FOR DECADES South Africans from across the political spectrum paid lip-service to the so-called ‘two-state solution’ in the Middle East. Pandering to universal notions of human rights, racial equality and justice for all.

Following the passing of our nation’s founder, Nelson Mandela, whose ideal of a nation in which no single group was dominated by another, the political expression of Palestinianism, at least within the country, took on an entirely different character.

Gone were the attempts at charting a moderate, progressive path so eloquently outlined when Mandela explained his bipartisan Zionist position before a global audience. “Support for Yasser Arafat and his struggle does not mean that the ANC has ever doubted the right of Israel to exist as a state, legally. We have stood quite openly and firmly for the right of that state to exist within secure borders.“

Following Mandela’s famous Pretoria speech on 4 December 1997 where he stated: “But we know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians; without the resolution of conflicts in East Timor, the Sudan and other parts of the world.“

Our late President’s words would be turned into a meaningless redaction that is nothing more than an imperative used by the left to justify unconditional support for Islamist organisations such as Hamas, whose aims are the very antithesis of the two-state solution.

Eliminationist goals

If 7/10 demonstrated anything, it showed us that the goals of Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal, are the complete removal of the secular Jewish state in favour of a theocracy under Sharia law, a theocracy one might add, in which Jews are decidedly unwelcome. The selfsame eliminationist rhetoric is evidence in statements attributed to Naledi Pandor and others, when she called last year for the complete eradication of Christian Zionism, promising funds reminiscent of Fatah’s Pay-for-slay program-me.

Gone are any attempts by our government to disguise their terror objectives. With Chief Rabbi Warren Goldstein sidelined by local media, and the Jewish community up in arms about a scandal involving posh, Anglican girls school Roedean, it is unsurprising what we witness members of a group called “Jews for a Free Palestine’, issuing calumny of a type once the preserve of Nazis.

It was the German scholar, Wilhelm Marr who coined the term “Antisemitismus” in 1879 to give “Jew-hatred” a pseudo-scientific, racial basis. The term later became associated with the very hatred it sought to promote. It is not as SAJFP spokesperson Megan Choritz suggested in a Salaam Media interview this week, the antonym or corollary of the term “Semite”.

And thus I leave you with the words of Mandela himself, who stated in 1993.

“I want to state in the most unequivocal terms that the African National Congress has stood firm against anti-Semitism as it has stood firmly against all other forms of racism. It is our belief that all citizens should be protected against all forms of racism, including anti-Semitism“