Tag Archives: South Africa

Apr 7 2013

What would you do if you only had a year to live?

The following was written by David Hirsh at Engage, and is being cross posted here with his permission.

What would you do [if you only had a year to live]?  You’d do the important things, right?  

Iain Banks decided to have the stupid things he’d written about Jews re-published in the Guardian.

“A sporting boycott of Israel would make relatively little difference to the self-esteem of Israelis in comparison to South Africa; an intellectual and cultural one might help make all the difference…”

Yes, because white South Africans only care about Rugby while Jews spend their time with their noses in a book…Mike Cushman came up with this one ages ago:  “Universities are to Israel what the springboks were to South Africa: the symbol of their national identity.”  And Tom (Israeli archeologists are nastier than Nazi killers) Hickey too: “we are speaking of a culture, both in Israel and in the long history of the Jewish diaspora, in which education and scholarship are held in high regard. That is why an academic boycott might have a desirable political effect in Israel, an effect that might not be expected elsewhere…”

“Israel and its apologists can’t have it both ways, though: if they’re going to make the rather hysterical claim that any and every criticism of Israeli domestic or foreign policy amounts to antisemitism, they have to accept that this claimed, if specious, indivisibility provides an opportunity for what they claim to be the censure of one to function as the condemnation of the other.”

Jews as hysterical?  People who say that “every criticism” is antisemitic?  Classic Livingstone Formulation… The conflation of criticism with demonization combined with the charge of raising antisemitism in bad faith in order to silence “critics”.

“Of all people, the Jewish people ought to know how it feels to be persecuted en masse, to be punished collectively and to be treated as less than human.” [ach you know what comes next...]

The Jews should know better?  The Jews should have learnt more at Auschwitz?  Well, take your pick.  Chris Davies?Jacqueline Rose, Desmond Tutu?  “My heart aches. I say why are our memories so short. Have our Jewish sisters and brothers forgotten their humiliation? Have they forgotten the collective punishment, the home demolitions, in their own history so soon? Have they turned their backs on their profound and noble religious traditions? Have they forgotten that God cares deeply about the downtrodden?”

Why does everybody who comes up with this garbage think they’re really clever, brave and original to have thought of it?

Iain Banks’ illness is terrible news for a talented writer, a man who always seemed to be one of the good guys.  I’m sad that he thinks that this clichéd, dangerous and stereotyped nonsense is the most important thing that he should do now.

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Apr 3 2013

Antisemitism at the UCU: David Hirsh responds to Tribunal ruling against Fraser

On March 29 we commented on a ruling by London’s Central Employment Tribunal which rejected Ronnie Fraser’s charge of  institutional antisemitism against the University and College Union (UCU).  

Fraser had charged the UCU with fostering an atmosphere of antisemitism which created an ‘intimidating’, ‘hostile’, ‘humiliating’, and ‘offensive’ work environment’ for Jews – citing, in part, the union’s decision to reject the EU Working Definition of Antisemitism on the grounds that it had the effect of ‘silencing debate on Israel’.

The EU working definition (as it pertains to Israel and Zionism) characterizes the following as antisemitic: denying the Jewish state the right to exist, applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not demanded of any other democratic nation, using the symbols associated with classic antisemitism (such as blood libels) to characterize Israel or Israelis, holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel, and drawing comparisons of Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.

UCU motion rejecting EU Working Definition of Antisemitism

UCU motion rejecting EU Working Definition of Antisemitism

Further, as David Hirsh detailed in a superb post at Engage yesterday, in addition to the UCU’s rejection of the EU working definition, there were a number of other incidents representing a culture whereby “antisemitism was accepted as normal within the union” – many of which Hirsh outlined:

In 2006 Ronnie Fraser stood as a delegate to NATFHE conference (a predecessor to UCU).  It was said at the regional meeting that Fraser could not be a delegate because he was a Zionist and therefore a racist.  NATFHE held an investigation and found that this statement had not been antisemitic.

Israel has been relentlessly condemned at every UCU Congress, often by motions to boycott Israel.  There were no motions to boycott any other states.

