The war in Gaza diminishes your humanity, dear Dave

Dear Dave

I miss our conversations via email and WhatsApp, and occasionally over a cup of coffee or a glass of wine. And I am tormented because our estrangement came after you called me a Jew-hater. You, of all people, who have known me for decades.

I have lost quite a few other Jewish friends as well since Israel launched its ferocious war on the people of Gaza after Hamas’s terror attack on October 7 last year.

I wish I could have simply kept silent about Gaza; just never written or made statements about it. Then you might still be my friend, and I wouldn’t be sitting with the terrible label of antisemitism.

But I simply couldn’t ignore it. No one dares look the other way when a genocide is unfolding before our eyes. It undermines your own humanity. That’s why, as a young journalist, I couldn’t keep my mouth shut about apartheid and injustice in my own country, and I paid a high price for it.

Dave, you and I became friends during those days. You were one of the Jewish South Africans who continued the proud tradition of activists such as Denis Goldberg, Rowley Arenstein, Ruth First, Ben Turok, Wolfie Kodesh, Helen Suzman, Lionel and Hilda Bernstein, Albie Sachs, Joe Slovo, Arthur Goldreich, Helen Joseph, Harold Wolpe, Nadine Gordimer, Gill Marcus, Ronnie Kasrils, Hugh Lewin, and many others who opposed apartheid with all their might.

All friends of Nelson Mandela, all national heroes in my eyes – in yours too, you once proudly told me.

And here we sit now on opposite sides, and you essentially call me a racist. I say that through your silence and condonation, you are complicit in one of the greatest human rights violations in our lifetimes. And before October 7, you and I disagreed on very few things in principle.

As you know, I come from a conservative, rural, Christian-National Afrikaner background. In the community of my childhood, the caricature of Hoggenheimer loomed large. I remember a time when they boycotted a shop in Kroonstad because the owner was Jewish. If someone was dishonest or greedy, people would say he was like a Jew. (Only a few beloved Boerejode were treated differently.)

Not that antisemitism was necessarily worse among Afrikaners than many other South Africans. I remember attending a banquet of elite businessmen as a journalist for the Financial Mail in the mid-1980s when a top industrialist told me about a new talented guy he had hired: hungry, talented and ruthless – “a bit of a Jew”, the man said laughingly. No one else who heard his remark was uncomfortable. I was disgusted.

Yes, Jew-hatred is a nasty reality, here and elsewhere. You, like your ancestors, have experienced it your entire life. As a non-Jew, I can’t really put myself in your shoes, though as a South African I could see what such prejudice did to my black and brown countrymen and got a small taste of it as a white Afrikaner, being on one hand the dumb hairyback rockspider and on the other the land thief who must return to Holland.

You and I have already talked about my overwhelmingly positive impressions after my visit to Israel. My visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau a few years earlier left a deep impression on me, and I felt it was good and right that Jews could have a state where they could feel secure.

Hamas’s attack on October 7 was an absolute horror. I can understand that the occupation of Israeli territory by a Palestinian militant movement, the massacre of civilians and the kidnapping of about 200 Israelis would evoke deep existential fear among Israelis and Jews elsewhere; that it would awaken memories of the Holocaust.

I think if you had asked me that Saturday morning, I would have said I hope Israel punishes the Hamas leadership hard and arrests and tries the murderers and kidnappers, or shoots them if they refuse to be captured.

I suspect most people in the world felt that way. There was intense sympathy for Israel.

The next morning, I began to feel uneasy when President Isaac Herzog, in his reaction that I followed on CNN, quoted Moshe Dayan: “This is the destiny of our nation. This is the choice of our lives – to be ready and armed and strong and tough. For if the sword falls from our fist, our lives will be cut down.”

My fears were strengthened on Monday when the minister of defence, Yoav Gallant, declared: “We are fighting human animals, and we must act accordingly.” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded: “I don’t call them human animals because that would be insulting to animals.”

The deputy speaker of the Knesset, Nissim Vaturi, said Israel’s goal was to remove Gaza from the face of the earth and declared on television: “There are no uninvolved people. We must go there and kill, kill, kill.”

I could go on. The minister of finance, Bezalel Smotrich, advocated “total destruction”. Various government leaders said the Palestinians should be trapped in the Gaza Strip without water, food, electricity or medical assistance – and that is what happened.

It became clear within weeks that Netanyahu’s government was determined to kill the maximum number of Palestinians in Gaza and bomb the entire strip into one big ruin.

And that’s what has been happening relentlessly for the past 314 days and continues to happen. Most houses, apartments, schools, hospitals, clinics, universities and mosques in Gaza have been destroyed.

As I write, the number of identified bodies stands at just over 40,000, the vast majority of them children and women. Thousands more bodies probably lie under the rubble. About 100,000 people have been wounded or injured. Gaza’s population was estimated at 2.1 million.

Tens of thousands are starving and sick. Human rights organisations say it’s human suffering on a level they’ve never seen before. The trauma the children of Gaza are going through will stay with them for the rest of their lives.

This was/is collective punishment on a grotesque scale.

You accused me of believing all of Hamas’s propaganda and said the numbers are not nearly as high. I’m not on the ground there, but I prefer to believe the UN agencies and organisations such as Médecins Sans Frontières, Save the Children, Amnesty International, and credible Western journalists rather than Tel Aviv.

