Mervyn Bennun ironically compares Chief Rabbi Goldstein’s ‘diplomatic’ trip to Israel, and the kind taken by anti-apartheid activists during South Africa’s apartheid regime. At the time such activists had a genuine complaint that the government was not representative. Their trips abroad to publish this came at great personal expense. Goldstein, on the contrary, is shown to follow in a tradition of formal Jewish leadership only too content to align themselves with injustice when it would seem to be in their interest. Bennun underlines how the South African government’s condemnation of Hamas 7/10 attack is rooted in the same Geneva Conventions as their condemnation of Israel’s indiscriminate violence.
