Steve Hayes
2014-05-22 04:18:48 UTC
AN ARAB SPRING FOR SOUTH AFRICAN JEWS
from "The Daily Maverick"
South Africa’s Jewish community is regarded as one of the most conservative in
the diaspora, its blinkered support for the Jewish state characterised as an
approach of ‘Israel – right or wrong’. But recent developments are
recalibrating local Jewish opinion on Israel-Palestine, and posing challenging
questions regarding the politics of sovereignty, security and democracy. By
REBECCA HODES.
South Africa’s Jewish community is led by an elected group of officials called
the Board of Deputies. Its membership is diverse – representing Jews of
different denominations and political affiliations – but its mandate is
singular. It must cut a swathe through the morass of local Jewish opinion, and
convey a coherent and representative position on matters of relevance to the
local Jewish community.
At times this task is relatively simple. In October 2013, when Marius Fransman
told the Cape Town Press Club that 98% of property owners in the Western Cape
were Jews, deploying anti-Semitic claims in a cynical pitch for electoral
support, the Board laid a complaint with the Human Rights Commission. When a
protest organised by Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions South Africa on Wits
campus last year featured the singing of ‘Dubul' ibhunu/shoot the Boer’ with
the lyrics altered to ‘Dubul’ ijuda’/shoot the Jew’, the Board could again
claim the consensus of the Jewish community in condemning the song’s vitriolic
content.
At other times, however, the Board’s mandate is not nearly so clear-cut. In
matters relating to Israel-Palestine, its responsibility to represent the
community still applies, but its position is rendered infinitely more complex.
The media, the government, and the public view the Board as a conduit for a
local Jewish consensus, when the diversity of Jewish responses to the
difficult questions raised by Israel-Palestine renders this an impossibility.
The adage, ‘Two Jews, three opinions’, which deprecates the whimsy of so many
Shabbat dinner discussions, is inverted. The vastly divergent political
opinions of a community of 80,000 are reduced to the content of a single
statement issued by the Board.
If the Jewish Board of Deputies is the African National Congress, Habonim Dror
is the Youth League (prior to the axing of Juju and its political declawing).
A Jewish youth movement with a global reach – Sacha Baron Cohen was an active
member of the London branch – Habonim has a rich social history in South
Africa. And while the movement’s leaders devote their days at summer camp to
strumming guitars and working on their tans, they are also reading Ha’Aretz.
For decades, Habonim has served as a kind of political kindergarten for young
Jewish South Africans. In recent years, its political participation has been
formed in the image of post-Apartheid struggles for social justice. Many of
its members have worked within the new social movements that have emerged in
the last fifteen years, including the Treatment Action Campaign, Equal
Education, the Social Justice Coalition and Ndifuna Ukwazi. These are young
Jews, steeped in the mythology of Jewish participation in the anti-Apartheid
resistance, for whom Joe Slovo, Ruth First, Helen Suzman and Albie Sachs are
moral beacons. They were brought up with Rivonia’s Children next to the novels
of Nadine Gordimer and Jewish Memories of Mandela on their family bookshelves.
Aware of their privilege as affluent, educated, white South Africans, they are
committed to social change. And they are doing something to affect it.
In recent years, these youngsters have ignited some fiery debates within the
Jewish community. Articulate, bolshy and laden with empirical facts about the
Israel-Palestine conflict, they have evoked the ire of the community’s
right-wing. Through combining traditional and new forms of opinion-making,
from public debates and op-eds in the Jewish Press to social media, they are
posing tough questions about the compatibility of Israeli democracy and the
Occupation. Their understanding of the substance of South African Zionism is
precisely what renders their campaign so powerful.
While the local and global BDS movements have taken ‘Apartheid Israel’ as
their rhetorical factotum, for many South African Jews this comparison is
anathema. It closes, rather than opens, a space for critical engagement on
Israel-Palestine. Many older Jews cannot reconcile the Israel of Shimon Peres,
whose political career is soon to enter its eighth decade, and who was awarded
the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994 together with Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin,
with the hyper-militarised, rogue state at the centre of anti-Zionist
critiques. Peres has twice served as the Prime Minister of Israel, twice as
its interim Prime Minister, and is its current president. It was Peres who
famously stated: “The Jew who condones Apartheid ceases to be a Jew, it is as
simple as that.”
For generations of Jewish South Africans, Israel has been regarded as a
refuge. This has been the defining fact of its existence, and the fundament of
diasporic pro-Zionist support.
