Brooke Goldstein: Fighting Jew Hatred & Unmasking Lawfare in SA & Beyond!

Brooke, we met 10 minutes ago.

We did.

This is your first day in Cape Town.

Amazing.

It's a rainy, windy, stormy day. Our rugby team's called the Stormers for good reason. And I'm sorry you're not going to see Cape Town for your first time in the beautiful weather. This is paradise and it's worth fighting for.

Right.

So I'm not going to do an introduction. Could you do your own introduction in Portuguese?

Happy to. Happy to. Well, first of all, I want to say how happy I am to be here. It's my first time in this amazing country. The people are wonderful and I'm I'm just blown away. I didn't come in with any expectations and I have learned so much. So who am I? I am the founder and executive director of the Lawfare Project. I'm also the founder of the End Jew Hatred movement, which is the first ever Jewish civil rights grassroots movement in modern history. And we have our bracelets here.

End Jew Hatred.

Right. And then in my capacity as the executive director of the Lawfare Project, I run a legal network of over 100 Sorry, 1,000 lawyers who have dedicated themselves to work pro bono on our cases all over the world, and 42 major law firms. And we have brought over 100 cases in the last 8 years in 17 different jurisdictions.

And what sort of cases? What's the area of focus?

Jewish empowerment cases. I run a Jewish civil rights litigation entity, and what we do is we bring impact litigation. The way that We make change that we want to see, which is equality for Jewish people, to have Jewish civil rights enforced and respected and to be afforded equal protection under the law, is we bring civil rights litigation before courts around the world on behalf of Jewish communities and persons who have experienced discrimination. And what we want to do is impose real consequences for that behavior, just like every other minority in civil rights. Group has done. And you have a very rich and deep history of civil rights and human rights litigation in this country as well. Absolutely. That I think that we can learn from in America.

And you do the lawfare locally, regionally, but in the international courts as well?

Well, no, we don't. I have not litigated in any international court. I find them problematic. I mean, we can obviously go in, we all know what's happening with the ICC and the ICJ and the—

America's not part of the ICC.

No, of course not. And neither is Israel, and which is why I thought it was a bit of a mistake to send an Israeli lawyer to appear and argue before a court that has absolutely no legitimacy, as though we had some sort of obligation to argue, you know, in our defense, why we can engage in self-defense. But we focus on really bringing litigation in North America, and we have also operated in Europe as well. The goal is to empower the local Jewish community to stand up for themselves. We provide pro bono legal counsel and financial support. And through the End Jew Hatred movement, we also provide strategic support for Jewish communities to mobilize in their interest to really affect the change that they want to see on the ground.

So for example, the antisemitism that has happened in American campuses relatively recently, has Lawfare been involved in defending and protecting students and organizations at universities?

Absolutely. I mean, the Lawfare Project, I would say, is behind most of the groundbreaking seminal civil rights cases in the United States against college campuses. And by the way, we're also looking at K through 12 right now because by the time that they get to college, it's too late. We are seeing a mass amount of Qatari funding coming in, not just, you know, to American college campuses and setting up DEI and critical race theory and Middle Eastern studies programs, but we're seeing Qatari-funded curriculum in our K through 12 schools in the United States. And that's what they mean when they say globalize the Intifada, bring the hate education that is widespread in the Middle East, which is actually what my documentary film was about and how I got into this industry in the first place, was advocating against hate education targeting children. And they're importing that into the United States. And so we have sued Columbia University. We actually recently just settled with them. We have a lawsuit against Carnegie Mellon University, which is the third largest recipient of funding from Qatar. They've received our understanding is over $800 million from the Qatar Foundation. We're suing Cooper Union, which is the school, I'm sure you saw it on social media, where there was 11 students, Jewish students trapped in a library behind a glass wall while pro-Hamas agitators and mob was banging on the windows with weapons and threatening violence to the Jewish students. They had to be escorted out under police protection. You know what the president of the school did?

No.

She hid in her office. Where? She fled and she escaped from the back.

Hopefully she's been fired.

What a coward.

Has she been fired?

No, she has not. No, she hasn't.

And my alma mater, Harvard?

Well, Harvard, I have not sued Harvard.

Okay.

There's a wonderful— Bring it on. No, there's a great, there were two lawsuits against Harvard. I think one was brought by Shabbos Kestenbaum, who's a very outspoken Jewish activist. And I believe he also recently settled his suit with them.

So nothing international. You mentioned Europe.

No, we have. So internationally, represented Sagot Winery in a lawsuit against the French government. We lost. The French government wanted to put discriminatory labels on products made by Jews coming in from Israel who live in Judea-Samaria. They said, if you want to import your wine, you have to label it made, a product of an illegal Israeli colony. We challenged that. We sued the French government and made it all the way up to the European Court of Justice. We lost the case. However, by virtue of us losing during the first Trump administration, he sent then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on the first ever official State Department visit to Judea-Samaria, went to Psagot Winery, and declared the two executive orders that were passed by President Trump. Number one, Jews are not illegal in Judea. And number two, that it was the United States trade policy that anything imported into the United States in an area under Israeli control should be labeled made in Israel. And that stands.