The Parliamentary Inquiry into Antisemitism reported that the boycott debates were likely to cause difficulties for Jewish academics and students, to exclude Jews from academic life and to have a detrimental effect on Jewish Studies.  UCU responded that these allegations were made to stop people from criticizing Israel.  76 members of the UCU published a critique of the union’s response, but the union took no notice.  John Mann MP told the Tribunal that UCU had been unique among those criticized by the inquiry in its refusal to listen.

Sean Wallis, a local UCU official, said that anti-boycott lawyers were financed by “bank balances from Lehman Brothers that can’t be tracked down”.  Ronnie Fraser asked him whether he had indeed made this antisemitic claim.  Wallis admitted having said it.  But it was Fraser who, for the crime of asking, was found to have violated union rules concerning “rude or offensive communications”.

Gert Weisskirchen, responsible for combating antisemitism for the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) asked the union leadership for a meeting to discuss antisemitism relating to the boycott.  The union did not meet with him.  When 39 union members protested publicly, the union ignored them.

The union invited South African Trade Unionist Bongani Masuku to speak at a pro-boycott conference in London.  Masuku was known to be under investigation by the South African Human Rights Commission for antisemitic hate speech.  Here is an example of what he had said:  “Bongani says hi to you all as we struggle to liberate Palestine from the racists, fascists and Zionists who belong to the era of their friend Hitler!  We must not apologise, every Zionist must be made to drink the bitter medicine they are feeding our brothers and sisters in Palestine”.    Masuku also said  that vigilante action would be taken against Jewish families suspected of having members serving in the Israeli military, and that Jews who continued to stand up for Israel should “not just be encouraged but forced to leave South Africa”  The union ought to have known Masuku’s record.  Ronnie Fraser told the union about Masuku’s record.  Masuku was found guilty in South Africa of hate speech before speaking as a guest of UCU.  And months later, UCU Congress explicitly rejected a motion to dissociate itself from Masuku’s “repugnant views”.

The Activists’ List is an email list hosted by the union.

Ronnie Fraser argued on the list that there was no absolute blockade of Gaza.  In response, another union member said that he was like the Nazis at Theresenstadt.  The union found that there was nothing inappropriate about this comment.

Josh Robinson put together a detailed formal complaint about antisemitic language being employed by union members on the list.   He documented how people who opposed antisemitism on the activists’ list were routinely accused of being: deranged, crazy, nutters; Israeli agents; hysterical; dishonest; twisted; rotten Zionists; less than human; believers in a promised land; motivated by the fairy story of the Old Testament; genocidal; accepting of the murder of innocents; racist; pro-apartheid; supporters of ethnic cleansing; Nazis.  The Holocaust was referred to as an ‘attempted genocide’.   There followed volleys of insults made against those who raised concerns about this description of the Shoah.  The formal complaint was given to Tom Hickey to adjudicate.  Hickey himself, the Tribunal was told, had said that Israel is “more insidious and in some sense almost nastier” than Nazi Germany.  In the end, nobody even bothered to tell Robinson that his complaint had been dismissed.

A number of other people made similarly careful formal complaints.  The union did not once, ever, find that anything complained of was antisemitic.

A significant number of union members resigned over the issue of antisemitism.  Congress voted down a motion to investigate these resignations.  There was no mechanism for counting resignations over antisemitism, and such resignations were instead counted as being because of disagreements over the Middle East.

People who complained about antisemitism in the union were routinely confronted with accusations that they spoke in bad faith.  They were told that they were making it up in order to try to silence criticism of Israel.  They were accused of ‘crying antisemitism’.

In court Sally Hunt, the General Secretary of the union was asked hypothetically:  “If somebody said ‘if you want to understand the Jews, read Mein Kampf’, would that be antisemitic?”  She answered that it would not necessarily be antisemitic.

Astonishingly, not only did the Tribunal rule that these incidents did not represent antisemitism, but, in a close approximation of the Livingstone Formulation, outrageously accused Fraser and his 34 witnesses of trying to ‘intimidate’ and ‘silence’ critics of Israel with an invented accusation of antisemitism.

