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Banners, Beatings and Boycotts
Michael Hamlyn, Cape Town
South African Jews are feeling the heat from their black and Muslim neighbors. Five months after the Durban anti-racism conference, they are fighting back, but warily.
ON A BRIGHT, SUNNY DEcember day, the little seaside town of Fish Hoek, just outside Cape Town, held what it called a Mardi Gras parade of floats and historic vehicles. Proudly driven by a group of teenagers in World War II German uniforms was an ancient German military jeep, bedecked in swastikas. After Philip Krawitz, chairman of the Cape council of the Jewish Board of Deputies, protested that the float was "completely unacceptable in a country where we have worked so hard to build good relationships among all groups," he received an apology from the owner of the jeep and from the organizers of the Mardi Gras. But it reminded South Africa's 80,000-strong Jewish community of how close to the surface anti-Semitism is here.
It is particularly strong � and growing � among the black and Muslim populations, a relatively new phenomenon which is fed by the memory that Israel cooperated with the apartheid regime. It has been given a boost by the Palestinian intifada, although South Africa's 600,000 Muslims are not Arabs, but descendants of Indian traders or Malay slaves.
Anti-Jewish sentiment was fanned further by "Zionism Is Racism" demonstrations surrounding the United Nations World Conference Against Racism in Durban last September. Yehuda Kay, the Board of Deputies executive director, says that for the first time black citizens saw "blatant anti-Semitism that has never been seen on the ground in South Africa." Krawitz detects an intensification of attacks on Jews as Zionists. "In the eyes of the radicals," he explains, "Durban legitimized these attacks."
On big-city walls, slogans appeared branding Israelis as "baby killers." Anti-Israel rhetoric in the newspapers escalated too. A recent headline in the Sowetan read: "SA Jews sending money to terrorists in Israel." The Sowetan is South Africa's largest-selling daily paper, aimed almost exclusively at black readers.
After September 11, Muslim radio stations and websites blamed the World Trade Center attack on the Jews, who were said to have done it to discredit Islam. Muslims marched through Cape Town in an anti-American, anti-Israel demonstration, chanting "Long live Bin Laden."
Surprisingly, perhaps, the number of physical attacks reported to the Board of Deputies, the Jewish community's roof organization, in 2001 remained in single figures, much lower than in countries such as Australia, Argentina, France and Britain. The worst incident was the beating of an elderly Cape Town Jewish doctor, who has spent most of his working life treating Muslims. Four men in Arafat-style head-scarves attacked him, shouting anti-Semitic slogans and blaming the Jews for the suffering of the Palestinians. Three Jewish youths were kicked and verbally abused in a Rosebank shopping mall in Johannesburg. Synagogues and Jewish day schools are now protected by security guards � armed and with radios � and by community volunteers.
Individual Jews are keeping out of harm's way. In Johannesburg, for instance, Jewish housewives are boycotting Oriental Plaza, where spices and silks and household items are sold by Muslim traders. "People won't go to Oriental Plaza," says Cindy Caines, a 28-year-old mother of two. "There's a lot of ill feeling. I wanted to go and buy some cloth for a dress for my cousin's wedding, but my gran and aunt said I shouldn't go. They said the rabbis have advised people not to go, or if you do go, not to show that you are Jewish."
Asked if she knows of any incidents, Caines admits: "I don't, but lots of people are afraid. The merchants don't want you there, and we just don't want to go and support them." Yehuda Kay, at the Board of Deputies, confirms this hostility. A sign was put up in Oriental Plaza reading "No Jews allowed." It was removed after the board protested, but soon reappeared.
On university campuses, the Muslim Students Association formed a sub-group, which said its aim was to defend Jeru-salem's Al-Aqsa Mosque. So far, there have been no physical incidents, but anti-Israel demonstrations have taken place at many universities. On Yom Kippur, about 500 Muslim students at Johannesburg's Witwatersrand University marched under banners proclaiming, "Sharon is a war criminal"; "Israel is an apartheid state"; and "Stop racist invasions." Tension reached such a pitch that Muslim and Jewish student associations, which used to work closely together, now no longer talk to each other.
A decade after the collapse of apartheid, South Africa's Jews are also paying a price for the contradictory messages delivered by Israeli diplomacy during the era of white supremacy. For its own security reasons, Israel cooperated strategically and sold arms to the apartheid regime, yet at the same time it voted in favor of United Nations sanctions. The former policies alienated African nationalists, while the latter played badly with the more conservative Jews and other whites. Yasser Arafat, on the other hand, was one of Nelson Mandela's staunchest allies in the struggle for majority rule.
This recent history makes the Jews � and Israeli diplomats � wary of hitting back too hard. They protect, they monitor, they make their voice heard, but they try not to provoke. "We've been guarded in our response," says Philip Krawitz. "If you attack editorials, the editor always has the last word, and cabinet ministers can always get preference when they want to have their views printed."
