Apartheid wealth cannot buy silence on Gaza

TAFI MHAKA

THE University of Cape Town (UCT) has lost 250 million rand (US$15.2m) in donor funding after adopting two resolutions on Israel’s war on Gaza. Vice-Chancellor Mosa Moshabela disclosed the losses to Parliament in June, explaining that the Donald Gordon Foun­dation had withdrawn the remaining funding under a 200 million rand (US$12.1m), 10-year com­mitment to a neuroscience institute. Other benefac­tors withheld another 50 million rand (US$3m), including 15 million rand (US$910,000) annually for bursaries.

This blow lands in a country ranked by the World Bank as the world’s most unequal. UCT’s student debt exceeded one billion rand (US$60.7m) by December 2025, while approximately 1 400 students still faced registration holds in Febru­ary 2026.

At UCT and across South Africa, poor Black families depend on public assistance and private bursaries be­cause apartheid denied them the land, income, schooling and inherited assets that continue to ease white ac­cess to higher learning.

As a graduate of UCT, I understand what the institu­tion’s resources and princi­ples mean to students who enter it carrying the weight of these inequalities. But nothing in its progressive resolutions justifies such harsh and callous retaliation.

The first of the conten­tious resolutions demanded a ceasefire, humanitarian assistance, the return of cap­tives and the reconstruction of Gaza’s shattered educa­tion system. Equally princi­pled, the second barred UCT academics from relations with any research group or network whose authors were affiliated with the Israeli military or the broader Is­raeli military establishment.

Crucially, neither measure targeted Israeli or Jewish scholars because of their identity, and UCT has not even implemented the restriction on military-linked research.

Court filings indicate that the Donald Gordon Founda­tion made its support condi­tional on UCT adopting the definition of anti-Semitism issued in 2016 by the Inter­national Holocaust Remem­brance Alliance (IHRA), an intergovernmental body promoting Holocaust educa­tion.

Seven of the IHRA defi­nition’s 11 illustrative exam­ples concern Israel, creating a framework that conflates opposition to Zionism or Is­raeli policy with anti-Jewish hatred.

UCT instead endorsed the Jerusalem Declaration, developed by scholars in 2021 and now signed by more than 400 academics. It condemns anti-Semitism while protecting criticism of Israel and advocacy for Palestinian rights.

The foundation’s insist­ence that UCT adopt the IHRA definition was there­fore an attempt to shape the boundaries of academic speech and action. UCT rightly rejected this private donor veto.

This is therefore not simply a dispute over a donation. It is an attempt to use private wealth, ac­cumulated within an apartheid economy, to determine the political and intel­lectual boundaries of a South African university.

The founda­tion’s leverage comes from Donald Gordon’s fortune, built through the financial-services company Liberty Life under apart­heid.

Liberty began op­erating in 1957, as apartheid converted Black dispos­session into white capital. Land seizures, forced resettlement, suppressed wages and job reservation impoverished Africans while concentrating property, sala­ries and investable income among whites.

In 1970, African per-cap­ita income stood at only 6.8 percent of the white level. By 1995, white per-capita income remained 7.4 times the African income, while approximately 82 million hectares (202 million acres) of commercial farmland, representing 86 percent of all farmland, remained in white hands.

Gordon established the Donald Gordon Foundation in August 1971, as Lib­erty expanded within this racially engineered market. Its growth did not take place alongside apartheid’s racial order, but within an economy whose incomes, assets and capacity to invest had been deliberately organ­ised along racial lines.

Political liberation in April 1994 did not fully re­cover the resources extract­ed from Black communities or redistribute the wealth produced by their exploita­tion. A 2024 study estimated that 45 percent of white adults possessed at least 250 000 rand (US$15 200) in inheritable assets, compared with just three percent of Black adults.

This enduring injustice deepens UCT’s solidarity with Palestinians confront­ing land theft, settler violence, homelessness and enforced poverty. Apartheid-era wealth is now being used to penalise that exem­plary stand.

The foundation’s with­drawal formed part of a wid­er donor response that also cost UCT 15 million rand (US$910,000) annually in bursary funding. The burden falls most heavily on Black students, young people from families denied comparable assets through colonialism and white minority rule.