May the examples cited above, of the undeniable racism suffered by Jewish members of the UCU, serve to shame those who have been critical of Fraser and his supporters – some of whom have even suggested that the UK Jewish community should never have taken on the fight in the first place.

Fraser, and those who had his back, should be admired for acting on principle, morality, and justice – and continue to deserve our unqualified support. 

You can read the rest of Hirsh’s masterful response to the Tribunal’s outrageous ruling here.

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Feb 7 2013

The Guardian takes note of a Middle Eastern country not involved in “rendition”

A guest post by AKUS

Controversy over the practice of “rendition” has been intense. In a recent article in the Washington Post, the Post described it as a CIA program “to detain and interrogate foreign suspects without bringing them to the United States or charging them with any crimes”

The Washington Post illustrated how widely the practice was implemented with a map in an article headlined: A staggering map of the 54 countries that reportedly participated in the CIA’s rendition program, drawn from a report by the Open Society Justice Initiative  that lists each country by name and describes that country’s participation in the program.

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In case you cannot make out one little country that did not participate in the program, here’s an extract from that map of a certain area of the world:

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See it now?

On the other hand, it does not take much effort to see other countries, frequent critics of Israel, with well-organized, well-funded groups constantly threatening it with boycotts, decrying its policies and so forth, and even supporting its enemies with weapons and money.

There was a February 5th, 2013 column in the Guardian about this, too: CIA rendition: more than a quarter of countries ‘offered covert support’ . To my surprise, the Guardian managed to take note of Israel’s absence from the list of 54 countries:

Other countries are conspicuous by their absence from the rendition list: Sweden and Finland are present, but there is no evidence of Norwegian involvement. Similarly, while many Middle Eastern countries did become involved in the rendition programme, Israel did not, according to the OSJI research.

I, on the other hand, took note of South Africa’s name on the list. After all, one of the calumnies thrown at Israel, and found on a daily basis in the Guardian CiF section in the threads to the endless articles decrying Israel for this or that,  is that it resembles an apartheid state.  South Africa’s government, influenced in some measure by its Muslim Indian constituency, is one of the few outside the Middle East that has made it government policy to support boycotts of Israeli product, academics, and cultural groups.  South Africa is often held up as an example of what the imaginary “one state” would look like after the Jewish state vanishes and “Palestine” exists “between the sea and the river”.

But never fear that Guardianistas could possibly leave Israel out of the issue.  After one post that noted that Israel did not participate in the program, there was this comment:

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The thread quickly filled up with comment after comment claiming that even though the report did not name Israel, and the Guardian specifically took note of that, Israel was just as bad or even worse.

Even when a report does not mention Israel, the appetite for condemnation of Israel among Guardian readers is so developed that rather than discussing, for example, South Africa’s involvement, even the absence of Israel quickly becomes the topic de jour. Or, as the following poster noted in response to a comment no longer visible:

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The Washington Post:

The 54 governments identified in this report span the continents of Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, and North America, and include: Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belgium, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Canada, Croatia, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Djibouti, Egypt, Ethiopia, Finland, Gambia, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Iceland, Indonesia, Iran, Ireland, Italy, Jordan, Kenya, Libya, Lithuania, Macedonia, Malawi, Malaysia, Mauritania, Morocco, Pakistan, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, South Africa, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Syria, Thailand, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, Uzbekistan, Yemen, and Zimbabwe.

 

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Jul 5 2012

Richard Millett: An evening with Ronnie Kasrils, where Jews are painted as racist & “demonic”

Cross posted by Richard Millett

Ronnie Kasrils (left), Alan (Chair), Gary MacFarlane (Right) last night.

Last night a few of us journeyed deep into Tottenham, north London, the area that sparked last year’s London riots, to hear hardcore anti-Israel activist Ronnie Kasrils, who was over from South Africa.

Haringey Palestine Solidarity Campaign hosted the evening in the St John Vianney Church.

It was an evening where Jews were painted as “demonic”. This didn’t apply to Ronnie Kasrils who told us that he was able to break with the ethnic position of being Jewish, Zionist and white skinned in a white society, which helped him to “find my freedom”.

