My husband is Jewish. I’m married into an extended Jewish family that I love. I have a Jewish stepmother, brother and sister, whom I love dearly too. Since I’m not Jewish, my children are not either, but they are keenly interested in their ancestry. Their father has a large collection of history books about World War 2 and the holocaust. He is ready to answer any of their questions about this dark period of history.
They have read about their father’s great aunt who managed to escape a train to Treblinka, after throwing her baby out of the cattle car. (Both miraculously survived.) We have taken our children to visit holocaust museums in Cape Town, Jerusalem and Washington DC. These experiences are not easy ones, especially for children. But it’s a history they and we must understand and remember.
But that’s not all they must understand and remember.
Both my husband and I grew up in eighties South Africa. We joined anti-apartheid organisations to fight for democracy, and for political, social and economic equality. As a country, we have a long way still to go to achieve equality and reconciliation.
A week in the West Bank
When my children were little, I spent a week in the West Bank. I was working as a journalist and had been invited by the Palestine Liberation Organization to visit Palestine. Along with a photographer, I was based in Ramallah, where we met peacekeepers, politicians and activists.
We also travelled to West Bank cities, visiting holy sites, ancient olive groves, soap factories. We interviewed and spoke with farmers, businesspeople, weavers, artists and mothers. We shared pots of dark coffee and strong mint tea. We ate incredible meals. Neither the photographer nor I are Jewish or Muslim, but we both grew up with Bible stories. It was a remarkable privilege to visit a place of such beauty and historic meaning. We walked through streets wondering who had walked them centuries before us. The experience was bittersweet.
To visit these ancient towns and cities, we drove past illegal Jewish settlements – some as fancy as the multi-million-rand gated communities you see in some of our suburbs – and saw the security setups and separate road networks that run through land occupied in violation of international law.
In one West Bank town, we unknowingly walked into a violent confrontation between Palestinians and Jewish settlers, and had to run for our safety. We also happened to be in Ramallah on Nakba Day, the day that marks the expulsion of most Palestinians from their homes and lands in May 1948. We were in the streets along with protestors, hearing stories of grief and anger.
While on that trip, I was interested in talking to Jewish people about these settlements and how they thought they could be dismantled, so we travelled to West Jerusalem to join a Jewish activist meeting, which required passing through a military checkpoint – one of the most intimidating experiences of my life. A security vehicle slowly followed us after we exited the checkpoint into West Jerusalem. The meeting, however, was not a success. The activists didn’t trust us – we were new faces, and they were frightened of spies – so we were asked to leave.
A few years ago, we celebrated a family bat mitzvah in West Jerusalem, staying in a Catholic convent near an entrance to the Old City. We drank jugs of pomegranate juice, shared in the family’s joy at the Western Wall, went on organised tours of historical Jewish sites, visited Christian churches, and watched the sunset over East Jerusalem.
In Tel Aviv, we joined one of the weekly Friday peace protests, and had a Shabbat meal with Jewish peace activists, cousins of my husband. We took our children into the West Bank to visit the anonymous British artist Banksy’s Walled Off hotel famous for having the “worst view of any hotel in the world”. It is situated against the 9-metre-high concrete wall that cuts through many parts of the land. Although it was a quick, cursory trip into the West Bank, visiting the hotel – also a protest museum and gallery – sparked our children’s interest in the politics of the area and led to interesting and still on-going discussions.
Triggering, carving divisiveness
What is happening right now is triggering for all of us. It continues to carve divisiveness and hatred for people beyond just Jews and Muslims and across the world. Jewish people are reminded of pogroms and the holocaust, and feel vulnerable and threatened by rising, increasingly overt anti-semitism. Millions more experience this unfolding disaster in the context of colonialism, slavery and on-going oppression. In South Africa, people are reminded of the violence of apartheid and persistent structural racism and inequality.
When my children ask me to take them to the protests, we go so that we can walk with our fellow South Africans to listen to their calls for a ceasefire, for peace and for Palestinian freedom. We hear their pain and anger. As a semi-Jewish family, it’s good for us to be there: to listen and to understand.
We are a messy nation. But for those of us sharing land at the tip of Africa, the Rugby World Cup is proof that we are first and foremost South Africans. We collectively watched and celebrated a wonderfully diverse Springbok rugby team win a tough World Cup tournament.
This rugby can teach us that as a nation, we should listen to each other, hear the hurt and fear about what’s happening right now in Gaza. We can collectively appeal for an immediate ceasefire, and for Israelis and Palestinians to listen deeply to each other. Anything else right now is a crime against humanity. Already our children will be suffering the consequences of this brutality for decades, even centuries to come. It must stop. DM
Become an Insider
A truly inspiring article, thank you. We are ordinary people who do not want war, bloodshed and hatred. Wars and conflicts are the lifeblood of the psychopathic globalists who care not for the peoples in their countries. If only more ordinary people would simply say “NO” to killing fellow human beings, and that includes the military.
