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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.
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.
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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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…
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.
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:
Hawkeye
Omar2
WellofSense
Medusa
The Alchemist
Louise
Tosca
Maimon
Telling the Truth
Israelinurse
Adam Levick
Margie in Tel Aviv
Guest/Cross Post
Hadar Sela
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