South Africa knows, all too well, how oppression weaponises education, be­cause apartheid used school­ing to control Black pos­sibility. In 1975-76, the state spent 644 rand (US$38) on each white pupil but only 42 rand (US$2.50) on each Black child, preparing one population to govern and another to serve.

Having seized the ground beneath Black communities, the regime restricted the knowledge and qualifica­tions they needed to chal­lenge white command over land, labour and national resources.

That history gives South African universities a particular responsibility to recognise the destruction of education as an instrument of domination.

Israeli forces have made safe learning almost impos­sible across Gaza. By April 2026, nearly 98 percent of school buildings were dam­aged, 81 percent had been directly hit, and 93 percent required major rehabilitation or complete reconstruction. By June, more than 179 public schools and 63 uni­versity buildings had been reduced to ruins.

For years, Al-Israa University, located south of Gaza City, housed medical and engineering laboratories and a national museum. Israeli troops occupied its campus for weeks before intentionally demolishing it in January 2024.

The school buildings di­rectly hit once served almost half a million Palestinian children. Their ruin imperils the institutions Palestinians need to educate another gen­eration, sustain national life and determine their future.

Palestinian scholar Karma Nabulsi coined the term “scholasticide” during Israel’s 2008-09 offensive to describe its war on educa­tion. The Oxford academic named a practice already decades old, extending from the 1948 Nakba through the military rule imposed in 1967 to Lebanon and Gaza today.

Since October 2023, that decades-long assault has escalated into the systematic destruction of the people who sustain Palestinian education. Israeli forces have killed 1 048 education workers, 19 101 school stu­dents and 1 379 university students.

UCT is being economi­cally punished for refusing to ignore this genocidal slaughter. Yet in September 2025, a United Nations com­mission of inquiry formally concluded that Israel had committed genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

The Donald Gordon Foundation’s intervention is not an isolated South African dispute. By making donations conditional on ideological compliance, it forms part of a wider Western campaign that uses money, disciplinary action and policing to raise the price of defending Palestin­ians.

In the United States, the administration of President Donald Trump invoked al­legations of anti-Semitism surrounding pro-Palestinian campus protests to cancel US$400m in federal grants and contracts to Colum­bia University and freeze US$2.2bn at Harvard University while demand­ing changes to governance, discipline and academic oversight.

British institutions have initiated proceedings against protesters, while Cam­bridge obtained court orders restricting pro-Palestinian demonstrations. In Canada, the University of Toronto secured an injunction to remove an encampment demanding disclosure and divestment from companies connected to Israel’s war on Gaza.

Despite differences in scale and form, govern­ments, donors and campus authorities are raising the material cost of opposing Israel’s war by threaten­ing research, employment, enrolment and institutional viability.

Academic freedom is proclaimed as universal, then withdrawn when schol­ars use it to affirm Palestin­ian humanity and challenge occupation, apartheid and genocide.

Universities need private support, and UCT has a duty to its students. But reliance on donors does not require political obedience. Even after these benefactors withdrew, UCT’s overall donor funding increased by more than 11 percent since 2024, although the number of donors declined.

That growth has not replaced the lost bursary funding, but it demonstrates that UCT need not surrender its academic independence or support for Palestinian rights to retain substantial donor backing.

Universities cannot prevent donors from with­drawing their money, but they can reduce the power of any benefactor to punish students for an institution’s political decisions.

UCT should establish a replacement fund for every affected bursary and seek support from alumni, trade unions, responsible busi­nesses and foundations that impose no political condi­tions.

South African universi­ties should also publish the ideological requirements attached to major dona­tions and create a common defence fund for students harmed by punitive with­drawals. Government must guarantee bursaries threat­ened when benefactors at­tempt to dictate scholarship, research or public advocacy.

At stake are Gaza’s children and students, whose classrooms, librar­ies and laboratories Israel has laid waste. Their right not merely to survive, but to learn, question and shape their own future, remains absolute.

UCT must protect its students without abandoning the Palestinian people.

My alma mater need not surrender its conscience to the Donald Gordon Founda­tion.

Apartheid wealth cannot buy silence on Gaza. —Aljazeera