Can I ask you a question that's been bothering me for a long time? And it's a non sequitur. The Republican Party tends to be pro-Israel, supportive of Jews across the board. And the Democratic Party has within it Islamists, anti-Semites, and yet for a long period of time, the Jewish Americans voted Democrat. In South Africa, an Afrikaans friend of mine, Willem Venter, he's a podcaster, quite a conservative podcaster, said there are only two types of Jews, hardcore leftists and hardcore rightists, Zionists. Okay. There's nothing in between.

I don't know if I would call Zionism hardcore rightists. I would say actually Zionism is a very progressive liberal value, right? When Zionism was invented 126 years ago by Theodor Herzl, the concept was the oldest, most persecuted minority community in human history deserves self-sovereignty and deserves equal rights, equal protection.

Zionism is specific to the state of Israel, is it?

Yes, but it's also part deeply integral to the Jewish religion and ethnic identity. We pray facing Jerusalem. We say at every Passover Seder, next year in Jerusalem. It is central. The temple, obviously, when it existed, was central to the practice of Jewish worship. So, you know, Israel and the Jewish people's connection to Israel as the indigenous people to Judea. If Jews are not from Judea, I don't know where we're from.

So let me ask you a question. Is your lawfare project supported on a bipartisan basis?

So what is amazing about what we do is that we take the politics out of civil rights. And I think this is absolutely essential. And same with the End Jew Hatred movement because the Jewish community, as you said earlier, and so rightly, it has been strategically divided on political partisan lines with antisemitism and accusations of antisemitism used as these partisan footballs, right? You know, Trump is Hitler Trump is a Nazi. He is not Hitler. ICE detention centers that the Republicans support are concentration camps. How can you Jews support modern-day concentration camps? This false historical revisionist terminology negates the unique historical experience that we had during the Holocaust, the genocide. And then what it attempts to do is use our pain for political gain. And because we have been divided on partisan lines, there are Jews who are so confused confused. They don't even know how to stand up for themselves. So for example, we were the first organization to file a complaint under the executive order passed by Donald Trump expanding Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to apply to religion, to apply to Jews. This was the Civil Rights Act that was used in America to create equality, right? To get rid of segregation, to create equality no matter what your race, what I don't know where it was on the order. He's passed a lot of them. This was last administration. Okay. So Trump issues this executive order and half the Jewish community comes out against the application of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act to protect Jewish students on campus.

But why?

Because all the—

Did they not understand this or did they see it?

Well, look, if Obama had moved the embassy to Jerusalem, I would be first in line to congratulate him. Because Jewish civil rights is a nonpartisan issue. And the more we make it a partisan issue, the more we harm ourselves. It's also an issue that has to be taken separate and apart from the so-called Israeli-Palestinian conflict or any conflict happening in the Middle East. If you hate a foreign government because of a conflict, you cannot turn around, project your hatred of that government on somebody because of the way they look or where they're born, right? If I hate China for its handling of COVID I can't go to a local Chinese student spit on him and call him a dirty COVID spreader? That would be disgusting. But why was it okay to go to my client Jonathan Karten at Columbia University, spit on him and call him a dirty Zionist baby killer because he's Jewish and that's political speech? And what we do is we put it right back where it should be, which is in the civil rights arena, right? When I sued the National Lawyers Guild for passing a BDS resolution and refusing to do business with our client in Israeli business. I didn't have to go to court and argue the legality of BDS. Is Israel an apartheid state or not? I don't care what your political excuse is. That's not an affirmative defense to discrimination. I hate a foreign country is not an affirmative defense to national origin discrimination. I can't have a store that says no Chinese people allowed because I don't like the way China handled COVID. And day one in court, We settled the case because any type of national origin discrimination, all we had to argue was that my client is being treated differently because they are Jewish or because they are Israeli. And that in and of itself is discriminatory. I don't care what your excuse is.

