Your mission statement claims that your organisation is ‘committed to a South Africa where everyone will enjoy freedom from the evils of prejudice, intolerance and discrimination.’
If your commitment to the principles of equality is sincere, and you respect the inherent worth and dignity of all human beings (not just those who find themselves within the borders of South Africa), one would expect your organisation to have done more to condemn Israel’s actions in Gaza. There is there is no more monstrous an embodiment of prejudice, intolerance and discrimination than genocide.
While we are inundated with images of skeletal children, amputated infants and an increasingly emaciated population, over at the SAJBD you seem to be inhabiting a parallel world. Aside from showcasing your various charitable endeavours, like donating teddy bears to a hospital, the home page of the SAJBD’s website proudly displays its efforts to whitewash Israel’s crimes and obscure the true details of the genocide that is being committed.
Your site currently features a number of attacks on those who challenge your fundamental narrative that Israel is an entirely innocent party; that there should be no accountability for its war crimes; and that its many documented war crimes should be tolerated. This ‘engagement’ with those speaking out against Israel’s actions in Gaza – based not on facts but on the propaganda tools of Hasbara – seems to be as close as you will come, right now, in these most urgent of times, to any comment on Gaza at all.
It is widely reported that at least 59,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, but numerous experts, including a Lancet study, estimate that the true figure of direct deaths (not including deaths from disease, famine and non-existent medical care) is nearly double that. Currently, the entire population is being starved to death, not as a mere accident but as a matter of policy. Israel has deliberately destroyed all of Gaza’s basic infrastructure —from farmland, to bakeries, to hospitals — and has engineered mass starvation by refusing to allow the free flow of humanitarian aid to reach the population.
In recent months, Israel has permitted limited food to enter Gaza under the auspices of the ‘Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’ (GHF), a new Israeli-linked NGO run by mercenaries, not humanitarians. Doctors Without Borders has characterised this arrangement as ‘slaughter masquerading as aid’. There are multiple reports of people being corralled in the burning heat, and of soldiers firing into the starving crowds. At least 766 Gazans have been killed close to the GHF sites. It is not a surprise that more than 170 charities and NGOs have called for this proxy of the Israeli army to be shut down.
How wholly absurd in this context — while infants are enduring amputations without anaesthetic, people are collapsing in the street from hunger, and echoes of the very worst crimes of history fill our screens — that the SAJBD should try avoid the entire unspeakable spectacle and deflect with accusations of antisemitism. This is what we call in Yiddish a shanda — a disgrace and deep source of public shame.
Palestinian voices have long been silenced or villainized, parodied and met with brutal skepticism. Currently, however, there is a broad and growing international consensus, among such well-established bodies as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Doctors Without Borders, that what is occurring is indeed a genocide. Israeli organisations such as B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights Israel (PHRI) concur. There is also broad scholarly consensus that this is the case, including from established scholars of holocaust and genocide studies such as Dr Omer Bartov, Dr Amos Goldberg, Dr Lee Mordechai and Dr Raz Segal. Dr Omer Bartov shows that Jewish voices have now joined those Palestinians such as Dr Haidar Eid and Ramzy Baroud, in acknowledging that a genocide is taking place. These scholars question the very possibility that there can be any international moral order in the wake of what is being allowed to happen in Gaza.
This is not the first time that the SAJBD has stood on the wrong side of history. Not only did the organisation fail to speak out during apartheid, but it chose to ostracise Jewish individuals who were principled enough to put their lives on the line to fight for justice. You should not repeat this past failure. Now is the time to show that all human life is sacred, that the moral capacity to condemn the worst crimes against humanity is there. If not, the moral vacuity of this organisation must stand exposed.
South African Jews for a Free Palestine (SAJFP) has consistently maintained that your claims to represent South Africa’s Jewish community are empty. Your response to the emergence of outraged voices from within your community about the genocide – rather than to engage with us as fellow Jews – has been to ignore us, marginalise us, or attack us in print. This shows that the SAJBD has given up all pretence of being an umbrella organisation for Jewish communities in South Africa, and instead represents Israel’s genocidal regime.
As South African Jews fighting for a free Palestine, we are not alone. We belong to Global Jews for Palestine (GJP), which unites Jews opposed to Zionism from around the world, and consists of 25 Jewish organisations in 19 countries. Our horror at the genocide being committed in our names is mirrored by Jewish organisations across the globe, including Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), The International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network (IJAN) and Independent Jewish Voices (IJV). The recent Jewish Anti-Zionist Congress in Vienna shows that our movement is alive and growing. The tide is turning, and many Jews will no longer accept the abuse of our religion in service of a settler-colonial ethnostate.
Our first forefather, Abraham, offered food to the strangers who passed his tent, and we have ever since had a tradition of tzedakah, an obligation towards justice and feeding the hungry. Torture, murder and forced starvation are not Jewish acts, but ones perpetrated by those in the grip of a vile ideology. This is why we call on you, the SAJBD, to unequivocally condemn the atrocities being carried out in Gaza — or else to frankly confirm that you represent the interests of Israeli genocidaires, rather than the South African Jewish community as a whole.
Yours truly,
South African Jews for a Free Palestine (SAJFP)