In contrast to the recent charges of xenophobia brought against the Israeli
populace, many Jews regard Israel as a nation of refugees, having absorbed
over three million of them in its sixty-five year history. Operation Magic
Carpet (in which 50,000 Yemeni, Djiboutian and Eritrean were taken to Israel
between 1949-1950) and Operation Solomon (in which 15,000 Ethiopian Jews were
airlifted to Israel in 1991 in the course of just 36 hours) are two examples
from a history replete with stories of salvation by the Jewish state. These
events play a powerful role in the global Jewish imaginary, in the defence of
Israel’s national morality and its role as a protector of Jewish lives, lest
history repeat itself.
On the other side of the ideological chasm is a portrait of Israel not as the
solution to, but rather the source of, a refugee crisis. For opponents of
Israel, the creation of the Jewish state was not a moment for jubilant
rejoicing, but of Naqba – catastrophe – the beginning of the territorial
dispossession and oppression of the Palestinian people. For anti-Zionists,
Israel is an exemplar of colonial conquest, dispossession and the
brutalisation of civilians – the national embodiment of the global inequities
carved in the era of Bretton-Woods geopolitics.
It is because Israel’s oppression of Palestinians has come to exemplify a
particular form of global oppression, to epitomise human rights abuses, that
the South African government continues to take a muscular anti-Zionist stance
while issuing far weaker condemnations of humanitarian crises closer to home
(the descent of South Sudan into famine and war, and the legislation of rabid
homophobia in Uganda, are some current examples). It is this seemingly
disproportionate criticism of Israel that is so bewildering to Jewish South
Africans, and that has caused Jews to close their ranks of political opinion,
to uphold the stance of ‘Israel – right or wrong’.
It is also for this reason that Habonim’s campaign for a two-state solution
has highlighted a secure Israel as its first objective. Instead of downplaying
the importance of Jewish statehood, it places this issue at centre stage –
speaking of the creation of two safe and sustainable nations, Palestine and
Israel. The campaign video states: “If you care about protecting Israel as a
secure, Jewish democracy, and if you care about the rights and the future of
the Palestinian people, then it is time to join the Israeli and global
consensus and call for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict.”
Pre-empting counter-allegations that this is the outlandish goal of young
idealists, the video then describes the two-state solution as: “the stated
position of Israel, the PLO, the UN, the EU, the USA and countless Jewish
diaspora organisations.” The onscreen infographic shows viewers that these
include the South African Zionist Federation and the Jewish Board of Deputies,
as well as the Arab League.
The video is heavy on fact and light on emotive appeal. It went viral within a
couple of hours of being posted on the Habonim Facebook homepage, with
supporters changing their Facebook profiles to images of the campaign logo
bearing the numbers ‘2-4-2’ (two states for two nations). Debates about the
campaign were held in Cape Town and Johannesburg over the weekend. Both events
featured heavyweights in Jewish public opinion, and both were packed to the
hilt.
The backlash against these campaigns is likely to be severe. In the past,
young Jewish South Africans who have criticised Israel have been excoriated
and victimised. Their names have been added to the infamous S.H.I.T. List
(Self Hating and/or Israel Threatening), an honour roll of sorts for local
Jewish personae. On last reading, its South African nominations included
Dennis Davis, Nathan Geffen and William Kentridge. Some of the 2-4-2 campaign
leaders have already made it onto the list.
But because they have positioned their campaign objectives so as to resonate
with the politics of Jewish South Africans, quoting the former leaders of the
Israeli Defence Force and the Shin Bet, rather than Noam Chomsky and Ronnie
Kasrils, they cannot be so easily dismissed as anti-Zionists with no stake in
a Jewish future. Instead, the 2-4-2- campaign is using a range of tactics to
mobilise popular support against the blinkered status quo on Israel that is
often championed by Jewish communal leadership. With an intimate knowledge of
the political co-ordinates of the local Jewish community, the campaign’s goal
is to reorient these leftwards. In their savvy use of social media to raise
awareness about the necessity of a two-state solution, and in their home-grown
appeals for the dual recognition of Israeli and Palestinian sovereignty and
democracy, Habonim’s leaders may not succeed in manufacturing a new consensus
among the Jewish community. But the existence of a growing dissensus on the
position of ‘Israel – right or wrong’ can no longer be denied. DM
Rebecca Hodes is a historian based at the University of Cape Town.
http://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2014-05-20-analysis-an-arab-spring-for-south-african-jews/
from "The Daily Maverick"
South Africa’s Jewish community is regarded as one of the most conservative in
the diaspora, its blinkered support for the Jewish state characterised as an
approach of ‘Israel – right or wrong’. But recent developments are
recalibrating local Jewish opinion on Israel-Palestine, and posing challenging
questions regarding the politics of sovereignty, security and democracy. By
REBECCA HODES.