It's just common sense though. Isn't that extraordinary how the world has moved away from common sense? But what I want to ask you is in South Africa, We have discrimination against minorities, which is quite extraordinary if you think of where we came from during apartheid and the amount, the extraordinary efforts that Jewish people in this country made to fight against apartheid and support the ANC and even help the ANC in their first 10, 15 years of their presidential term in running this country. And yet today, the ANC ANC is anti-Israel and anti-Semitic. But there seem to be two minority groups in South Africa that are taking the brunt of the ANC's racist and socialist laws and ideology, the Jews and the Afrikaners. And there were 140,000 Jews in 1994 when we handed peacefully white minority rule to democracy. There are 40,000 today. Afrikaners, of the 5 million white people or white tribe of Africa, I think just more than half, maybe 2.5 to 3 million are Afrikaners. But in this country of 60 million, they're a minority and they are being persecuted against. There's the BELA law, which has been pushed through recently, which minimalizes the ability of of school teachers and principals to offer learnings to minorities like the Afrikaners in their own languages. There's been constant threat and murder of Afrikaner farmers in South Africa, many of whom are Afrikaners. And I keep quoting one statistic, you're 3 times more likely to be murdered in this country as a farmer than as a policeman. So our government are racist, are socialist, that are persecuting minorities economically and potentially in a more evil systemic way. And this word genocide's been thrown around and there is no extermination, but of the 10 definitions of genocide, 7 or 8 of them are in process right now. There's certainly economic genocide. In terms of human genocide, No, the ovens have not been lit yet. What can we do? There's an organization called AfriForum and Sakalika, mainly that came out of the Afrikaner community, that have been helping state-proof minorities against the government. State-proof. It's a lovely concept. And they've been broadening their defense from Afrikaners to other minorities. And they've done a very good job. I'd love you to meet them and hear what they're very—

I did meet with them actually. Yes. I was very fortunate to have a very nice meeting with the people at AFRI Forum. And, you know, it's always this persecution of minorities in the name of minority rights. And you see that also on the international scale when it comes to the conflict in the Middle East with the Jewish state and the Islamist terrorist groups. It's the accusation of the democracy for defending herself against the terrorists who use children as human shields. The reverse lawfare, the democracy that is responsible for you know, the civilians that are put in harm's way. So all of this manipulation of the law, right? And of legal systems and human rights terminology to forward ends that have nothing to do with equal protection and minority rights. That's what we call the warfare threat. And I wrote my first book about it as well.

Is Afriforum doing the right thing? Could they amplify what they're doing? What can they learn from you? What tactics we as individuals and civil organizations in South Africa should be learning from you and implementing here in South Africa to protect minorities?

Well, one of the things I learned quickly when I got here is that the American Jews need the South African Jews and Blacks and also Afrikaans more than you need us, because you have such a great history of mobilization. You have a wonderful constitution here. You have a beautiful, long history of impact litigation. And I think what AFRI Forum is doing is exercising their duty as citizens of a democratic state to make sure that their issues are heard before courts of law. And my understanding is that they are filing some real precedent-setting cases, especially when it comes to private prosecution of criminal activity. I think there is an enormous opportunity for litigation funds such as mine own and the American legal community and political community to work together with minority groups here in South Africa to ensure there's accountability across borders, right? If you are a school that receives funding from the United States like UCT does, but you are hosting designated terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah.

Which they are.

That funding needs to be cut off immediately, and our American partners should be helping. And I think they are helping to do that. There is a lot of movement, whether it's coming from members of Congress like Elise Stefanik to, you know, go after MTN, and there's movement for lobbying potentially to to sanction ANC members as they should be if they are engaging in unlawful criminal activity, especially if they're working with Iran. So I would be wary actually, because the tides are turning and Iran is, at least the IRGC, the regime will be gone sooner than we know it. The future of Iran obviously will remain in the hands of the Iranian people as it should, but the entire banking system, And those officials who have been complicit, aiding and abetting the terrorist regime of Iran, are going to be held accountable, whether it's in American courts or South African courts or international courts, right? Justice is a slow wheel to turn, but we are playing the long game here. And the point is that there needs to be consequences for that type of behavior in 2025. It is not acceptable.

Brooke, what can we do to help you on this trip in South Africa? Thanks for coming, by the way. I really appreciate you making the effort to come here to South Africa. How can we help you on this trip and give a message to South Africa, a message of hope, if you can?

Okay.

Because I tend to be 3 out of 10 on South Africa.

I'll tell you that what gives me the most hope is to see really people like you who have moral clarity and conviction and who are not afraid of speaking the truth. Meeting with the chief rabbi, Rabbi Goldstein, was an incredible experience. Meeting with groups of attorneys here who are wanting to mobilize, meeting with Black Zionist activists who want to come to the United States and help mobilize Jewish American students. Because like I said, I think we need you more than you need us. Us, and we need to understand how to really enforce change through a grassroots mobilization way, whether it's through protests and different pressure tactics with a one-two punch combined with civil rights, human rights litigation. What I'm really looking forward to is bridging the gap over the ocean and making sure that our two communities are not only aligned, but strategically work together.

So coming here is really gonna make that happen. And thank you so much for doing that, Brooke.

Thank you for having me.

Wonderful meeting you.

That's a wonderful— Yasher koach to you.

Yasher koach? I don't know what it means. It sounds great.

It means that you should have the strength to continue to do what you are doing.

Yasher koach.

Yasher koach. You should have the strength.

Thank you.