Kasrils told how South African Jews thought of blacks in apartheid South Africa as “the wretched of the earth”. This was followed by a woman in the audience who opined about “what Jews have become”.

Kasrils’ opening attack was the usual nonsense:

“The Jews took that land from the Arabs who had been there for over 1,000 years…The mythology of the establishment of the state of Israel is ‘The Lord Our G-d acting as an estate agent’…and He decided He has a Chosen People… ‘There is a Chosen People and it’s me the Jews and we are specially given the land’…We are the Chosen People and we can come here and evacuate, we can dismiss an entire population of people, at that time 700,000, by all means possible.”

He compared the landing of the forefathers of South Africa in 1652, when they discovered “black skinned people”, to Zionists. Both the forefathers and Zionists, he said, “argued that the land was empty”:

“In 1948 people were fleeing Europe from the Holocaust but the Zionists misled the poor wretches to a land without a people for a people without a land.”

Then he described what Jews in South Africa told their children:

“Don’t worry about the blacks. They’re used to it. That’s the mantra. Don’t worry, they’re used to it. All the poverty and the way they have to live etc. Each to his own. Focus on your own life. You can give the beggars some money. But these people; the poor, the wretched of the earth, they’re used to it. Don’t waste your time.”

Here it is:

During the Q&A a woman spoke of her visit to Gaza. She said she hadn’t met any terrorists there, just “freedom fighters”. She had met an amputee who had been walking to hospital one day to give birth when her husband was “liquidated” next to her after which she gave birth while Palestinian doctors were patching up her amputated legs. The woman continued:

“This is Israel. This is Israel. And it’s much more than an apartheid state; it is a demonic state!”

She addressed Jonathan Hoffman who had also been allowed to speak during the Q&A:

“Your behaviour is so atrocious that we when see someone acting like you act, if this is what the Jews have become it is a great shame. But I know that is not true because there I see a man, a Jew, and there are many others who I know who are standing up for what Judaism is really about. Ronnie Kasrils it is very nice to see you here…What is happening now about Iran and about Syria? I was teaching in school when a young Jewish boy stood up many years ago and said ‘We Israelis, we Jews, are going to bring Syria down’. This is 10 years ago.”

Here is the sickening audio:

“What’s become of the Jews?” – Haringey PSC

Meanwhile, I was under strict instructions from Alan, who was chairing, not to take any photos eventhough I had politely asked at the beginning. As ever everyone else was allowed. On my way out of the event I quickly took the above shot from the back of the room whereupon I was pushed and shoved out of the room by two thugs.

I just don’t get how anti-Israel activists think they have the right to even lay a hand on someone, let alone push and shove them.

Once outside though it was funny to see bins for the church provided by Veolia, one of the companies that there had just been a call inside the meeting to boycott because of its links with Israel (see below).

Oh dear, Veolia bins in the church grounds.

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Apr 13 2011

Words Matter: African-American Student Group blasts Students for Justice in Palestine on “Apartheid” lie

I attended college during the the height of the anti-Apartheid movement in the US during the mid to late 80s, and recall the raw emotion of African-American students involved in efforts combat the hideous racially based regime in South Africa.

And though the campus environment in the US during that time was also defined by an increasingly virulent hostility to Israel in the context of the First Intifada, I recall the solidarity between Black and Jewish groups over the issue of Apartheid and so, all these years later, am heartened to see the following passionate and unequivocal condemnation of Palestinian groups who engage in the morally unserious charge that Israel is an Apartheid state.

Here is the full-page ad, entitled “Words Matter”, which was placed in newspapers on April 7 by an African-American student group called Vanguard Leadership Group.

