Gloves off, as Pandor sinks to new low

Diaspora Jewry has learned to brace itself for the inevitable backlash whenever conflict erupts between Israel and its neighbours. Over the past 15 years, most of these conflicts have taken place on the Gaza front, something which could hardly have been anticipated when Israel withdrew its troops and evacuated in its entirety the Jewish population of the territory in 2005. Tragically, Gaza quickly fell under the sway of militant Islamist groupings whose core ideologies commit them to the pursuit of Israel’s violent destruction, no matter how long it takes and regardless of the price that ordinary Palestinians have to pay.

Over the past week, we witnessed yet another round of violent confrontation, this time involving the smaller but no less fanatical faction Palestine Islamic Jihad. Thankfully, it was of relatively short duration, and the ceasefire, brokered by Egypt, appears to be holding. Hardly had the missiles begun flying, however, than ritual condemnations of Israeli “aggression” began flooding in, and as we have sadly come to expect, our own government and ruling party lost no time in adding their voices to the clamour.

As the representative voice of South African Jewry, the South African Jewish Board of Deputies’ stance is to be strictly apolitical. To bring the needs and concerns of our community to those in authority, we seek to maintain cordial relations with the government, as indeed we do with all political factions. This doesn’t mean that we’ll never disagree with the government when it comes to certain issues, but neither do we wish to be continually at loggerheads with it. Unfortunately, and particularly over the course of this year, South Africa’s stance on Israel has become so obsessively and unreasoningly hostile that the Board has had no choice but to respond in correspondingly harsher terms.

Within hours of the outbreak of the Gaza conflict, the department of international relations and cooperation (Dirco), as ever in the name of Minister Naledi Pandor, rushed to issue yet another virulent denunciation of the Jewish state, effectively denying Israel its right – and duty – to defend its citizens from the more than 1 100 rockets targeting them. In our statement, we contrasted this alacrity to condemn with South Africa’s extraordinary silence regarding Russia’s barbaric war of aggression against the Ukrainian people six months and tens of thousands of civilian deaths later. Likewise, we had waited in vain for the government even to express condolences when dozens of Israelis were killed or injured in a wave of terrorist attacks earlier this year. As always, all expressions of outrage were reserved solely for condemning Israeli acts of retaliation. Why, moreover, did our government have a problem only with Israelis defending themselves against violent Islamist extremism, when South Africa itself is fighting that very scourge just across our border in Mozambique?

We’ve become all too used to gross displays of hypocrisy on the part of Dirco, but with this latest demonstration that she has one set of standards for Israel and another for the rest of the world, Minister Pandor sank to a new low. It not only makes a mockery of South Africa’s pretensions to being a moral voice on the global stage, but in a deeper sense is a tragic betrayal of the ruling party’s proud legacy of peace building and reconciliation.

• Listen to Charisse Zeifert on Jewish Board Talk, 101.9 ChaiFM, every Friday 12:00 to 13:00.