Over two years, more than 71,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, with scholars estimating that over 80% of them were civilians. The deliberate targeting of children has also been documented. Though children, and even infants have been mutilated so badly that they require amputation, these procedures were performed without anaesthetic, which was not allowed to enter Gaza by the Israeli government, which has maintained a siege over the region for close to two decades. As a people, the lives, habitats and belongings of those in Gaza have all been reduced to rubble – the immensity of their suffering is impossible to measure.
For its 23rd annual lecture, the Nelson Mandela Foundation (NMF) invited Francesca Albanese, the Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, to speak. Dr Albanese has become an international celebrity due to her unceasing support for the Palestinian people; and her rigorous scholarship on the occupation as well as her work to shine a spotlight on the private interests on which it rests.
It goes without saying that the South African Jewish Board of Deputies (SAJBD) has not deigned to comment on the number of Palestinians killed, nor on Israel’s unceasing crimes against them. Nevertheless, in the latest in an ongoing series of absurd fits of indignation, it has made a statement condemning the NMF, its Chair, Doctor Naledia Pandor, and Dr Albanese.
It might seem tempting to defend NMF and both women against the smears directed at them by the SAJBD, but to do so is entirely unnecessary. Their actions, words and work speak for themselves. What is striking, though, is the way the SAJBD, in its diatribe, takes recourse to a whole repertoire of ethical terms: ‘integrity’, ‘unity’, ‘reconciliation’, ‘moral authority’, ‘moral clarity’, ‘justice’…
It is as if it believes that the marshalling of such a vocabulary can somehow replace the simple act of calling a genocide that which it is, of condemning the wanton killing of civilians, of acknowledging the fact that Israel’s occupation is a violation of international law. These are not even virtuous acts, but do indicate a baseline of human decency. An organisation that does not have the capacity for such basic decency can only look comical in its resort to normative and moral terms.
The role of the SAJBD lies primarily in its feigned obliviousness to the endless crimes committed against Palestinians, and its excited slandering of those who call attention to them. It is widely acknowledged that it does so by labelling all such persons anti-Semites. Given the very real anti-Jewish animus in the world it does Jews a disservice in doing so, and contributes blatantly to the very phenomenon it pretends to protest.
The antisemitism fiasco, however, is only a minor part of the SAJBD’s war on words. English speakers everywhere want to know what the word ‘integrity’ really amounts to if those so lacking in it are able to throw it around with such abandon. What are we to make of the term ‘moral community’ when it’s mouthed by a structure that actively undermines the moral fiber of the very community it is meant to serve?
Most ironic, however, is the SAJBD’s lament that the NMF is losing its ‘moral authority’. It is, after all, hard to remember a time when the SAJBD had even the merest vestige of such ‘moral authority’. In admitting to abandoning those Jews who really fought against South African apartheid it may have hoped to recoup some. Its ongoing support of Israeli apartheid, and its attempt to marginalise dissenting Jews, has, however, made a dismal mockery of such apologies.
Ultimately, the SAJBD does not have, and never has had, the moral authority to position itself as a judge of other organisations, or of individuals. Its happy accommodation of genocide, the crime of all crimes, has placed it well outside of any recognisable moral universe.
Merlynn Edelstein, who has an LLB and teaches English, is a member of South African Jews for a Free Palestine and has published a volume of poetry called Bearing Witness: Beloved Maryam and Other Poems after the 2014 attack on Gaza