleagues into voting for "symbolic" resolutions to further their own personal political agendas.More proof may lie in a synchronised move Arendse and Yach made on July 15, 2025. It may have inadvertently revealed their true intention: to rewrite the narrative on the financial fallout long after the canary had stopped singing. Both tried to access UCT’s private donor lists but were unable to do so due to legal privacy constraints. Undeterred, Arendse later presented letters from donors as retroactive “bouquets of moral approval” of the resolutions, as Mendelsohn described it in court papers..Marika Sboros: The Roedean and King David saga.And when UCT’s Executive instituted an independent investigation into this creative "donor stewarding", Arendse took to an unusual high road: he declined to “be complicit in or condone an unauthorised/unlawful investigation which is contrary to the UCT statutes”. In other words, Arendse refused to cooperate with the inquiry into his conduct because he had not authorised it. Yach claimed that her "sole reason" for requesting the donor lists was to "encourage” donor support. That newfound zeal for outreach contrasted sharply with her response to 290-plus emails of concern from high-profile alumni and donors that she received between April and May 2025. Yach has reportedly dismissed them as "unsolicited" approaches to her private email. Since then, the digital world sheds further light on the darkness of UCT’s governance circus at the highest levels.Critics have noted that Isaacs was appointed CEO of The Spar Group as of March 2026, with the ghost of the David Jones debacle during his decade-long tenure as Woolworths FD by his side. It was a R21-billion Australian misadventure that vaporised shareholder value with the efficiency of a controlled demolition.Criticism of Woolworths Holdings following its acquisition of David Jones was generally directed at its executive leadership under CEO Ian Moir. Isaacs, as finance director at the time, would have formed part of the broader leadership cohort associated with the transaction. That can look like a questionable background for someone holding the keys to UCT’s University Finance Committee.Spar’s Board has declared full confidence in its CEO. A question hanging in the ether is why Arendse and Yach are still on Council, not even suspended pending the court’s ruling, given the serious allegations against them? UCT leadership appears impervious to criticism, unburdened by tedious constraints of good governance, financial reality and unimpeachable integrity. Its standard for Council members appears to be "not yet convicted of anything”, while critics say that it should be “above any suspicion at all". The most telling thing hovering "above" some UCT Council members is the level of arrogance required to burn down the house and then complain about the fire damage..UCT was approached for comment. Spokesperson Elijah Moholola replied: “UCT notes that this query relates to litigation concerning the Gaza resolutions. The matter was heard in the Western Cape High Court in October 2025, and UCT is currently awaiting judgment. Given that judgement is pending, it is inappropriate for UCT to comment on the matter.”

UCT’s Gaza fallout: donor exodus, legal firestorm and a council under siege

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