On January 2, 2026, I published an opinion piece called Africa Must Fragment, South Africa First. I argued that colonial borders are not sacred forever and that peaceful, referendum-based self-determination should be available to peoples who want it.

People were free to call the argument dangerous, historically illiterate, offensive or stupid. Some did. Fine. That is what publication is for. What happened afterward was different. Because the piece appeared in The Times of Israel, it gradually stopped being treated simply as my opinion. It became evidence of Israeli involvement, then of a hidden operation, and eventually of foreign interference in South African unrest. By August, Femi Fani-Kayode was pointing to it immediately after writing about hidden financing and foreign actors. That is the record I want to examine.

The masthead became the evidence

Nobody in Israel commissioned the article, instructed me to write it or paid me to write it. I used The Times of Israel because it gave me a blog platform years ago, before I had a Substack readership, and I kept using it. The site states that blog posts are contributed by third parties and that the opinions and facts are presented solely by their authors. I wrote the piece. The newspaper gave me somewhere to publish it. It was not the author or the Israeli government, and I am not Israeli.

The association nevertheless began doing work that evidence had not done. I described the early stage in When Israel Is the Desired Villain. Then a social-media discussion went further. A user posted my article and said an undefined “they” were behind the disorder. Broadcaster Redi Tlhabi replied Nnete — true — invoked Mossad, said investigative journalists should be working on it, and offered leads. Lawrence Nowosenetz recorded the exchange in The Antisemitic Gospel According to Redi Tlhabi, and I responded in Redi Tlhabi and the Death of a Word.

I neither participated in nor found in the cited record any bank transfer, instruction, meeting, intermediary or communication linking me to a protest organizer. Nothing in that record connected Israel to my article beyond the name of the platform. By the time I wrote The Construction of a Conspiracy Theory, the pattern was already visible: authorship was being collapsed into publication, publication into Israel, and Israel into Mossad. That is association, not evidence.

By June the theory had grown more elaborate. Global Geopolitics published The Recognition Network, linking my writing with the Mthwakazi Republic Party, Somaliland, Western Cape independence advocacy, Israeli interests, mineral geography and donor networks. Those are legitimate subjects to examine. But the article also conceded that publicly available evidence could not establish coordination rather than parallel interests, and that no coordinated operational program had been shown. There was a calendar problem too: H.R. 2633, the US-South Africa Bilateral Relations Review Act of 2025, had been introduced on April 3, 2025, with a Senate companion following in September. Both predated my January article. I set out that chronology in The Case That Concedes Itself.

On May 27, Mzoxolo Mpolase of Political Analysis South Africa traced the evidentiary trail and found that it ended at one blog post: mine. Marika Sboros reported and endorsed that finding in the Daily Friend on June 21, writing that the “chain of evidence ends” there and noting that my article posits no funding channel,........

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