South Africa’s Jewish community is led by an elected group of officials called
the Board of Deputies. Its membership is diverse – representing Jews of
different denominations and political affiliations – but its mandate is
singular. It must cut a swathe through the morass of local Jewish opinion, and
convey a coherent and representative position on matters of relevance to the
local Jewish community.
At times this task is relatively simple. In October 2013, when Marius Fransman
told the Cape Town Press Club that 98% of property owners in the Western Cape
were Jews, deploying anti-Semitic claims in a cynical pitch for electoral
support, the Board laid a complaint with the Human Rights Commission. When a
protest organised by Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions South Africa on Wits
campus last year featured the singing of ‘Dubul' ibhunu/shoot the Boer’ with
the lyrics altered to ‘Dubul’ ijuda’/shoot the Jew’, the Board could again
claim the consensus of the Jewish community in condemning the song’s vitriolic
content.
At other times, however, the Board’s mandate is not nearly so clear-cut. In
matters relating to Israel-Palestine, its responsibility to represent the
community still applies, but its position is rendered infinitely more complex.
The media, the government, and the public view the Board as a conduit for a
local Jewish consensus, when the diversity of Jewish responses to the
difficult questions raised by Israel-Palestine renders this an impossibility.
The adage, ‘Two Jews, three opinions’, which deprecates the whimsy of so many
Shabbat dinner discussions, is inverted. The vastly divergent political
opinions of a community of 80,000 are reduced to the content of a single
statement issued by the Board.
If the Jewish Board of Deputies is the African National Congress, Habonim Dror
is the Youth League (prior to the axing of Juju and its political declawing).
A Jewish youth movement with a global reach – Sacha Baron Cohen was an active
member of the London branch – Habonim has a rich social history in South
Africa. And while the movement’s leaders devote their days at summer camp to
strumming guitars and working on their tans, they are also reading Ha’Aretz.
For decades, Habonim has served as a kind of political kindergarten for young
Jewish South Africans. In recent years, its political participation has been
formed in the image of post-Apartheid struggles for social justice. Many of
its members have worked within the new social movements that have emerged in
the last fifteen years, including the Treatment Action Campaign, Equal
Education, the Social Justice Coalition and Ndifuna Ukwazi. These are young
Jews, steeped in the mythology of Jewish participation in the anti-Apartheid
resistance, for whom Joe Slovo, Ruth First, Helen Suzman and Albie Sachs are
moral beacons. They were brought up with Rivonia’s Children next to the novels
of Nadine Gordimer and Jewish Memories of Mandela on their family bookshelves.
Aware of their privilege as affluent, educated, white South Africans, they are
committed to social change. And they are doing something to affect it.
In recent years, these youngsters have ignited some fiery debates within the
Jewish community. Articulate, bolshy and laden with empirical facts about the
Israel-Palestine conflict, they have evoked the ire of the community’s
right-wing. Through combining traditional and new forms of opinion-making,
from public debates and op-eds in the Jewish Press to social media, they are
posing tough questions about the compatibility of Israeli democracy and the
Occupation. Their understanding of the substance of South African Zionism is
precisely what renders their campaign so powerful.
While the local and global BDS movements have taken ‘Apartheid Israel’ as
their rhetorical factotum, for many South African Jews this comparison is
anathema. It closes, rather than opens, a space for critical engagement on
Israel-Palestine. Many older Jews cannot reconcile the Israel of Shimon Peres,
whose political career is soon to enter its eighth decade, and who was awarded
the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994 together with Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin,
with the hyper-militarised, rogue state at the centre of anti-Zionist
critiques. Peres has twice served as the Prime Minister of Israel, twice as
its interim Prime Minister, and is its current president. It was Peres who
famously stated: “The Jew who condones Apartheid ceases to be a Jew, it is as
simple as that.”
For generations of Jewish South Africans, Israel has been regarded as a
refuge. This has been the defining fact of its existence, and the fundament of
diasporic pro-Zionist support.
In contrast to the recent charges of xenophobia brought against the Israeli
populace, many Jews regard Israel as a nation of refugees, having absorbed
over three million of them in its sixty-five year history. Operation Magic
Carpet (in which 50,000 Yemeni, Djiboutian and Eritrean were taken to Israel
between 1949-1950) and Operation Solomon (in which 15,000 Ethiopian Jews were
airlifted to Israel in 1991 in the course of just 36 hours) are two examples
from a history replete with stories of salvation by the Jewish state. These
events play a powerful role in the global Jewish imaginary, in the defence of
Israel’s national morality and its role as a protector of Jewish lives, lest
history repeat itself.
