SOME TIME AGO I arrived late at a panel discussion on Israel and Palestine hosted by one Terry Crawford-Brown. Readers my remember the Irish banker and former spokesperson for the Anglican Church, whose credibility was later destroyed after he attempted to pin the blame for Chris Hani’s assassination on the ANC?
The gathering at Community House in Salt River was being addressed by a Muslim activist who was literally retracing the infamous “Jewish Question”. Who are these people? Where did they originate on our shores? Why had they arrived in Africa, and what should we be doing about them? He inquired of South Africa’s Jews.
The presentation was literally the substance of a Nazi thriller from the 1930s. My own family history, as refugees from the Pale of Settlement in Mother Russia, being addressed not in loving terms, but in a rather hostile manner, by a person who was obviously anti-Semitic, without any moderation on the part of Brown. I got up, explained that I was exactly one of the objects being referred to by the racist panel, and left, to loud boos and howls from the crowd of local Anti-Semites and members of the Nazi Youth League.
Removed from the lily-white cloister of Gardens, and Tamboerskloof, Brown was thus regaling all and sundry with the type of deceptive hatred best described by the French philosopher Sartre, when he wrote: “Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”
Mendelsohn Lecture
It is thus that I arrive here after a series of deplorable responses made by public persons such as journalist Redi Thlabi (an individual who should know better) to a lecture by Adam Mendelsohn delivered at UCT . The title: Where to for the Jews / Quo Vadis Jews, traverses the idea of the Jew in the Western imagination, to the very same question raised during the 1930s.
We all know how that turned out. After the 1938 Evian Conference, where Western powers followed the example of South Africa in clamping down on Jewish immigration, stalling Hitler’s plans to deport Germany’s Yiddish population, under the notorious Havaara Agreement, a tragedy unfolded. Nightmarish industrial-scale euthanasia which has created a perpetual problem, unique to contemporary Jews in maintaining and defending our legal identities. In many countries including our own, we are viewed as nothing more than objects instead of the subjects of rights, and enjoy the status of tables and chairs before the law.
It is only in the United States which has a sizable Jewish population alongside guarantees of religious freedom, (unlike our own de facto theocracy, secular in name only, and which has paid lipservice to the idea), that Jews have managed to embrace a universalist position, that is often mistakenly lumped together with an assimilation vantage point. For many years, my own views may be characterised as Bundist. An internationalist, secular tradition with “the central principle that Jews have the right to live, organise, and thrive wherever they currently reside:” A tradition that rejects the idea that Jews must migrate to a central homeland to find fulfillment or safety, advocating instead for the improvement of their local societies.
Political Halaalism
Enter the baying mob of South Africa’s aggressive, ‘progressive Left’, those who believe they can simply pursue a racist inquisition of Jewish identity on the world stage, a crude endeavor that seeks to strip Jews of their agency, deprive us of citizenship and even the right to hold an opinion in the matter. As Naledi Pandor and others have already suggested, Zionism or the belief in Mount Zion as a focal point in any religion, should be rendered unlawful.
The parts of the Torah that mention Jerusalem should just be redacted. We should all make way for the new political doctrine surrounding ‘Philistia, the land of the Philistines’, or ‘Canaan, the land of the Canaanites.’
Such obnoxious persons as Pandor and Thlabi I predict, will go the same way as Botha, Malan and Vlok, who similarly imposed internal sanctions on Jews, seeking to hold us hostage to the apartheid state. They will be removed from office in the same fashion — not necessarily via the ballot box, but by mass action in support of wrongfully indicted black Jews. Persons such as Julus Malema where the sentence does not fit the crime. People such as myself who have been framed as public enemies merely on account of our beliefs.