You told me I deny Israel’s right to defend itself. Let me use a comparison that will make sense to you as a South African. On May 20, 1983, Umkhonto we Sizwe detonated a powerful bomb on Church Street in Pretoria, killing 19 people. If the apartheid army had followed Israel’s logic, it would have levelled the township of Mamelodi and killed thousands of residents, as that was where the MK fighters hid and received support.

Israel’s propaganda machine was quickly in high gear, and initially the world believed it: the rape and beheading of dozens of babies, the cutting open of a pregnant woman’s belly, mass rapes, children burned alive, and so on. It was an attempt to justify the genocide of Palestinians.

Gradually, mainstream media and other investigative journalists exposed this propaganda as mostly false. And all who did so were labelled Jew-haters, even if they were Jewish or Israelis themselves.

The brutality of October 7 was bad enough. Why lie so blatantly about it?

And you and the Jewish Board of Deputies and other Jewish organisations in South Africa lied along, and still do.

When South Africa brought a well-considered case against Israel before the International Court of Justice, you participated in condemning everyone involved as supporters of Hamas and Iran and as antisemitic.

Really, Dave? Ronald Lamola and the esteemed international legal experts John Dugard, Adila Hassim, Tembeka Ngcukaitobi, Max du Plessis, Vaughan Lowe and Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh, all Hamas supporters and Jew-haters?

Because I’ve been to Israel and the West Bank, I have an intense interest in what’s happening there. As a journalist, I am well aware of the biases and interests of different media houses, so I take everything with a pinch of salt. I read the Israeli newspaper Haaretz daily (in English), I watch the BBC, CNN, Sky, and I follow Al Jazeera daily. I read The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Politico and The Atlantic. I follow Mehdi Hasan’s Zeteo online and regularly watch and listen to others from all sides of the argument on YouTube and podcasts.

I wish you would do the same, Dave, rather than just swallow Israeli propaganda. Then you would know you are simply on the wrong side of history.

I take the analysis of esteemed Jewish thinkers and academics on the war in Gaza seriously. Like the Israeli/American historian Omer Bartov, professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University and probably the leading expert on genocide.

Bartov is unequivocal: what the Israeli army is doing in Gaza is genocide. He recently wrote in The Guardian that he initially thought Israel might be guilty of war crimes, but not yet genocide. That changed after the attack on Rafah on May 6. “It clearly indicated that the ultimate goal of this entire undertaking from the very beginning had been to make the entire Gaza Strip uninhabitable, and to debilitate its population to such a degree that it would either die out or seek all possible options to flee the territory.

“In other words, the rhetoric spouted by Israeli leaders since October 7 was now being translated into reality.” This, says Bartov, is exactly how the 1948 Genocide Convention defines genocide.

Bartov was born in Israel and his family still lives there. He served in the Israeli army for four years, including during the Yom Kippur War, and was an infantry commander. Is Bartov also a Jew-hater, Dave, a Hamas supporter?

Dave, I would have thought that you, as a Jew and as a South African who grew up during apartheid, would hear the alarm bells ringing when an entire ethnic group is regarded as lesser beings, as Untermenschen.

Forgive me, but I can't help but suspect that Jews like you, and most Israelis who justify the genocide, are little concerned with the extermination and mutilation of Palestinian civilians because you see Palestinians as Untermenschen.

Just last week, Israel justified the bombing of a school in which more than 100 people died by saying that 13 of the dead were Hamas members. Earlier this year, there was a case where a Hamas leader was targeted, and dozens of children were killed in the attack. Mission accomplished, says Tel Aviv.

Besides the shocking scenes of dead and mutilated children, the footage of Jewish settlers assaulting Palestinians and driving them off their land – with the approval and protection of the Israeli government and security forces – is the most painful for me to witness. Doesn't it ring a bell for you as a South African who once loudly protested against forced removals and pass laws?

My friend, the Netanyahu government and the Israeli army have made Israel, with their genocide in Gaza, a more unsafe place than at any time since 1948. Israel is now, in large parts of the world, the pariah state that apartheid South Africa once was.

And with that, you have also sparked a new antisemitism that we are  beginning to see sprout everywhere in the world.

Lose-lose. And Israel couldn't even win the military war itself – Hamas fired missiles at Tel Aviv from Gaza the day before yesterday. Hamas, a nasty group of anti-democrats and thugs, is now more popular than ever.

Our South African history should have taught you that you can't shoot an idea dead.

Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East, its apologists like to say. Well, there was a time when the old National Party government in South Africa also boasted that it was the only democracy in Africa, remember? Because the whites went to vote every five years.

Israel's different rules for Arabs and Jews, the disregard for the rule of law (there are more than 10,000 Palestinians in detention without trial), the “legal" theft of Palestinian land, the disregard for international law and many UN resolutions, and the restriction of media freedom make it difficult to describe it as a democracy.

Speaking of the media: since October 7, 160 journalists in Gaza have been shot dead by the Israeli army. Al Jazeera has been kicked out of the country, and Israel flatly refuses to allow the international media access to Gaza.

Dave, I can only hope that the scales will fall from your eyes and those of the other apologists for the genocide in Gaza, and that you will realise an immediate ceasefire is now necessary, followed by massive aid to the people and infrastructure in Gaza.

And then I hope people like you in the Jewish diaspora will use all the influence you have to force the politicians in Tel Aviv to negotiate a lasting peace.

As we did in 1994. Remember, people also said for decades that it was impossible?

♦ VWB ♦

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