Oct 24 2010

Ugly demonization of Israel in S. Africa

Per the South African Zionist Federation:

“The SA Zionist Federation is holding its 47th Conference in March 2011,  and we recently placed an order for conference bags from a company by the name of Saley’s Travel Goods, based near Gold Reef City in Ormonde. The order was confirmed telephonically; we faxed it through and  immediately received the invoice for the goods.The following day, however, the same invoice was faxed through to our offices again, with lines drawn through it stating “Order cancelled by management!” and the following sentences handwritten on the invoice:

“Sorry, we cannot supply you any of our goods as we don’t want or need  your blood money! Please do not contact us any more and remove all our contact details from your records and we will do likewise. We don’t want to aid  and abet organizations that are responsible for crimes against humanity.  Please don’t pay! Don’t contaminate our account with your blood money!”

Over the past few years the SAZF has placed various orders with Saley’s Travel Goods, purchasing conference bags and folders from them. We have never before been confronted with such naked hostility, such unbridled hatred, such disgusting slander and such overt anti-semitic sentiment.

Companies are at liberty to do business with whoever they choose; and it  is their right to refuse to provide us with the goods. However, their reason for cancelling our order is deplorable; hence we have no compunction in naming and shaming them.

- Froma Sacks, Executive Coordinator, South African Zionist Federation

 


Apart from noting the extreme and glaring hypocrisy of  S. Africans participating in boycotts of Israel as their own country continues to coddle and protect the genocidal leader of Sudan, as Froma Sacks said, in the face of such intolerance, it is incumbent that we continue to “name and shame” those who seek the isolation and delegitimization of the Jewish state.

Oct 5 2010

BDS and South Africa, Pt. 3

This is cross-posted from the blog, Divest This! (This 3 pt. series represents, in some measure, a reply to the essay by South African politician Ronnie Kasrils in CiF in favor of BDS against Israel.  See CiF Watch’s reply, here.)

A BDS debate involving South Africa usually follows certain predictable patterns. BDS advocates claim that those involved in the struggle to topple Apartheid in SA see the Arab-Israeli conflict in the same terms with Israelis serving as stand-ins for the Boers. Various names are dropped, but since most Americans are unfamiliar with the cast of characters (and because most students at schools targeted for BDS campaigns weren’t even born when Apartheid existed or ended), the only two names with any resonance are Desmond Tutu and, of course, Nelson Mandela.

Because Reverend Tutu is a four-square champion for BDS, his support for a boycott or divestment program can only be trumped by invoking the name of Mandela whose relationship with Jews and Israel is more ambiguous. One of the reasons the recent attempt to break ties between the University of Johannesburg and Ben-Gurion University in Israel failed was because of Mandela’s involvement in the relationship between the two centers of learning. This is why the endorsement of Mandela is so sought after that BDS advocates are not beyond using fraud to pretend to obtain it.

Like most things, the actual relationship between Israel and South Africa (like the relationship between South Africa and every other country in the world – including Israel’s loudest critics) was and is a complicated affair. As is usually the case when $$$s mix with global politics, few hands are clean when it comes to international affairs vis-à-vis pre-Mandela SA. And South Africa’s relationship with Israel since Apartheid fell is as multi-faceted as one would expect between two such intense and vibrant societies.

But when BDSers lay down their Tutu card (as they do in nearly every BDS battle) or supporters and opponents of boycotts try to read the Mandela tea leaves, they are taking for granted the assumption that the South African experience gives those that fought against Apartheid unique moral weight in discussion on other topics (notably the Middle East). But, without diminishing the courage and patience of all those involved with the successful overthrow of Apartheid, is this a reasonable assumption?

After all, if suffering and courage lent all who practiced it unquestioned moral authority, why are Jews (who suffered one of history’s greatest mass murders only to revive and build a thriving nation and Diaspora) treated by BDSers as uniquely damaged by these experiences? Apparently, if the South African experience created saints who cannot be criticized in any way (lest critics be banished from decent society), the Holocaust turned Jews into proto-Nazis who learned nothing from the experience other than how to behave like their former tormentors.
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Oct 4 2010

BDS and South Africa, Pt. 2

This is cross posted from the blog, Divest This!