Good article. I think you sum up though, why people who call themselves ‘Jewish’ have not been very popular for some time, by telling us you aren’t ‘Jewish’. How can that be? Unfortunately their religion, or culture, or whatever you want to call it, whereby they set themselves apart – or worse, being ‘foreigners’, swearing allegiance to another country – makes them untrustworthy to the rest of us. And then when they act as they have done, and obviously now, continue to do, by taking over someone else’s country on some historical precept, and then acting in a similar way to what they accuse others of doing to them, makes our feelings to them even worse. Having spent just a couple of weeks in Amman and seen the other side of the propaganda, I’m afraid my sympathies are very much with the Palestinians – the ‘true’ Semites – and I keep reminding myself of the quote from Paolo Friere: “The oppressed, instead of striving for liberation, tend themselves to become oppressors”. Sound like the Israelis to you?
Did you really write “why people who call themselves ‘Jewish’ have not been very popular for some time” Steve Davidson? Racist much?
The article (if you read it) was about a non-Jewish woman married to a Jewish man in South Africa and her personal challenges in giving her children a liberal upbringing and trying to instil in them a set of values from this mixed (she calls it “messy”) perspective. Notice how she doesn’t mention being shunned, outcast or not accepted by her husband’s family. There’s no hint of her fear of a “fatwa” or “honour killing” from her husband’s family is there?. Sad as is it that Hitler, the Hamas murderers of October 7 and the maniacs at Dagestan airport yesterday would ultimately consign her children to the same fate as me, despite all this. Yet only you, Steve Davidson, find something in this article to hate about the Jews, as usual …
Did you really write “why people who call themselves ‘Jewish’ have not been very popular for some time”? I thought we were G’d’s Chosen People
The article (if you read it) was about a non-Jewish woman married to a Jewish man in South Africa and her personal challenges in giving her children a liberal upbringing and trying to instil in them a set of values from this mixed (she calls it “messy”) perspective. Notice how she doesn’t mention being shunned, outcast or not accepted by her husband’s family. There’s no hint of her fear of a “fatwa” or “honour killing” from her husband’s family is there?. Sad as is it that Hitler, the Hamas murderers of October 7 and the maniacs at Dagestan airport yesterday would ultimately consign her children to the same fate as me, despite all this.
Unfortunately, Jackie May’s empathy and humanism is lost in a religious war where atrocities and barbaric behaviour abounds and reason, empathy and humanism are thrown out of the window.
The UN and the ICC should have by now named many war criminals on both sides of the conflict and have issued warrants of arrest.
Have the parties in this conflict feel no shame to have inflicted all these deaths and suffering, especially to innocent children. Shame on them.
is it not a a solution to the bombing of Gaza for Hamas to allow the captured hostages, taken from Israel, returned to Israel. Hamas started this conflict. Hamas are the real punishers of innocent Palestinians. The history should be resolved once the bombing is resolved. The press are doing their best to pull at our hearstrings by their individual stories of the misery being inflicted by Hamas hard view. Have the Israeli deaths and the barbaric manner of their deaths inflicted on them eye to eye, been forgotten? Is every screaming Palestinian evoking more sympathy than tortured Israeli’s? Compassionate people should not take sides. Hamas must stop the war they started.
Like Jackie May, I too had a father who was a Dutch Jew and a mother a Christian. Many of his family lost their lives in the Holocaust. I learnt of their stories from a sole survivor of a family who managed to escape to Israel. She studied Genealogy and traced her and my father’s families back to the 16th century.
What I could not understand – still cannot understand as I watch aghast the appalling destruction of a people on TV, is how a people, who themselves suffered through the hands of the Nazis and before that the pogroms over the centuries, could themselves oppress and persecute the Palestinians in the manner they have. How, having lived in the Ghetto of Warsaw and similar they could now hound people off their land and put them behind a wall and fences. How could the Oppressed become the Oppressors?
I have lived through the worst years of Apartheid in South Africa. In the last thirty years since we threw away that racist yoke, I have witnessed how many of the previously oppressed have themselves become Racists – WHY?
Thank you for this piece that does not proliferate on taking a side, but advocates for peace. I agree… War itself is genocide and should not be allowed by our societies. On that point, it surprises me how people do not realise that when they vehemently defend their side of the war, they are no better than the the other side. They are just as warmongering and yes… murderous.
And it surprises me the wave of Christians siding with Israel’s war. It’s interesting to note that this gradual support of Jewish interests by Christians is contrary to the scriptures they hold dear which states things like ” no one comes to the father but by me”(Jesus). Their bible clearly makes any non believer or group “anti-christian” or anti christ. So how do Christians suddenly support this bloody war where so many on both sides are murdered? That’s an interesting thing. Could it be that the Muslim faith is the more threatening of the two to the state of Christians? Whatever it comes from..I wish they’d stop and try a message of love instead.
That my dear is Human nature, it is ingrained in our DNA. Religion is just another excuse to fight, it has been going on since the dawn of time and will continue long after we are all gone