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South African Jews Distance Themselves from Israeli Policy
JOHANNESBURG, Dec. 26 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - A recent declaration by some 200 prominent South African Jews distancing themselves from Israel's policies towards the Palestinians has sparked controversy in South Africa.
Spearheaded by a Jewish cabinet minister and signed - among others - by a Nobel laureate, journalists and anti-apartheid activists, a "declaration of consciousness" entitled "Not in My Name" condemned Israel's policies.
It also reflects official South African government policy, reported Agence France-Presse (AFP).
The declaration calls for peace in the Middle East, the establishment of a Palestinian state, and for Israel's withdrawal from occupied Palestinian territories.
The groundbreaking initiative challenges conventional views held by many of South Africa's 80,000 Jews, considered to be amongst the more conservative Jewish communities in the world, many of whom came from Lithuania at the end of the 19th century.
Many of the signatories - who accept they are among a minority in their community - believe the statement will fuel debate amongst South African Jews to reassess their viewpoint on the current Middle East crisis.
South Africa's mainstream Jewish community, however, has boycotted the declaration.
The South African Jewish Board of Deputies (SAJBOD), the country's official Jewish mouthpiece, along with many rabbis and Orthodox Jews, have slammed the declaration as being "one-sided and biased".
Launched simultaneously in Cape Town and Johannesburg, the document has raised SAJBOD's anger, which said, "The spiritual leaders of the vast majority of South African Jewry proudly reaffirm our strong identification with Israel."
The list of signatories reads like a who's who in the struggle against apartheid, which led to democratic elections in 1994: Arthur Goldreich and Dennis Goldberg, two anti-apartheid veterans who were with Nelson Mandela when he was arrested in 1963. Also included are activists Max and Audrey Coleman, as well as ruling-African National Congress parliamentarians Ronnie Kasrils and Max Ozinsky.
It also includes Nobel literature laureate Nadine Gordimer, the author of Burger's Daughter and
My Son's Story, both of which deal with oppression under apartheid.
Also signing is leading journalist Mark Gevisser, a biographer of South African President Thabo Mbeki.
"As white South Africans, we did not do enough to stop apartheid with the exception of people like [the late Jewish general secretary of the South African Communist Party] Joe Slovo and Ronnie Kasrils," Gevisser told AFP.
"Now again there is a chance to make a stand against oppression and the abuse of human rights [in Israel]."
Written by two Jewish heroes of South Africa's liberation struggle against the white government's apartheid system, and signed by 220 Jews, the document asserts that Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories is the cause of the escalating violence in the Middle East and denounces Israel's campaign of violence, reported the
Boston Globe.
"It becomes difficult," Ronnie Kasrils and Max Ozinsky write, "particularly from a South African perspective, not to draw parallels with the oppression experienced by Palestinians under the hand of Israel and the oppression experienced in South Africa under apartheid rule."
"There's never been a debate in the South African Jewish community quite like this. This is raw stuff," said Stephen Friedman, one of the declaration's signatories and executive director of the Center for Policy Studies in Johannesburg.
What most here do agree on is that the dispute owes its vitriol to the complicated history of South Africa's Jews, many of them descendants of Lithuanian immigrants who fled poverty and pogroms beginning in the 1870s. Two epic movements and the sometimes competing impulses they inspire shape the worldview of South Africa's Jews: the holocaust and apartheid.
Coupling appeals to racism with anti-Semitism, the National Party made the apartheid system of racial separation - modeled partly on Nazism - the law of the land when it took power in 1948, the same year the state of Israel was created.
But National Party leaders classified Jews as white and essentially assured them they would be left alone as long as they left the government alone.
But while many Jews accommodated the apartheid system with silence, many others were instrumental in its downfall, surrendering lives of comfort and privilege to financially support and even join the black majority's preeminent liberation organization, the African National Congress.
Kasrils, now minister of water affairs and forestry, was a commander of the ANC's armed militia, and two Jewish ANC members were arrested on treason charges alongside Nelson Mandela in 1963. Of the seven whites elected to the ANC's executive committee following Mandela's release from prison in 1990, five were Jewish.
''As a South African Jew, there are these uncomfortable parallels which you are constantly confronted with,'' Friedman said, reported the
Globe.
Many black South Africans regard Palestinians' impoverishment, overcrowded living conditions, and portrayal as terrorists by the West as similar to their own fortunes under apartheid. They resented Israel's support of the apartheid government, even while Western countries imposed sanctions on the white-minority government.
Close alliances between blacks and South African Jews, Friedman said, make it "impossible for you to not see that the machine guns used to mow down children in Soweto and other townships were Israeli-made weapons."
The document will stimulate debate amongst South African Jews and challenge traditional views in what Gevisser considers a "conservative and patriarchal society."
"To me this is what Judaism is about. It needs to be discussed around the Shabat table," he said.
Gevisser supports the declaration in broad terms, and says it is an indictment on the Jewish community in Johannesburg that there are only 220 signatories.
Anton Harber, a former editor of the liberal Mail & Guardian newspaper, who also signed the declaration, acknowledged that while some Jews had been at the forefront of South Africa's liberation struggle, they had very much been in the minority.
Under apartheid, the government maintained close links with Israel, notably to get around international sanctions, and considered the Jewish community part of the establishment.
"It has always been the individual activists who has been the most outspoken. Some say this strong sense of justice specifically comes from people's Jewish roots," Harber, who now heads the Journalism Department at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, told AFP.
But Yehuda Kay, SAJBOD executive director, said, "the people who signed this document have never associated with Jewish unity. This has gone down very badly within the community and there is a lot of anger. To us, this is a very one-sided declaration."
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