Making friends and dealing with enemies

The South African Jewish Board of Deputies has unfortunately been required to address many instances of anti-Israel rhetoric crossing the line into antisemitism. This was what was fundamentally at issue in our 13-year-long case against then Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) International Relations Secretary Bongani Masuku, who in February this year, was found guilty of hate speech by the Constitutional Court and ordered to apologise to the Jewish community.

More recently, we were called upon to respond to an article, titled “The Israel-Gaza conflict and the banality of evil” by Oscar van Heerden, which encapsulated this mode of wounding and denigrating Jews under the guise of criticising Israel. The title incorporates Hannah Arendt’s famous phrase in reference to Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi official who oversaw the practical implementation of the Final Solution. In his article, Van Heerden makes the shocking statement that “most Israelis … cannot or will not acknowledge that what they are doing is no different from those very Nazis so aptly represented by Eichmann”. The Board’s response appeared in the same publication, and can be accessed on our Facebook page.

In his article as well as in a subsequent radio interview on Smile FM, Van Heerden propagated further deeply unpleasant antisemitic tropes, specifically by grossly misrepresenting the ancient Jewish religious notion of what it means to be a “chosen people”, combined with inflammatory claims that Israeli Jews don’t regard Palestinians as human beings. Last week, I was interviewed by the same station to respond to these comments. In terms of likening Israelis to Nazis, I pointed out that so manifestly false was that comparison, that the only reason for Van Heerden’s making it would have been to use the pain that all Jews still feel about the Holocaust against them, not because of any desire to see peace in the Middle East. Aside from demonising Israelis and causing gratuitous hurt and offense to Jewish people, it also served to minimise the true extent of Nazi crimes.

In addressing Jewish understandings of the Biblical concept of “chosenness”, I objected in the strongest terms to how someone from outside our religion had been given a platform to misconstrue and denigrate this aspect of our tradition in the way Van Heerden had done.

On Sunday, our Gauteng chairperson, Harold Jacobs, and National Director Wendy Kahn were invited to attend a luncheon organised by The Chinese Association to celebrate the Chinese community’s recent victory in the Equality Court concerning a hate speech case against it. It was a welcome reminder that while purveyors of spiteful Jew-baiting are a reality and must be responded to, there are deep reserves of goodwill towards our community from across the racial and ethnic spectrum, and we should take every opportunity to deepen and build on these relationships.

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