Boycott or protection racket? Sboros exposes double standard behind campaign against Cape Union Mart
Two Cape Town Jewish philanthropists. Comparable ties to Israel. Vastly different treatment from the SA BDS Coalition and Palestine Solidarity Campaign. Philip Krawitz — executive chairman of Cape Union Mart — faces years of protests, death threats, bodyguards, a bulletproof car, and a Western Cape High Court battle. Dianna Yach, chair of the Mauerberger Foundation Fund, with arguably deeper structural links to Israeli institutions, faces none of it. Veteran health and science journalist Marika Sboros has investigated why. Her findings are uncomfortable: the campaign that presents itself as a moral principle appears to operate more like a form of leverage. Compliance, it seems, is the price of peace.
By Marika Sboros*
Consistency is the tax that political campaigns pay for calling themselves "principled". A principle worth fighting for should apply to everyone, not just easy targets.
Apply that test to two Cape Town philanthropists with comparable ties to Israel, and glaring anomalies emerge.
One is Philip Krawitz, executive chairman of Cape Union Mart, founded by his father in 1933. He has faced the wrath of the SA BDS (Boycott, Disinvestment, Sanctions) Coalition and its affiliate, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC).
The other is Dianna Yach, chair of the Mauerberger Foundation Fund (MFF), a non-profit company founded by her grandfather, Morris Mauerberger, in 1936. She is free of that wrath.
Since November 2023, Cape Union Mart has been targeted by boycott and protest campaigns co-ordinated by the PSC, backed by BDS and its network, including the fringe SA Jews for a Free Palestine (SAJFP).
Protesters have laid siege outside its stores, blocking and harassing customers and staff, carrying placards bearing swastikas and photos of Krawitz (and his wife) doctored to show devil horns. They have chanted slogans branding him and the company "genocide funders", "baby killers" and supporters of "the army that kills children".
The protests over Israel’s Gaza war have led to death threats that the Hawks have taken seriously enough to advise Krawitz to hire bodyguards and a bulletproof car, even to leave the country for a short time.
The matter is now before the Western Cape High Court, after a recent three-day hearing before a full bench of three judges and five advocates arguing in close to 900 pages of papers. Judgment is pending.
The court was approached not to stop criticism of Israel, the boycott or protests outside stores; not even to rule the slogans unlawful hate speech, hateful though Krawitz calls them.
Krawitz and Cape Union Mart have asked for an interdict stopping protestors stating as fact that he and the company fund genocide, harm babies and children or fund Israel's war machine. They want a halt to harassment of customers and staff, blocking of store access, and for protests to comply with the Regulation of Gatherings Act, including its masking ban.
People are free to protest, they say, just not to spread false, defamatory claims.
The PSC counters that it can prove the truth of its claims. By its logic, Cape Union Mart is "synonymous" with Krawitz – guilty "by extension". It cites his leadership in Keren Hayesod and the Jewish Agency for Israel, and fundraising for Telfed, the SA Zionist Federation in Israel, which it brands "an enabler" of the IDF (Israel Defence Forces).
It claims this as evidence of Krawitz’s “several hats” as fundraiser, donor and “leader for Israel's national causes". It describes him as "enmeshed in a global Zionist institutional network", not an apolitical charity.
Krawitz and Cape Union Mart say this fails twice over- that the PSC can't prove its core accusations, relying instead on speculation and opinion. So, fair comment doesn't apply either. They provided evidence that Cape Union Mart has never funded a single institution in Israel. Every cent of corporate giving stays in South Africa.
This case turns on two irreconcilable definitions of one word, Zionism.
For Krawitz, Zionism is a religious, not political, imperative. His connection to Israel comes from his Jewish faith. Acting philanthropically on that connection with the spiritual homeland for Jews is not support of the government of Israel, he says.
He has for decades supported self-determination for Palestinians as part of a two-state solution. In 2002, he was quoted in the Cape Argus saying that while Zionism is “in no way a licence for any excesses or for any inhumane policies... our love of Israel should not be a cause for maligning us in any way".
The PSC's case rests on an "incorrect, skewed definition of Zionism", Krawitz says, premised on the idea that "Zionism is racism and bad". Protesters "impute collective liability for the Israeli government’s actions to everyone forming part of their stereotype of what a 'Zionist' is".
Critique of his leadership roles, he submits, "could only be objectionable" on that same skewed reading of Zionism. He denies being a "Zionist" by the PSC's definition and asked the court to disregard it entirely.
For the PSC, Zionism is an institutional, political identity, inseparable from religion and causes that people fund and boards they sit on. Where Krawitz draws a hard line between faith and government, the PSC draws none.
Krawitz has raised the spectre of antisemitism. Cape Union Mart, he argues, was targeted "for no apparent reason other than the fact that the company was founded by and is owned by Jews". The PSC's retort is along the lines that some of its best friends are Jews.
Its quarrel, it insists, is with Zionism, not Jews.
That’s debatable, since "Zionist" is now the anti-Israel lobby's code word for Jews. Outside the court hearing, protestors chanted: "Say it loud, say it clear, we don't want no Zios here." Posters expressing "disgust at Jews in general" have appeared throughout the protests, Cape Union Mart's lawyers note. Swastikas displayed in Krawitz's presence compound the injury against the backdrop of the Holocaust history his family fled.
The PSC insists its motivation is political, not antisemitic, and points to its Memorandum of Demands, acceptance of which “would end the boycott”.
