South African Jews Polarized Over Israel
al953
Anti-Racism Leaders Equate Country’s Treatment of Palestinians to
Apartheid
By Jon Jeter
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, December 19, 2001; Page A35
JOHANNESBURG, Dec. 18 -- It is a brief document, occupying less than
half a page in a local newspaper here. But since the “declaration of
conscience” was published 10 days ago, it has polarized South African
Jews like no issue since the collapse of white-minority rule seven years
ago.
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. Titled “Not In My Name,” the declaration
acknowledges Israel’s right to exist and its valid security concerns but
compares Israel’s treatment of Palestinians to the oppression of South
Africa’s black majority under apartheid.
“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.”
The document has triggered a raging debate among South Africa’s 80,000
Jews that many here said is unrivaled in the years since South Africans
of all races went to the polls for the first time and abolished
apartheid. Lifelong friends have stopped speaking to one another.
Supporters and critics have fired off hundreds of letters to newspaper
editorial pages, each more emotional than the last. Dinner parties have
ended abruptly following terse exchanges, and Kasrils and Ozinsky have
been labeled both traitors and patriots.
Stephen Friedman, one of the declaration’s signatories and executive
director of the Center for Policy Studies here, said: “There’s never
been a debate in the South African Jewish community quite like this.
This is raw stuff.”
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. The world view of South Africa’s Jews is shaped by two epic
movements and the sometimes competing impulses they inspire. One is the
Holocaust; the other is 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 that 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, who is 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,” said Friedman.
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.”
But many Jews here said the declaration of conscience misreads the
situation in Israel and the occupied territories.
“I can’t get around Kasrils’s opening stance that Israel’s denial of
Palestinian rights is the root cause of the conflict,” said Selwyn
Sundelowitz, a Jewish resident of Johannesburg. “To me, the root cause
is the long-standing refusal by the Arab-Islam world to accept the right
of Israel to exist.”
Cyril Harris, chief rabbi of the Union of Orthodox Synagogues in South
Africa, said comparisons between apartheid and Israel are misguided.
“It’s quite ridiculous,” Harris said. “Kasrils doesn’t know what he’s
talking about, and I’m afraid this has not gone down well at all.”
Harris said that Israel, unlike South Africa in the apartheid era, is
merely defending itself from hostile neighbors committed to its
destruction. Israel’s state-sanctioned assassinations, he said, target
known terrorists, while the apartheid government killed anyone
considered a threat to its rule, regardless of whether they were
involved in violence.
“Israel is a democracy,” he said. “It has tried to broker peace, and it
has been rejected by a population that is determined to see Israel
destroyed.
“Apartheid was an evil all to itself.”