I’ve always been curious whether certain words create their own power or simply draw upon the power of that which they describe. The term “Holocaust,” which starts with soft vowels implying vastness and ends with knife-sharp consonants, seems like it would be evocative regardless of what it describes. Yet once this term came into general use to describe the Nazi’s extermination of European Jewry, it drew upon the massiveness of that event, eventually pushing out other terms (some foreign like “Shoah,” some euphemistic such as “Final Solution” – a simple phrase which itself can mean only one thing to today’s ears) to become synonymous with history’s most horrific crime.

Fights over the term simply demonstrate its unique power to move people emotionally. As horrific, vast and mind-numbing as other historic mass murders have been (such as the Armenian genocide, which many see as an historic “warm up” for other 20th century ethnic exterminations), there is a reason we describe these as the “Armenian Holocaust,” the “Rwandan Holocaust,” etc., rather than describing the Shoah as the “Armenian genocide of the Jews.”

“Apartheid,” meaning “seperateness”, resonates as a word, even to those unfamiliar with the Dutch dialect used by South Africa’s white Afrikaans population, implying as it does the English terms “Apart” and “Hate.” And yet the ugliness of the system it describes, a form of mass racial discrimination masquerading under formal legalism, certainly contributes to this term becoming synonymous with bigotry as state policy.

As with the term “Holocaust,” there are legitimate fights over whether the term “Apartheid” belongs to the world, or just to those who experienced the original phenomenon. Anyone looking over the past century will see enough political murder and racism to shake their faith in humanity. But are all murders of any scale a “Holocaust,” and is all institutionalized bigotry a variant on “Apartheid?” Many (but by no means all) Jews and South Africans would argue that by allowing these terms to be used to describe anything remotely smacking of large-scale killing or racism, one is not universalizing them but draining them of any meaning whatsoever.

In the cauldron of debate over the Middle East, arguments over the use or misuse of these words are particularly acute. While some attempts have been made to describe the Palestinian experience as a new “Holocaust,” this runs into a problem when you realize that, unlike other historic genocides, the Palestinian population has skyrocketed since Israel’s birth (especially in the disputed/occupied territories that are supposed to be serving as stand-ins for Hitler’s concentration camps).

“Apartheid” is by far the more frequent term of abuse hurled at the Jewish state for its alleged “crimes.” Thus the barrier built to stop mass bombing campaigns originating from the West Bank is not a fence, a wall or even “the New Berlin Wall,” but the “Apartheid Wall.” Jimmy Carter’s book “Peace Not Apartheid” has basically been translated to the single phrase: “Jimmy Carter says Israel is an Apartheid State,” (even if the author himself has tried to weasel out of the implication of his chosen title).

Web sites such as It Is Apartheid are dedicated solely to the purpose of making Israel synonymous with Apartheid South Africa (especially in the mind of people too young to remember the original), with BDS itself simply a component of a wider “Apartheid Strategy” whose practitioners believe that by replacing the term “Israel” with “Apartheid Israel” in all of their communication and correspondence they can, over time, turn their preferred version of reality into common wisdom.

But who gets to draw boundaries around where the term “Apartheid” is used, even in debate over the Middle East? Some supporters of Israel have responded to the “Israel Apartheid” slur by charging Israel’s accusers of practicing, supporting or ignoring crimes of “Gender Apartheid,” “Sexual Apartheid” and “Religious Apartheid” within the wider Arab world. And unlike some of the more fanciful charges against the Jewish state, repression of women, homosexuals and religious minorities by Israel’s neighbors is undisputable.

But who gets to decide if they are all variations on “Apartheid?” If enough people started using the phrase “Apartheid Saudi Arabia,” “Apartheid Syria” or “Apartheid Gaza” in their daily communication, does that legitimize an accusation masquerading as a descriptive phrase (a la “Apartheid Israel”)?

This is why the involvement of South Africa and South Africans in this debate is so significant. Absent the ability to characterize the Middle East conflict in Apartheid terms, it becomes a less charged (and, as an aside, potentially more solvable) political dispute. That being the case, is it as clear as BDS advocates would like everyone to believe that South Africans who participated in the fight against the original Apartheid see the Arab-Israel conflict in the same terms as their own struggle?

