SA Jewish students: Striking out on a new path

29 November 2009

During Apartheid many Jewish students, unlike most Jewish institutions, believed that the system of white domination was morally reprehensible. Giddy Shimoni, in Community and Conscience, recounts the story of how the South African Union of Jewish Students (SAUJS), which had a commitment to equality and justice at that time, walked out of the 1972 South African Jewish Board of Deputies (SAJBD) conference after their resolution to condemn all forms of racial discrimination in South Africa was shelved (the Board only condemned Apartheid in 1985, 37 years after it began). Many Jewish students posed the familiar question of how could Jews ‘condemn the indifference of others to past and present discrimination and persecution suffered by Jews if the struggles of other peoples to secure human rights were betrayed by the Jewish community’.

At around the same time a new magazine called Strike, in which many positively-identifying Jewish students were involved, began publishing strong criticism of the Jewish community and the SAJBD in particular. They argued that the community was ‘fully part of a white-controlled exploiting machine’ and that we ‘must come to terms with our own racism.’ Strike criticised Jewish industrialist Phillip Frame, who exploited his textile workers and the community’s praise of Verwoed after his death. It called on communal institutions to apply the Jewish ethic/history to South Africa, and hence condemn Apartheid. At the time the editor of the Jewish Times published an editorial saying that Strike was ‘grist for the mill of antisemites’, to which the students responded with a 250 signatory petition demanding that the editor apologise. Ultimately, many of these students, despite their commitment to being Jewish and being a part of the community, became increasingly estranged from institutions that appeared indifferent to the suffering of the majority of people in our country.

A similar process is happening today. Increasing numbers of young Jews in this country are becoming angry with the Israeli policy of occupation and systematic racism directed towards Palestinians. Not only do they see it as morally indefensible, but they are less convinced that it serves either Jewish or Israeli interests. They know that this policy only increases antisemitism. Jews who defend violence and the oppression of the Palestinian people appear to be indifferent at best or fully supportive at worst, of the daily humiliation of over 3.5 million people. Many of these young Jews have either seen or read widely about the Israeli occupation system and its policy of land-grabs, checkpoints and the basic attempt to rid the West Bank of Palestinians. South African Jewish youth have started to meet Palestinians, and although there are those violent, antisemitic extremists, many of our community’s young people have found that the majority of Palestinians want to live in coexistence with their Jewish neighbours under a just peace.

While the SAJBD Cape Council made a positive step to reach out to people from the Jewish left at their conference this year, most Jewish institutions do not allow any real self-reflection around the occupation. Instead, debate is silenced and dissenters are pushed out. Ultimately though, this overreaction is simply a form of desperate denial, where old fabrications are retold to us as a way of calming our collective consciences (like ‘the territories are disputed not occupied') and the community’s methods of handling dissent remain a reflection of the way that it dealt with Strike in 1973.

Unless the Jewish organizations of South Africa move beyond parev and meaningless statements about a two-state solution and start to publicly condemn the occupation as immoral, many young Jews will become alienated from the community, because they cannot identify with the current hegemonic voices of the right who do not respect the dignity of the Palestinian people. This applies equally to organizations like SAUJS, which has yet to release an unequivocal statement condemning the occupation. This is a very sorry state of affairs for three reasons. First, because many of these people are amongst South Africa’s most committed and passionate people, with so much to contribute to the community. Second, because South African Jewry has a specific kind of moral contribution to make to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict which talks to the challenges of what it means to coexist in a meaningful way. Finally, because the history books will judge the communal inability to forthrightly condemn the occupation as another instance, just like during Apartheid, when our community did not speak up when it was morally obliged to.