"Let the Bodies Pile High"
Boris Johnson, 2021, (attributed) - MET - Chapter 54
I have found Jews to be more broad-minded than most whites on the issues of race and politics, perhaps because they themselves have historically been victims of prejudice.
Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom
If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
George Orwell, Animal Farm
Several concerned readers have written to me to advise me, in the nicest possible terms, that I’m not sufficiently versed in the history of Israel nor the historical plight of the Jews to offer an opinion regarding the rights and wrongs of the Gaza conflict.
They have a point. What do I know beyond what my eyes can see and my ears can hear?
So I will leave it to this extraordinary group of fellow South Africans to spell out what the self-defining ignorance of a goy such as I clearly disqualifies me from saying.
Their open letter, published in South Africa’s Daily Maverick newspaper as early as 17th November, deserves to have been circulated to global audiences far wider than the ten million South Africans to whom the DM insists upon telling the truths they don’t always want to hear. This is the statement in full:
We are a diverse group of South African Jews who are dismayed by the situation that is unfolding in Israel and Palestine. Through it, the world has witnessed a catastrophic loss of life, and indeed, a loss of humanity. We mourn every life lost: Palestinian and Israeli.
We believe in the universal values of peace, justice and equality, and condemn in the strongest terms any and all violence against civilians, and against children in particular. We must hold to account those responsible for violence against civilians — whether perpetrated in Gaza, the West Bank, or Israel. We do so not in spite of our Jewish identity, but because of it. One of the core beliefs of Judaism is the sanctity of human life and the duty to preserve it, enshrined in the principle of pikuach nefesh.
You can read the names of the 706 signatories here:
https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2023-11-15-william-kentridge-among-hundreds-of-concerned-south-african-jews-calling-for-ceasefire-in-gaza/
I am proud to count several friends and former acquaintances among them.
Mandela had very good personal and political reasons to single out the courage and convictions of the community of anti-apartheid South African Jews for particular praise. Many of them were among his closest friends and supporters. They were invariably in the front line of anti-apartheid protests, intellectually and often physically. Nadine Gordimer helped him craft his magnificent speech in defence of his actions and beliefs at the Rivonia Trial in 1964 when the prosecution was intent on sentencing him to death. More than several South African Jews, including the extraordinary Ruth First, gave their lives for the struggle.
For the definitive story of their contribution to bringing a peaceful end to forty-six years of one of the most noxious political systems of history I can point you to no better source than Franklin Hugh Adler’s South African Jews and Apartheid, available free online here:
https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/46721943.pdf
As deeply felt as it is, and as passionate as the underlying emotions that inspired it self-evidently are, the text of the open letter to the Daily Maverick struck me as well-measured, entirely reasonable and hardly controversial. It’s difficult to imagine what kind of person you would have to be to actively endorse the killing of civilians and children in the name of some greater good, no matter how good you might think it.
I had imagined the Maverick’s journalists, op-ed writers and readers to have consisted largely of nice, South African liberals with thoroughly decent, well-meaning, polite and unobjectionable values. More or less, I would hope, like my own. The tone and the intent of the letter, together with the newspaper’s decision to publish it along with the names of all its signatories, confirmed it.
Then I made the mistake of venturing into the dark place below where the readers’ comments had made an open sewer of hatred, vitriol and noxious rage of the Maverick’s basement. More of a shitstorm, actually.
Among the most vile and vicious allegations and counter-allegations of anti-semitism and pro-semitism, of pro-Nazism and anti-Nazism, of anti-fascism and the unsung merits of full-blown fascism; of anti-genocidists against the virtues of ethnic cleansing, of almost reasonable, downright unreasonable and fully unhinged arguments for and against the causes and consequences of the worst atrocities of human history, not a single stone of furious insult, paranoia, sarcasm and racist frenzy was left unflung.
I’ll quote just one to give you a hint of the not-so-redolent fumes of this cesspit’s stink:
If Israel wanted to “ethnically cleanse” Palestinians, this war would have been done and dusted on October 8.
For the sake of your sanity, don’t go down there.
Yes, you can say what you like about South Africans of any colour and every stripe but they don't shrink from telling people things they don’t want to hear.