Sun (and sons) getting up. More later…

Oct 3 2010

BDS and South Africa, Pt. 1

This is cross posted from the blog, Divest This!

In a way, yesterday’s vote by the University of Johannesburg (UJ) to reject a boycott of their Israeli counterparts at Ben –Gurion University is pure BDS: a high-profile boycott call at a prominent institution followed by rancorous debate followed by a “No” vote with enough posing built around the final decision to allow BDS advocates to characterize their latest loss as a victory. But the venue of this week’s BDS battle makes it more worthy of exploration than other routine BDS defeats.

By “venue,” I’m not talking about academia, although it is worth noting that academic boycotts are probably the least popular of all BDS variants flying as they do in the face of academic freedom. Academic BDSers have offered various explanations over the years why Israeli scholars and only Israeli scholars (although just the Jewish ones – with folks like Tel Aviv University graduate student Omar Barghouti clearly exempted) should be excluded from the world of scholarly inquiry because of their nationality. But outside of the BDS community itself, no one seems to buy the argument that one champions academic freedom by assaulting it.

And this vast majority of boycott haters has a voice. When academic boycott was all the rage within the British academic union, BDS champions had to contend with the global scholarly community’s unprecedented solidarity with their beleaguered Israeli colleagues. While this month’s boycotters were interested in nothing more than the headlines they could grab by getting a boycott passed at a prominent South Africa institution, less ideologically blinkered academic decision makers at UJ likely didn’t relish being told by some of the world’s greatest scholars and universities that, for purposes of a Israel boycott they too should be considered “Israeli academics” and boycotted.

So academia is not the topic here, South Africa is.

Why South Africa? To start with the obvious, the entire BDS enterprise is part of what BDSers themselves refer to as their “Apartheid Strategy,” a long-term propaganda campaign to “brand” Israel as the inheritor of South Africa’s Apartheid legacy. Just as Jews are giving a prominent place within the boycott and divestment “movement” (to support a fanciful claim that BDS has widespread Jewish support), so too South Africans willing to leverage their own experience to attack the Jewish state have become anchors for boycott and divestment champions everywhere.

Just try to edit a Wikipedia entry on any Israel-related boycott subject to point out that BDS began with someone other than Desmond Tutu (who was actually a relative latecomer to the divestment parade) and watch how fast it will be reverted to ensure Tutu’s name gets placed front and center of the BDS origin myth. This is not a simple academic/political Wikipedia squabble but a highlight to the criticality of prominent South African voices to the cornerstone BDS message that Israel is the new Apartheid, worthy of the same fate that befell the last one.

Entering a debate on South Africa’s role in BDS requires navigating some well-laid traps by Israel’s critics similar to ones encountered when Rachel Corrie is the subject of discussion.

In any Corrie debate, Israel’s foes demand to use her death to highlight a series of political charges against the Jewish state (notably that it’s guilty of deliberate murder and cover up). But if anyone responds to those political attacks on a political level (assigning some level of responsibility for Corrie’s death to her International Solidarity Movement enablers, to Palestinian weapon’s smugglers or to Corrie herself) and out come the Corrie baby photos and high-school yearbook pictures accompanied by charges that anything Israel’s defenders say represents gross insensitivity to the death of a young girl.

In a similar way, BDSers lie in wait hoping someone will make even a glancing criticism of people like Desmond Tutu, at which point they can pounce and insist that friends of Israel be bunched up with the Bohrs of pre-Mandela SA on one side of a political spectrum they self-servingly construct, while the BDSers and Tutu are on the other side representing all that is good and virtuous.

The fact that such rhetorical traps lie in wait is no reason to avoid discussion of the important issue of South Africa’s role in the BDS movement altogether. So with that as a somewhat-longish segue, tune in tomorrow (or at least sometime this weekend, parenting schedule allowing) for thoughts on this critical aspect of the boycott, divestment and sanction debate.

