Dear Leslie,

I respond to your recent opinion piece in the Daily Maverick.

During the landmark People’s Health Assembly at UWC in 2011, I was struck by the words of the late Prof Emeritus David Saunders, during his opening address, ( in which he wore the Iraqi Keffiyeh associated with Palestinian Nationalism). Saunders seemed to suggest that if the Middle East conflict “was not able to be resolved via peaceful negotiations like our own, then he was inclined to believe it was not a civil but rather a religious conflict’.

The event was marked by the vocal presence of a sizeable delegation of Palestinian medics. I sat in various sessions, right next to a female Palestinian doctor, gaining her insights, and attended a special plenary session hosted by Palestinian doctors.

There I posed a question whose answers have remained with me to this very day: ‘Would the example of Belgium, which is a binational state with two distinct groups, the Flemish and Walloons, but with a common constitution, be a model solution to what appeared to be an intractable problem’?

‘No, no and no’ was the woeful response from the head of the delegation.

The answer to my dismay, instead of eliciting the barest of working peace proposals, merely echoed the three Noes of Khartoum:

No peace with Israel
No recognition of Israel
No negotiations with Israel.

These were the exact words from the Arab League Summit (August 29 – September 1, 1967) which sort to establish a unified Arab strategy aimed at regaining territories occupied by Israel during the war — territory that Israel claims it has liberated from the Jordanian occupation, and to which it is entitled under the doctrine of Uti Possidetis Juris.

Pan African Congress

Later the same year, I attended a special workshop hosted by a member of Fatah at UCT, with fellow People’s Health Movement (PHM) member, the late Dr Costi Gaza. (It is more than tragic that Costi, a PAC veteran, passed away last year, still not gaining the peace for which we had both hoped).

Yet, the seminar once again demonstrated why I not only understand David Saunders’s hesitation, his desire to not fall into the trap of an outright endorsement of religious violence, but am able to testify to the enormity of the problem.

Asked to summarise the details of what are the barest of essentials to the conflict, what is the actual problem? The Fatah representative responded in broad terms: “Jews, Jews, and Jews.”

For those Palestinians who rejected Israeli citizenship in 1948, (choosing rather to embrace an eliminationist scheme outlined by the later President Amin Husseini before Adolf Hitler in 1941 Berlin, a scheme which without a shadow of doubt in my mind, directly lead up to the Final Solution), the dilemma has always been their embrace of a vision of a Palestine, ‘free of Jews’ — Jews for whom the Old Yishuv that surrounded Jerusalem even before Zionism became a political ideology, is ample proof of indigeneity.

The inconvenient historical facts suggest Palestinian nationalism is far younger than many would assume. As former Knesset member, Einat Wilf , puts it, ‘the top priority for Palestinians, is not the creation of a Palestinian state, rather it is the elimination of the Jewish state.’

Gift of the Givers

Your facile introduction of contradictory definitions of anti-Semitism in the public domain, given this history, is nothing more than a red herring, and not helpful in this context — when the primary allegations are not that Dr Imtiaz Sooliman is Anti-Semitic or racist as such (these are second order allegations), but rather, something far worse — that he supports an Anti-Secular, Jihadist movement hellbent on eliminating Jews from the Middle East and North Africa.

It is thus that I arrive at a rather uncomfortable conclusion, your analysis, devoid of truth and filled with synthetic terminology, is nothing more than a sorry attempt to whitewash the factual, allegations involving donations by Dr Sooliman and Gift of the Givers (GOG), to a US sanctioned, Hamas-affiliated umbrella charity, Union of Good, as far back as 2008. The failure of GOG to open its books to public scrutiny, and your neglect of various statements made by this organisation in the aftermath of the slaying of the Bibas Family, demonstrate that when it comes to your own perceptions, as always, they have arisen from a failure to examine empirical facts.

A misdiagnosis and malpractice if ever there was one.