Former Democratic Alliance leader and contemporary public intellectual Tony Leon has warned that disregarding minority interests is an indicator of “the overall health of our Constitution”.

Writing in his weekly column in News24, and subsequently discussing his perspectives on the Morning Shot podcast, Leon reflected on a recent lecture by Professor Adam Mendelsohn at the University of Cape Town on the place and future of Jews in South Africa.

Leon remarked that the security and inclusion of minorities – whether cultural, religious, or simply defined by having a smaller quantum of support than its opponents on a given issue – are an important bellwether of the state of a constitutional order.

The Jewish community in South Africa is a relatively small one – Professor Mendelsohn had observed that all of them would not fill up Cape Town Stadium – but have been the subject of intense scrutiny and pressure in view of conflicts in the Middle East, particularly the war in Gaza. This has not infrequently spilled over into raw antisemitism, and has left the community feeling threatened and questioning their belonging in South Africa.

Ironically, Leon noted, for all the malign powers ascribed to Jews or “Zionists”, they had been singularly unsuccessful in holding back the hostility: critics of Israel were widely honoured, and institutions believed to support it were subject to vocal protest, while South Africa’s foreign policy took a hardline anti-Israel stance.

For Leon, the conditions of South African Jewry can be seen as representative of those of many other minorities. He remarked that he had been contacted by a senior Afrikaans editor who said that his article might well have been about Afrikaners.

“Constitutions and Bills of Rights aren't needed for the majority, however the majority is constituted,” Leon stated, “They have Parliament. […] The individual and the agglomeration of minorities rely on the Bill of Rights in the Constitution that we inaugurated while I was in Parliament 30 years ago on Friday the 8th of May 1996. So, if minorities are under strain in a country, that tells you something about the democratic health of a country or its lack of health.”

In a constitutional order, while minorities could not demand a veto, their views and concerns needed to be taken on board in governance decisions.

He pointed out that many in the African National Congress had harboured doubts about the utility and wisdom of constitutional governance, with sentiments in favour of untrammelled majoritarian parliamentary rule. In 2011, Ngoako Ramathlodi, a former Premier of Limpopo and Cabinet minister, said that the Constitution had denuded “the legislature and the executive of real power.”

These views have now been taken up by the Economic Freedom Fighters and the uMkhonto weSizwe Party.

Leon referred to the response to Mendelsohn’s lecture by Professor David Bilchitz, who had said: “The future flourishing of Jews in South Africa is very much tied to the fate of the constitutional promise that was made in 1996. Should the Constitution itself be gutted either de jure or de facto, many more Jews will leave… Should South Africa become a country where constitutional commitments are honoured such that government improves, crime reduces, diversities of opinions and identities are respected, incitement to hatred challenged, and poverty addressed, Jews will not only remain but flourish.”

In this sense, he said, Jews are a proxy for other minorities.

He noted, though, that the anti-Israel orientation of the government and of activist communities was not universal, while relations between Jews and the wider South African community were not hostile. “South Africa has been spared a lot of the horrors that are [happening] elsewhere in the world,” referring specifically to attacks on Jews in London.

He added that there was an energetic tradition of civic engagement and solution-seeking outside of government.

“There are some extraordinary things happening in South Africa,” he remarked. “This morning, in the same publication my column was published in – News24 – there's an article by Pieter du Toit on a gathering of farmers in the Karoo, and just the kind of vibes there and the conversation and the innovations and the can-do attitude. He says we must celebrate these people, and we should, rather than say, ‘Kill the Boer’, we should say, ‘Up the Boer’, because they really are the backbone – and many other backbones, as you can have more than one in a large society – who really make this country work. And I think that's really something to not just hold on to but to extend and to commemorate.”