Remembering to forget the Holocaust in South Africa

In 2005, the United Nations (UN) General Assembly passed a resolution designating 27 January as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. This is the day the Soviet Union’s Red Army liberated the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in Poland in 1945. The UN encourages all its member states to mark this tragedy, and many across the world do so.

The South African government, however, has never issued a media statement around this day. Many other governments don’t either. But this comes from a country that says it believes wholeheartedly in collective action, multilateral organisations, and international solidarity. It strongly supports the UN and its plethora of international days. So why is this the day it has decided to skip? Is it incompetence, insensitivity, or ideology? Or does the government demonstrate its position in other ways?

I checked the online press statements of the department of international relations and cooperation (Dirco), and not a single one mentions the Holocaust or the UN day. By contrast, almost every year, there has been a Dirco statement at the end of November on the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. This day was established by the UN in 1977, marking 30 years since the UN Partition Plan vote on creating a Jewish and a Palestinian state on 29 November 1947. This should surprise no-one.

The official silence by Pretoria undermines the horrors of the Holocaust, some believe. This has raised questions, including on social media, especially among people who feel the African National Congress (ANC) government’s vehement support for the Palestinians veers seamlessly into thinly veiled antisemitism. This is in spite of the ANC having long defended its abhorrence and rejection of any form of racism and discrimination, including antisemitism. Not issuing a statement speaks volumes, they say.

Others speculate that the government’s ideological and political closeness to Iran and its proxies is a possible reason for not issuing Holocaust Day statements. Over the years, the ANC government has shifted support from the secular Palestine Liberation Organisation to the far more radical Hamas and Hezbollah. Commemorating dead Jews wouldn’t suit these allies at all.

However, it’s not fair to say the government ignores the Holocaust itself. Indeed, the ANC government has lent its support to the establishment of not just one but three Holocaust museums in South Africa. The first opened in Cape Town in 1999, followed by one in Durban in 2008, and finally in Johannesburg in 2019. These institutions also commemorate and study other genocides, particularly in Rwanda in 1994, of particular importance in Africa. These museums – renamed as Holocaust and Genocide Centres – would never have been a reality without the support of the South African government in the respective cities and provinces.

The Holocaust is taught as part of the high school history curriculum – in Grade 9 and Grade 11 – across the country, also requiring government consent and backing. These centres are integral to the teaching of the Holocaust and, COVID-19-permitting, they host hundreds of school groups annually.

And though it may not issue statements, the government has participated at Holocaust memorial events held by these centres, civil society organisations, the UN, and diplomatic missions for many years in South Africa.

But here’s the problem. The Holocaust is inextricably tied up with the founding of the state of Israel just three years after World War II, in 1948. For many, there would be no Israel if there was no Shoah. For some extremists, the Jews have manipulated the Holocaust to unjustly occupy and usurp the land of indigenous occupants, and Jews continue to play the victim to this day.

By openly commemorating the Holocaust, the ANC would be supporting a narrative of Jewish suffering, which doesn’t play well within its ranks or those of its supporters, foreign and domestic. After all, this is a party that collectively voted in 2017 to downgrade the South African embassy in Tel Aviv to demonstrate its pique at the Jewish State. Elements of this government openly support the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement. It’s a government that undoubtedly sees the Middle East conflict as analogous to its own struggle. Yet this same government warmly accepted the credentials of new Israeli Ambassador Eli Belotsercovsky last week. Go figure.

Permeated by paradoxes and at war with itself, the ANC is a wounded and confused party that is fast losing political support. The ANC has become more myopic about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict as the negotiations of the 1990s gave way to stagnation and stalemate. It puts the blame for everything on Israel’s shoulders. Nothing that its comrades the Palestinians do is wrong. The anti-Israel crowd delights, if not in odious Holocaust denial, in drawing analogies between Jewish suffering in the Holocaust and the contemporary plight and treatment of Palestinians by Israel (and 74% of Israelis are Jews, of course). This is victim morphed into perpetrator. Understandably, it rankles a Zionist Jewish community like South Africa’s.

But if South Africa was so opposed to the Holocaust, it wouldn’t have supported a UN resolution last month to combat Holocaust denialism, adopted by the General Assembly without a vote. Maybe we need to accept that actions speak louder than press releases.

• Steven Gruzd is an analyst at the South African Institute of International Affairs in Johannesburg. He writes in his personal capacity.