It’s with Orwell’s blessing, then, that I will invoke my southern wortels and attempt to express in words a thought my South African bones have long been urging me to say but which my English skin has been too thin to allow me to voice out loud in earshot of my frightfully well-mannered British self.
If you don’t want to hear it, turn away now.
The comparison often made between apartheid and Netanyahu’s Israel is beginning to look increasingly like an insult. To apartheid.
No, don’t bother pointing out the major or minor differences between our apartheid and Israel’s apartheid. If it looks like apartheid, smells like apartheid and works like apartheid, it’s apartheid.
We know.
We invented it, ffs.
If you refuse to take it from me, take it from Tamir Pardo, a former director of Mossad.
Pardo told the Associated Press that Israel’s mechanisms for controlling the Palestinians, from restrictions on movement to placing them under military law while Jewish settlers in the occupied territories are governed by civilian courts, matched the old South Africa.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/06/israel-imposing-apartheid-on-palestinians-says-former-mossad-chief
Numbers don’t tell the whole story. They do, however, paint a vivid picture of the wider truth:
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (1998 - 2003) found that there were 21,000 deaths from political violence, with 7,000 deaths between 1948 and 1989, and 14,000 deaths and 22,000 injuries in the transition period between 1990 and 1994.
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Which gives us apartheid-related murders averaging at just a fraction less than 500 people a year.
Gaza, by contrast, gives us a current killing rate of 262 per day.
These numbers won’t reflect the many more millions of daily indignities suffered by South Africa’s (so-called) non-white population during apartheid. Nor do they count the deprivations and deaths caused by underfunded healthcare, limited education and an institutional lack of basic life-enhancing or life-sustaining amenities in the (so-called) black homelands.
But nor do the numbers from Gaza.
Sharpeville, South Africa’s most notorious massacre of anti-apartheid protesters, killed 69 people including 10 children. Of the 180 injured, nineteen were children.
It went on to change the world.
The subject of racial discrimination in South Africa was raised at the UN General Assembly in its first session, in 1946, in the form of a complaint by India concerning the treatment of Indians in the country. But it was not until after Sharpeville that the UN made clear that the country’s system of racial segregation would no longer be tolerated.
https://theconversation.com/how-the-1960-sharpeville-massacre-sparked-the-birth-of-international-human-rights-law-133325
But when it came to taking any kind of action to pressure South Africa into dismantling apartheid, the Western world sat on its hands.
In 1961 United Nations Secretary-General, Dag Hammarskjold visited South Africa, but reported back that he could not come to an acceptable agreement with the Prime Minister. In the same year H.F. Verwoerd announced South Africa’s withdrawal from the Commonwealth of Nations as a result of criticism from this organisation, and the Foreign Minister was criticized for his speech in the General Assembly. In 1966, the first of many UN seminars on apartheid was held in Brazil, and later in the same year the General Assembly proclaimed 21 March to be International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination in remembrance of the Sharpeville Incident. A 1971 General Assembly resolution condemned the establishment of homelands. In 1974 there was a resolution to expel South Africa from the United Nations as a result of human rights violations, but it was not accepted as France, the UK and the USA did not support it.
(My italics)
https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/south-africa-and-united-nations-1946-1990
Karl Marx, commenting on the consequences of the French Revolution, famously said, “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.”
He should have said, “…and third as irony”:
In 1965 the most prominent of the countries who voted against imposing sanctions on apartheid South Africa were the US, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Turkey, Portugal and Spain. The apartheid regime had friends in the strangest places, not least among them the most notorious fascist dictatorships of the sixties and seventies.
Among the few decent countries that voted for sanctions against apartheid was, yes, Israel.
https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/662066?ln=en
It took a single massacre of 69 people to persuade the world that racial segregation was a crime. In today’s numbers, Gaza has been giving us us four Sharpevilles per day.
And counting.
But the western world is still sitting on its hands. Or, as the US and the UK might have said when they respectively voted against and abstained from the vote calling for a peace-fire in Gaza, let the bodies pile high.
Not a single word or image relating to Gaza appeared on the BBC news last night, 12th December.
I’m beginning to wonder who the good guys are.