On the other side of the ideological chasm is a portrait of Israel not as the
solution to, but rather the source of, a refugee crisis. For opponents of
Israel, the creation of the Jewish state was not a moment for jubilant
rejoicing, but of Naqba – catastrophe – the beginning of the territorial
dispossession and oppression of the Palestinian people. For anti-Zionists,
Israel is an exemplar of colonial conquest, dispossession and the
brutalisation of civilians – the national embodiment of the global inequities
carved in the era of Bretton-Woods geopolitics.
It is because Israel’s oppression of Palestinians has come to exemplify a
particular form of global oppression, to epitomise human rights abuses, that
the South African government continues to take a muscular anti-Zionist stance
while issuing far weaker condemnations of humanitarian crises closer to home
(the descent of South Sudan into famine and war, and the legislation of rabid
homophobia in Uganda, are some current examples). It is this seemingly
disproportionate criticism of Israel that is so bewildering to Jewish South
Africans, and that has caused Jews to close their ranks of political opinion,
to uphold the stance of ‘Israel – right or wrong’.
It is also for this reason that Habonim’s campaign for a two-state solution
has highlighted a secure Israel as its first objective. Instead of downplaying
the importance of Jewish statehood, it places this issue at centre stage –
speaking of the creation of two safe and sustainable nations, Palestine and
Israel. The campaign video states: “If you care about protecting Israel as a
secure, Jewish democracy, and if you care about the rights and the future of
the Palestinian people, then it is time to join the Israeli and global
consensus and call for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict.”
Pre-empting counter-allegations that this is the outlandish goal of young
idealists, the video then describes the two-state solution as: “the stated
position of Israel, the PLO, the UN, the EU, the USA and countless Jewish
diaspora organisations.” The onscreen infographic shows viewers that these
include the South African Zionist Federation and the Jewish Board of Deputies,
as well as the Arab League.
The video is heavy on fact and light on emotive appeal. It went viral within a
couple of hours of being posted on the Habonim Facebook homepage, with
supporters changing their Facebook profiles to images of the campaign logo
bearing the numbers ‘2-4-2’ (two states for two nations). Debates about the
campaign were held in Cape Town and Johannesburg over the weekend. Both events
featured heavyweights in Jewish public opinion, and both were packed to the
hilt.
The backlash against these campaigns is likely to be severe. In the past,
young Jewish South Africans who have criticised Israel have been excoriated
and victimised. Their names have been added to the infamous S.H.I.T. List
(Self Hating and/or Israel Threatening), an honour roll of sorts for local
Jewish personae. On last reading, its South African nominations included
Dennis Davis, Nathan Geffen and William Kentridge. Some of the 2-4-2 campaign
leaders have already made it onto the list.
But because they have positioned their campaign objectives so as to resonate
with the politics of Jewish South Africans, quoting the former leaders of the
Israeli Defence Force and the Shin Bet, rather than Noam Chomsky and Ronnie
Kasrils, they cannot be so easily dismissed as anti-Zionists with no stake in
a Jewish future. Instead, the 2-4-2- campaign is using a range of tactics to
mobilise popular support against the blinkered status quo on Israel that is
often championed by Jewish communal leadership. With an intimate knowledge of
the political co-ordinates of the local Jewish community, the campaign’s goal
is to reorient these leftwards. In their savvy use of social media to raise
awareness about the necessity of a two-state solution, and in their home-grown
appeals for the dual recognition of Israeli and Palestinian sovereignty and
democracy, Habonim’s leaders may not succeed in manufacturing a new consensus
among the Jewish community. But the existence of a growing dissensus on the
position of ‘Israel – right or wrong’ can no longer be denied. DM
Rebecca Hodes is a historian based at the University of Cape Town.
http://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2014-05-20-analysis-an-arab-spring-for-south-african-jews/
--
Steve Hayes from Tshwane, South Africa
Web: http://www.khanya.org.za/stevesig.htm
Blog: http://khanya.wordpress.com
E-mail - see web page, or parse: shayes at dunelm full stop org full stop uk
Steve Hayes from Tshwane, South Africa
Web: http://www.khanya.org.za/stevesig.htm
Blog: http://khanya.wordpress.com
E-mail - see web page, or parse: shayes at dunelm full stop org full stop uk