Sep 30 2010

CiF gives voice to South Africa’s most famous Theobald Jew, Ronnie Kasrils

Theobald Jew Ronnie Kasrils is the most high-profile and prolific slanderer of Israel in South Africa and, therefore, was given a platform by the Guardian in support of Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) against the Jewish state.  Specifically, Kasrils promoted a termination of the relationship between University of Johannesburg and Ben-Gurion University of the Negev – a proposal which the University of Johannesburg subsequently rejected.

Kasrils’ position on Israel can be summed up be this quote, from a two-part essay “David and Goliath: Who is Who in the Middle East” published in the ANC’s theoretical journal Umrabulo in late 2006 and early 2007. Parts of the essay were published in the S. African paper, Mail&Guardian, in a summarised form under the title “Rage of the Elephant: Israel in Lebanon.“ Kasrils, commenting on the results of civilian deaths following the Second Lebanon War, and referring to the Israeli leadership, noted:

“[Regarding Israel] we must call baby killers “baby killers” and declare that those using methods reminiscent of the Nazis be told that they are behaving like Nazis. May Israelis wake up and see reason, as happened in South Africa, and negotiate peace. And finally, yes, let us learn from what helped open white South African eyes: the combination of a just struggle reinforced by international solidarity utilising the weapons of boycott and sanctions.”

His CiF piece, not surprisingly, elicited these comments:

Aug 27 2009

Watch what I do, not what I say……

In tomorrow’s JC, the Guardian says “We reject completely the charge of antisemitism”.

Calling Israel “racist” is antisemitic. Here is “Ilan” (Pappé?) doing precisely that on CIF a few hours ago. The post has been there for three hours now. Does The Guardian expect anyone to seriously believe them?

Ilan
27 Aug 09, 6:35pm
Richard Moore is being disingenuous here on at least two counts.
First up, if he knows anything about Israel at all he will know that Israel is not simply a common or garden serial human rights abuser like other states he names. Israel’s existence is predicated on its on going human rights abuses much as South Africa’s was during the apartheid era.
Second (no particular order) there is, as Loach says, an established boycott of the racist war criminals of the State of Israel. It has been called for by many representative groups of the most numerous and longest suffering of Israel’s victims: the Palestinians. Who in China and Iran has called for a boycott of those states?
The fact that the boycott of Israel is established and that there are not representative groups of victims of other regimes calling for a boycott of those regimes means that it is not Ken Loach granting dispensation to other human rights abusers. Richard Moore must surely know this.
Far be it for me to act as an apologist for Israel but….. But of course Richard Moore is acting as an apologist for Israel by trying to have the racist war criminals of Israel carry on business as usual while he is ignoring the expressed pleas of Israel’s victims.
There is a third issue distinguishing Israel from other serial human rights abusers and that is the fact that whilst Richard Moore claims not to be an apologist for Israel he clearly is one as are many who write in the mainstream media. Can he tell us who is China, Iran and Burma’s Jonathan Freedland at the Guardian? Can he name Zimbabwe’s Matt Seaton at Cif? Do China, Iran and Burma have a Kilroy-Silk at the Express and the Star to abuse their victims? Do they have a Richard Littlejohn at first the Sun then the Mail? Israel has legions of apologists and smear merchants in the mainstream media that other serial human rights abusers just do not have. It is thanks to these that many people still don’t know what it is that is wrong about Israel and of course Richard Moore isn’t going to enlighten anybody by trying to undermine the principled position and the standing of Ken Loach.
There are principled opponents of the boycott of Israel though as we have seen with Neve Gordon’s recent conversion to the cause, they are becoming a rarity. Richard Moore is certainly not a principled opponent of boycott as a potentially effective weapon against the racist war criminals of the State of Israel.
Of course he needn’t be ashamed of himself. Israel apologists are ten a penny in the mainstream media and this disingenuous article certainly won’t do his career any harm.
Since I have space to do so, I may as well mention Richard Moore’s ludicrous and no less dishonest equation of Ken Loach with the chinese state! Perhaps he really can’t distinguish an illegitimate state from an oppressive regime.  One individual is not as powerful as a state, certainly not a state like China. Sometimes I worry that Israel apologetics might be taken seriously by the non-committed but I don’t think that’s a worry in the case of this ludicrous and dishonest article.