Board’s constructive role to build a better SA

MARY KLUK
 

That being said, we also continually seek as well to lead our community in identifying with and playing a constructive role in building a better South Africa. It was therefore gratifying for me to see the Board being involved in a number of positive, nation-building initiatives over this past week.

As reported last week, the Board responded to the xenophobic attacks in Gauteng by appealing for donations to assist the victims. The response from our community was immediate and generous, and we thank everyone who contributed.

On Thursday our Gauteng Council organised a meeting between MEC for Health Dorothy Mahlangu and Jewish medical practitioners working in the public sector. It was inspiring to see the high levels of professional dedication and commitment to public service shown by these unsung heroes and heroines of our community.

We were further involved, through our association with the Hate Crimes Working Group, in the 20^th Frank Talk Radio Dialogue, kin which the Steve Biko Foundation and YFM held a live dialogue on the xenophobic attacks in Soweto and the CBD.

In Cape Town, meanwhile, our Cape Deputy Director Gwynne Robins helped put together the Cape Town Interfaith Initiative’s Prayers for the City with Mayor Patricia de Lille at the V&A Waterfront Amphitheatre.

All of these activities took place during or around the time of International Holocaust Remembrance Day. This year’s commemoration was taken on board by the international community to an extent that I found striking and very uplifting. Everywhere, leaders and commentators engaged soberly and seriously with the terrible events that were being remembered, reflecting on how such things could have been allowed to happen and applying the lessons that could be drawn from it to the contemporary situation.

We have just come out of a period of introspection regarding what evils human beings are capable of inflicting upon one another and how the recurrence of such events must be prevented. It is therefore even more shocking that it is at precisely this time that Leila Khaled, a high-profile advocate of terrorist violence and herself a perpetrator of terrorism, is poised to visit this country, at the behest of BDS-SA.

There are a great many credible pro-Palestinian activists who support peaceful co-existence between a future independent Palestinian state and Israel, and who believe that such a solution can only be arrived at through negotiations, not violence.

BDS-SA could have chosen any one of these to promote itself, thereby demonstrating its professed commitment to peace and a South Africa-style settlement to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Instead, they chose someone whose main claim to fame is to have been involved in major acts of terrorism, and who to this day is an unabashed proponent of violence against Israel.

This should make clear even to those who do not consider themselves supporters of Israel, that BDS-SA is an organisation that has no compunction in spreading ideologies of violence and hatred in our society, even as it hypocritically employs standard human rights-style rhetoric and pieties in order to conceal its true nature.

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