The images from Palestine in 2024 evoke memories and feelings covering more than 80 years. I feel cursed. I write this comment because these memories now mean more to me than they ever did. I dread them yet I nurture them.
My parents were not religious. My father had studied at a yeshiva (a traditional Jewish religious school) in Lithuania and was fluent in Jewish religious customs and traditions. He graduated as a chemical engineer in Vienna and came to South Africa in the 1920s. He joined the Communist Party of South Africa, reading deeply in Marxism, politics and economics. He spoke and read Hebrew, Yiddish, German, Russian and English – some of his English turns of phrase became family jokes.
My mother, however, was from a long-established South African Jewish family.
In 1939, the Communist Party encouraged members who could do so to enlist in the South African army to fight fascism. I am proud that my father wore the red flash on his uniform to show that he had volunteered to serve abroad.
In my childhood in Port Elizabeth, we lived in close contact with uncles, aunts and cousins through both my parents. Most observed Jewish customs religiously. Like most Jews of that generation who had roots in Eastern Europe, they spoke Yiddish, often as a first language.
At Passover, my father was respectfully invited to lead the Seder — the traditional feast — attended by over 20 of the extended family. He would lead the prayers and traditional songs with benign gusto. He was seated at the head of the long table in a comfortable armchair with extra pillows and cushions.
The festival is rich in symbolism; as part of its ritual, a child questions features of the feast, including asking why it is that one may lean comfortably at the table only during Passover evenings and not others. In the ritual, the reply is that Passover celebrates freedom from slavery.
We moved to Johannesburg in about 1943. My father became an atheist, but he taught me of Passover’s political symbolism in a South African context. He also attached importance to being Jewish, but saw no conflict with atheism.
From about 1947 I was a member of Habonim — a Zionist youth organisation. At all times, the focus was on Zionism. We learnt that as Jews, we were not merely linked to Israel but entitled to it, to build Israel and, if possible, “to make alia” — to “go up” and settle in Israel. The sense of entitlement instilled a feeling that as Jews we were in some way superior.
The Holocaust was a constant point of reference. During World War 2, my father and others in our family — in fact, probably almost every adult Jew in South Africa — lost parents, siblings and other relatives in the European Holocaust.
During my growing up I was made to understand that Jews were morally superior. My father believed that in South Africa, this meant that Jews should be sympathetic to demands for change because there was something horribly wrong with the country. In his last years, he paid an agonising price for his beliefs.
Haunting memories
I am still haunted by two linked memories from August or September 1945. I was a child of nine.
I was bewildered and shocked by photographs and news reports about the Holocaust. Because of the horror I felt then, it is still not easy today to write names like Buchenwald, Treblinka, Auschwitz, Belsen, Dachau and other places.
My father took me with him to a gathering in the Yiddisher Arbeitersklub in Doornfontein. I was possibly the only child there, among men and women of my father’s generation. I understood what the occasion was, and its link to the news and photographs.
My memory is of chaos. There were hundreds of Jews present in the hot, dusty hall… adult men and women, overwhelmed and frantic — outrage, grief, confusion and weeping; naming parents, brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, cousins; turning to others equally distraught to seek, and to give, comfort.
In Habonim and from my peers and some of my relatives I learnt words for a Gentile. I have heard them still being used in South Africa. The words were used only in a deprecatory sense, to emphasise Jewish moral superiority. In Habonim, we were never counselled against those words. The most dramatic memory that I have of this usage involved no less a person than Chief Rabbi Louis Rabinowitz when I was about 11 years old.
The Rabinowitz family lived directly opposite our house in Johannesburg and knew that we were Jewish. My brother and I were friendly with his young son Jimmy. I was visiting Jimmy once during a Jewish holiday, and Rabbi Rabinowitz asked me whether I had been to synagogue that day. I said that I had not. He asked me angrily if I was not a Jew, using a contemptuous Hebrew and Yiddish word for a Gentile to show his disgust. I was shocked and confused — was this the right thing to say to another Jew? If the Chief Rabbi used such words, were they permissible?
The group leaders in Habonim had been lied to about what Zionism meant for Palestine and they passed these lies innocently on to young members like myself. We were told, and believed, and told others, the myth that Palestine was “a land without people, for people without a land”.
