We are an organisation of South African Jews wishing to see a just resolution to the conflict in Historic Palestine.
We strongly believe in the Jewish concept of Tikkun Olam, “Repairing the World” which embodies social action and the pursuit of social justice.
Historically Jews have been involved in struggles to achieve social justice and we are proud to continue this tradition. Furthermore, as Jews, we feel obliged to speak out against injustice purportedly carried out in our name.
As South African Jews, our relationship with apartheid, dispossession and settler colonialism is a long one. Most of us are in South Africa because our ancestors and families fled the pogroms of Eastern Europe or the Holocaust.
Though many of us were rendered less than white through pervasive antisemitism in Europe, once our families moved to South Africa, we were progressively incorporated into whiteness as an institution. As a result, significant portions of our communities became complicit in, and even beneficiaries of, the violence of ghettoisation, dispossession, racial capitalism, and militarised occupation in Apartheid South Africa.
On the other hand, some South African Jews with non-European backgrounds remained direct victims of apartheid. Moreover, there were those among our communities who recognised our positioning as complicit in oppression and sought ways to actively resist that.
Today, we seek to continue this tradition. We refuse to allow the memory of our ancestors, our history, identities, and grief to be weaponised in support of interlinked fascist genocidal apartheid projects in South Africa, in Palestine, or anywhere else.
We reject Zionism as a form of settler colonialism and acknowledge the concomitant injustice of land dispossession.
We reject Zionism as a political project committed to an exclusive Jewish State in Historic Palestine. Any such state must discriminate against non-Jews and we oppose discrimination.
We acknowledge that our history of dispossession, and the Holocaust in particular, was an important factor in the formation of the state of Israel. In part it was an attempt by the international community to rectify the wrongs that were done to us. However, wrongs against one people cannot be corrected by wronging another. The Palestinians should never have had to bear the burden of Europe’s misdeeds.
We therefore acknowledge the vast tragedy of the Nakba, the many injustices that followed it and which occur to this very day. For this reason we seek social and restorative justice in Historic Palestine.
We strongly believe in equal rights for all and so oppose discrimination in all its forms. We abhor anti-semitism, Islamophobia, racism and ethnocentrism. Consequently we condemn all acts that are rooted in such attitudes, including racism committed by Zionists both within Israel and within the Occupied Territories as well as against Jews of Arab, African or Sephardic origin.