To: Mr. Dale Quaker and the Board of Directors

Roedean School (SA)

Date: 13 February 2026

Subject: Response to Board Apology and Defence of Parental and Student Rights of Conscience

Dear Mr. Quaker and Members of the Board,

We write in response to your letter dated 12 February 2026 addressed to Rabbi Seef regarding the cancellation of the match with King David School.

After carefully reviewing your statement, we must express profound disappointment, not because Roedean sought to address hurt within the Jewish community, which is entirely appropriate, but because the apology fundamentally fails to acknowledge the rights of Roedean’s own parents and learners.

Your letter frames the incident exclusively through the lens of antisemitism and discrimination. In doing so, it collapses a complex ethical objection into prejudice. This is a serious mischaracterisation.

At no point does the Board’s apology recognise that parents and learners may hold principled objections to participating in activities involving an institution that openly affirms a Zionist framework and institutional support for a foreign state currently facing allegations of genocide before the International Court of Justice. One may agree or disagree with that position, but to deny its legitimacy as a matter of conscience is to deny the very moral agency that schools claim to cultivate.

Roedean has failed its parents and its girls in this apology.

The Constitution of South Africa protects freedom of conscience, belief, opinion, and expression. Parents have the right to raise ethical concerns about the institutional associations of schools with which their children engage. Learners have the right to form and express moral positions about global injustice. These rights do not evaporate at the school gate.

Your apology does not defend those rights. It does not even mention them.

Instead, it suggests that the cancellation itself was inherently discriminatory and that the problem lies in communication failures. This framing implicitly positions Roedean parents and learners as the source of prejudice, while failing to distinguish between antisemitism (which must be unequivocally rejected) and political opposition to Zionism or to state violence (which is protected political speech and moral expression).

This conflation is not neutral. It is consequential.

By issuing an apology that treats the incident solely as a failure to prevent discrimination, the Board has effectively silenced and delegitimised the conscience-driven concerns of families within its own community. It sends a message that moral discomfort must be subordinated to institutional diplomacy. It suggests that elite harmony matters more than ethical conviction.

That is not leadership grounded in courage. It is reputational management.

If Roedean wishes to reject antisemitism and it must it should do so clearly and unapologetically. But it must also reject the weaponisation of antisemitism to suppress legitimate political and ethical dissent. The two are not the same. To blur them is to fail educationally and morally.

Your statement speaks of inclusion and respect. Inclusion must include those whose conscience leads them to refuse participation in what they perceive as complicity in injustice. Respect must extend to girls who think critically about power, militarism, and global violence — even when their thinking unsettles established relationships.

By omitting any defence of those rights, the Board’s apology reads not as balance, but as willful betrayal.

Roedean is entrusted with the formation of young women capable of ethical reasoning in a fractured world. That formation requires the courage to hold complexity, not the instinct to retreat into apolitical language when controversy arises. “Apolitical” in South Africa has never meant neutral; it has historically meant insulated.

If Roedean is serious about dialogue, then dialogue must begin internally. The Board owes its own parents and learners a transparent process that:
 1. Affirms unequivocally that antisemitism is unacceptable.
 2. Distinguishes clearly between antisemitism and political critique.
 3. Recognises the constitutional rights of parents and learners to act from conscience.
 4. Commits to open, facilitated engagement within the Roedean community before issuing public apologies that implicitly condemn sections of its own constituency.

Until such recognition is explicitly made, the apology stands as incomplete and misdirected.

The issue is not whether sport should unite rather than divide. The issue is whether moral conviction is permitted to exist within elite institutions without being reframed as bigotry. If Roedean wishes to build bridges, it must first ensure it has not burned trust within its own community.

Respectfully,

Alumni, Students and Community Members