Ilan Pappé, in Lobbying for Zionism on Both Sides of the Atlantic (2024), describes how this mythically unpeopled Palestine was imagined. Referring to various sources he writes that, from mediaeval times, the visions —
“...had nothing to do with the reality on the ground. You could take your pick and decide whether you were looking at Jewish prophets of yesteryear or saints from early Christianity. One thing was clear, there were few Arabs and hardly any Muslims in this illusory landscape…
“As much as Jesus’ Palestine was an imagined country, where Jesus sometimes appeared as an Aryan, sometimes as an Arab or even a black Jew, so were the Palestinians pictured first as the early Hebrews living in an ancient Christian land where nothing, nothing at all, changed from 70CE until the late nineteenth century. To this empty land in the collective Christian memory, it was easy to restore the Jews and build a future state for them, as if the country’s history between the time of Jesus and his predicted return had disappeared into a black hole.
“In this respect, the Christian, and later Jewish, depiction of Palestine as terra nullius, a land no one owned, was similar to other settler-colonial projects.”
It is also a Zionist myth that Jews were a people without land. Zionists were a minority among Jews in the late nineteenth century when Zionism emerged, and the majority wanted to be where they were.
There is a song from those days; the English translation of two verses goes:
“Oh you foolish little Zionists
With your utopian mentality
You’d better go down to the factory
And learn the worker’s reality
“You want to take us to Jerusalem
So we can die as a nation
We’d rather stay in the Diaspora
And fight for our liberation.”
Historically, Jews were treated by many governments with varying degrees of hostility, culminating in the European Holocaust. This swept up others deemed to be “subhuman” – the Romany, the non-binary, and those with mental or physical differences for which society would have had to provide.
There was a theme for Palestinians in Habonim, and is the source of the cruel illusion that “Israel has the most moral army in the world”. Palestinians are “non-people” to Zionism, as Pappé has shown. Zionism sees Palestinians, where they have lived for many centuries, as an aberration lacking significance.
Palestine thus becomes an uninhabited land called Israel and Jews can make their home there. In his book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Pappé quotes David Ben-Gurion speaking in 1938: “I am for compulsory transfer; I do not see anything immoral in it.” Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and other ministers and officials have repeated this.
Resistance by the Palestinian “non-people” is perceived to be unreasonable, aggressive and violent. Above all, however, it is anti-Semitic. As Pappé described, Palestine was viewed as a land uninhabited by people with a history. Rights, however, flow from a people’s history; because no rights can vest in “non-people”, such as the right to live where they have lived for many generations, the Israeli army can claim to be moral, whatever means it uses when ridding the country of them.
The proceedings before the International Court of Justice in the “genocide” case brought by South Africa against Israel reflect the issues.
Opening the South African case on 11 January 2024, the Agent for South Africa explained that the Palestinians had a history:
“In our application, South Africa has recognised the ongoing Nakba of the Palestinian people through Israel’s colonisation since 1948, which has systematically and forcibly dispossessed, displaced, and fragmented the Palestinian people, deliberately denying them their internationally recognised, inalienable right to self-determination, and their internationally recognised right of return as refugees to their towns and villages, in what is now the State of Israel.”
The following day, Israel’s Co-Agent responded , denying that the Palestinians had a history and thus rights. The basis of the Israeli denial of genocide is that, having no back-story in 1948 — they were “non-people” with no right to be where they were — they had no rights after 1948:
“South Africa purports to come to this Court in the lofty position of a guardian of the interest of humanity. But in delegitimising Israel’s 75-year existence in its opening presentation yesterday, that broad commitment to humanity rang hollow. And in its sweeping counterfactual description of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it seemed to erase both Jewish history and any Palestinian agency or responsibility. Indeed, the delegitimisation of Israel since its very establishment in 1948 in the Applicant’s submissions, sounded barely distinguishable from Hamas’ own rejectionist rhetoric.”
The court signalled what Israel faced if it was to avoid a finding of genocide. In para 54 of its Provisional Order, the ICJ concluded that it was plausible that the Palestinians had a protected right to not be the victims of genocide. In para 74, it concluded that it was plausible that these were at risk of being irreparably prejudiced. When the matter eventually comes to trial, it seems that Israel will have to show that these conclusions are implausible.
In the Zionist world view, the Holocaust is a history which washed away any moral restraints when dealing with anti-Semitism. The Nazis also thought that they were doing no wrong, for they too claimed to be dealing with “non-people”.
Because Zionists are dealing with “non-people”, vision is altered. Mary Turfah, in an article in the Los Angeles Review of Books titled The Most Moral Army, writes:
“You and I, we lack the ability to discern. Where we should see existential threats to the state of Israel, instead we see a cancer hospital, a UN compound, a group of people praying at dawn, two journalists in press vests, an ambulance, children playing football, a flock of sheep, fishermen casting their net, a rib-baring cat, a flour mill, a water pipe.”
A Jew is someone with Jewish parentage. In the Orthodox tradition, one’s mother must be Jewish. Since the advent of DNA testing, in the Reformed tradition having a Jewish father suffices. It is also possible to convert to be a Jew.