In the same spirit, Jewish students handed out flowers to anti-Israel demonstrators at Durban, but they have now adopted a more militant approach. Jodi Raskin, chairperson of the National Union of Jewish Students, says Durban was "an eye-opening, frightening experience." The student group responded by establishing a political wing to fight Israel's corner. It ended the academic year with a pro-Israel rally at which the keynote speaker was an Ethiopian immigrant woman flown in specially from Israel.
Ten student leaders have just returned from briefings in Israel. Raskin, a 21-year-old psychology student, says more will follow in the new academic year, which begins in February. "We shall be protesting, marching and lobbying," she promises. "We shall do our best to get a pro-Israel message into the newspapers."
Memories of Israel's policy during the apartheid years also make black and Muslim South Africans less receptive to Israel's depiction of Arafat as an unreconstructed terrorist who rejected an honorable peace. The government wants Israel's friendship, but not at the expense of old alliances. Benjamin Pogrund, a leading anti-apartheid South African Jewish journalist now living in Jerusalem, lobbied for Israel during the anti-racism conference. He says that when he visited his old African National Congress friends in their ministerial offices, they all said the same thing: "People like Muamar Qadhafi, Yasser Arafat and Fidel Castro supported us in our liberation struggle. Why should we throw them out now?"
The Board of Deputies acknowledges the problem. Assessing the impact of Tova Herzl, Israel's current ambassador, Krawitz says: "Jews are seen as white and privileged, and the ANC sees Arabs or Muslims as historically disadvantaged. It is a difficult stand from which to make a difference, but she has helped to make up a tremendous amount of lost ground." The 49-year-old, Israeli-born ambassador spent nine of her childhood years in South Africa, where her parents taught Hebrew. She strikes the right notes, though she admits: "Convincing people that Israel is right would be difficult. I would be satisfied to show there are two sides to the conflict." The editors of the Johannesburg Star, the country's biggest-selling evening paper, recently named her as No. 5 in their list of favorite dinner guests in 2001. "She is loads of fun," they wrote, "even if you disagree about the politics of her country."
IT'S NOT JUST HER HOSTS WHO disagree about Israeli policies. The Jewish community itself is bitterly divided. Last October, Ronnie Kasrils, the only Jewish member of President Thabo Mbeki's government, attacked Israel for the "ruthless security methods" it employs against the Palestinians. "These intolerable strategies," the 63-year-old Water and Forestry minister said, "together with the growing number of provocative Jewish settlements in the West Bank, undermine the legitimacy of the Israeli government and its negotiating position." Kasrils, a Communist former intelligence chief of the ANC's guerrilla army, drew a parallel between "the oppression experienced by Palestinians under Israel and the oppression experienced in South Africa under apartheid."
In a series of meetings across the country, he and Max Ozinsky, an ANC minister in the Western Cape's provincial government, called on South African Jews to sign a declaration of conscience entitled "Not In My Name." So far, more than 200 have signed up. They include the Nobel Prize-winning novelist, Nadine Gordimer, and veterans of the 1960s treason trials like Arthur Goldreich and Denis Goldberg. Explaining why she signed, Gordimer told The Jerusalem Report: "I want to see peace and security come to the two states. For me, that is very much conditional upon the return of the occupied lands and guaranteed security provided for each side."
Helen Suzman, who waged a lone battle against apartheid as the only Progressive Party legislator between 1961 and 1974, declined to sign the declaration, which she dismisses as one-sided. The same charge is made by rabbis and leaders of the traditionally Zionist majority of South African Jews. The veteran chief rabbi, Cyril Harris, argued that "the Palestinians have never admitted the possibility of coexistence with Israel, and continue to incite their children with hatred."
But Shelagh Gastrow, a 52-year-old Cape Town University fund-raiser, who signed the Kasrils declaration, retorts that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not an even-handed issue. "One side has an army," she insists, "the other has not. One is occupied, the other is the occupier." Gastrow complains that she and other signatories have been ostracized within the Jewish community. "People have told me I'm an idiot," she says, "and there's nothing to discuss."
That's not drastic enough for some of their more zealous critics. "Kasrils should be excommunicated from the Jewish community," says Jonathan Cantor, a student of commerce at the University of South Africa, who has just returned from a year's yeshivah study at Ohr Sameach in New York. "Kasrils has never done anything Jewish in his life, he's never done anything for the Jewish community. Now he's running around saying 'I'm Jewish.' It's an accident of birth that he's Jewish. That's all."
The Jewish community is also feeling a trifle nervous � and resentful � about a late-November call by Ariel Sharon to move to Israel. Philip Krawitz reports a negative reaction. Zionism is no longer as dominant here as it was. Ultra-Orthodox groups, like Ohr Sameach, are making inroads. Only 182 applied for aliyah in 2001. Barely 18 percent of those who leave go to Israel, while about 40 percent choose Australia and 25 percent the United States. They'll defend Israel, but they're in no hurry to go there.
(February 12, 2002)
Jewish World
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