South African Jews for a Free Palestine (SAJFP) unequivocally condemns the comments made by the South African Jewish Board of Deputies (SAJBD), through its National Director, Wendy Kahn, about the Nelson Mandela Foundation’s (NMF) invitation to Francesca Albanese, the United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, to present the annual Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture.
We are appalled by the SAJBD’s attack, which was not only directed at the NMF and Albanese, but also targeted the Foundation’s Chairperson and former Minister of International Affairs and Co-Operation, Dr Naledi Pandor. The SAJBD’s diatribe decries the NMF as having become ‘a stage for antisemitism disguised as human rights advocacy’ as a result of it being chaired by and platforming ‘two women [Albanese and Pandor], both repeatedly accused of antisemitic bias, now [standing] together under the banner of the Mandela name, not to bring South Africans together but to unite them in hate’.
By invoking the NMF’s status as ‘a symbol of unity, integrity, and reconciliation’, the SAJBD’s attack attempts to claim the moral high ground and portray itself as gatekeepers of Nelson Mandela’s legacy. The duplicity of this attempt comes not only from the SAJBD’s history of silence in the face of apartheid in South Africa and the sidelining of Jewish activists who partook in the struggle against the apartheid regime, but from its unwavering support for Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. The SAJBD, claiming to represent all South African Jews, has spent the past two years demonstrating that it in fact represents only the interests of staunch Zionists loyal to the genocidal, apartheid State of Israel.
What the board conveniently omits from its account of what Mandela stood for was Mandela’s unequivocal support for the Palestinian people and their struggle for freedom. In 1997, Mandela said in no uncertain terms that the freedom of South Africans ‘is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians’. These words are more than eloquent solidarity with the Palestinians; they serve as a grim warning to South Africans — a warning that the rights set out in our Constitution, rights that were fought for with the assistance and support of the Palestinian people, must be vociferously defended wherever they are violated.
Despite the SAJBD’s attempts to rewrite history, there is ample evidence of strong solidarity between the liberation movements of South Africa and Palestine, and in turn of close collaboration between apartheid South Africa and Israel. These links are a matter of historical fact, and the truth is all too easy to discover. Israel openly and proudly embraced this collaboration, when in 1976 it offered a warm welcome to then-Prime Minister of apartheid South Africa J.B. Vorster at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Israel. Vorster was an active Nazi, interned during World War II, and went on to become South Africa’s Minister of Justice and then Prime Minister during the darkest and most violent period of apartheid.
Francesca Albanese and Dr Pandor have been consistent in demonstrating their commitment to human rights and the prescripts of international law. By equating this commitment with antisemitism, as the SAJBD does, and by resorting to the rhetoric of hate and violence, the SAJBD reveals itself to South Africans. It is not an organisation that is truly committed to combating antisemitism, but rather one which is committed to defending Israel from its critics, using the well-worn weapon in the form of the disingenuous charge of antisemitism to further its aims. Not only does this frustrate efforts to address real instances of antisemitism, it is nothing more than a cynical invocation of a commitment to anti-racism in order to suppress speech and advocacy which oppose Israel’s crimes and seek to hold it to account.
A real commitment to anti-racism in fact requires one to oppose Zionism and to support, as Francesca Albanese and Dr Pandor do, the rights of Palestinians to self-determination and to live freely, equally and with dignity in their land. For Zionists, Palestinians, unlike all other humans, do not deserve to have these rights. Zionism so dehumanises Palestinians that it cannot comprehend how they could be victims of occupation, apartheid or genocide. Such crimes are only committed against human beings.
By claiming that the NMF, in associating with Albanese, ‘is isolating itself from the moral community it once led’, the SAJBD attempts to drape a stolen cloak of pious virtue on itself. The board makes no attempt to falsify the information meticulously assembled by Albanese or the conclusions drawn from that information, all of which were done in her capacity as UN Special Rapporteur and informed by her expertise in international law. The SAJBD instead resorts to the now-predictable antisemitism accusation, seeking once again to convince the world of the baseless claim that Judaism, which has existed for thousands of years, and Zionism, a much more recent invention, are synonymous.
Fortunately, this tactic is no longer effective. From what Wendy Kahn writes, SAJFP is satisfied that one conclusion can be drawn with confidence: the Zionist project is reaching its blood-soaked end.
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