Demands include that Krawitz and Cape Union Mart publicly "condemn the genocidal atrocities committed by the Israeli regime against the Palestinian people"; match every rand donated to Israel since 2010 with equivalent gift to Gaza via Gift of the Givers; and halt donations "to Zionist causes in Israel until a permanent political settlement is reached".
Krawitz calls that "extortionist".
Compare that with Yach's experience, and inconsistencies become a case study in why one Jewish philanthropist escapes the PSC's uniquely elastic "Zionist" label while the other is hunted by it.
Perhaps it’s because, as a University of Cape Town Council exco member, Yach voted for the "Gaza Resolutions" that the university adopted in June 2024. The resolutions include an academic boycott of institutions linked to Israel's "military establishment".
Given near-universal IDF conscription and reservist service, that's effectively a boycott of Israeli academia.
The MFF's constitution requires half its annual grants to go to Israeli institutions. That’s a founding commitment, not incidental. It funded Telfed until 2002. In 2025, Yach told its CEO Israel's response to the October 7, 2023 terror attack by Hamas has amounted to genocide, and MFF funding would not resume until a Palestinian state was established.
Those are not positions her Zionist grandfather built his foundation to hold. They are straight out the BDS-PSC playbook.
Yach is facing a lawsuit in the same High Court, launched by her brother, US-based doctor Dr Derek Yach, and cousin, Durban businessman Steven Levy, both MFF directors. They accuse her and fellow directors of breaching fiduciary duty by steering the MFF from its Israel mandate.
The MFF still funds Tel Aviv and Ben Gurion universities, both linked to Israel's security establishment. By the PSC's own logic – universities tied to Israel are legitimate targets – the MFF sits inside the net it cast around Cape Union Mart.
The Foundation also funds the Israeli First Line Med Project that gives psychological support to October 7 survivors, released hostages and the bereaved, and runs with Israel's National Insurance Institute and Defence Ministry.
Yach's ties to Israel run deeper than university funding alone, and deeper than the BDS and PSC's own logic would require for a boycott.
In 2025, the MFF donated R1-million to Gift of the Givers – the precise act of contrition the PSC demanded of Krawitz. Yach went further. She posed for photographs published online of her handing over the cheque to the charity's founder-CEO, Dr Imtiaz Sooliman, an outspoken anti-Zionist, and chatting cosily with him in her own home.
The optics speak for themselves.
One has to wonder, if Krawitz had done the same, would the boycott and bodyguards have evaporated for the price of a donation and a smile?
In December 2025, Yach nominated an SAJFP-aligned UCT law lecturer for its Convocation Council executive. She denies SAJFP membership but her record reads as accommodation of, not resistance to, BDS-PSC positions.
None of this argues that Yach and the MFF should face boycotts, smears and threats. It simply exposes the hypocrisy and double standards in a boycott and protest movement that rewards compliance, not principle.
It leaves other unanswered questions about the motivation behind the Cape Union Mart boycott, and why one Jewish philanthropist is hounded while the other is not.
Perhaps prominence is the deciding factor? Krawitz is an influential figure in South Africa’s Jewish community. Cape Union Mart is a household name with stores nationwide. Yach chairs a low-profile foundation most South Africans haven't heard of. That makes him the more productive target in a propaganda war that runs on the oxygen of publicity to gain sympathy and world outrage.
Or is influence the question? Do activists believe Krawitz wields greater sway over pro-Israel fundraising than Yach does? The evidence suggests otherwise, as her institutional reach in Israel is deeper, more structural.
Or perhaps it’s about personal relationships creating capitulation? Yach's seat on UCT Council places her inside rooms that the boycott movement cares about. Krawitz has never sat on a body the PSC and BDS need to win over. He has rejected the PSC's demands outright. Yach, by conviction or convenience, delivered versions of precisely what was demanded of Krawitz.
If compliance separates enemy from friend, the boycott campaign was never about whether someone funds Israeli institutions, but who could more easily be forced to capitulate.
A movement built on public pressure profits more from making an example of a holdout than rewarding one already in its embrace. Krawitz has been a consistent refusenik, emailing open letters to staff about his contributions to Israel-based charity projects, attempting to negotiate with the protesters, taking the fight to court.
That makes the difference between PSC’s treatment of him and Yach appear less like ideology and more like compliance.
It makes a movement presenting itself as a moral campaign against institutional complicity resemble a protection racket with a press office. Defy it, and you get years of protest, boycott, defamatory accusation, bodyguards and a bulletproof car.
That's not how a principled boycott behaves. It’s how an extortion racket survives.
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It rests on a definition of "Zionist" that is politically elastic, contested and convenient. It assigns collective guilt to one family for being Jewish while sparing another with deeper Israeli ties. The selectivity is the eventual tell that ends up looking not unlike masked hate.
The issue was most likely never whether Krawitz or Yach supports institutions tied to Israel. Both plainly do. Yet one is treated as an enemy, the other as a friend of a friend.
The BDS and PSC should admit that their campaign claiming to answer to moral principle actually answers to leverage. And that "Zionist" – the label that has cost Cape Union Mart reputational and financial damages, and Krawitz his dignity and family's safety – is a status decided by others, one that people can buy their way out of.
If that's not a sign of selective outrage, it's hard to say what is.
If it is selective outrage, those who should be held accountable in court are the activists who decide quietly, unilaterally, what price a Jewish philanthropist in South Africa must pay to be left alone.
Follow Marika Sboros* on Substack: https://marikasboros.substack.com/. And on X: @marikasboros https://x.com/MarikaSboros
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