Yossi Schwartz ISL (The section of the RCIT in Israel/Occupied Palestine), 13.01.2024
The New York time is considered a very respectful and reliable liberal newspaper yet, it is clear that in the real world it is a mouthpiece of American imperialism and a pro Zionist publication that spreads lies. The last example is an article by John Eligon that attacks South Africa for bringing the case against Israel to the ICJ. He does it by writing that the Jews of South Africa that were very active against the apartheid regime are now feeling betrayed by the government of South Africa for the complaint that Israel is committing a genocide. He writes:
“South Africa’s case against Israel could generate a backlash globally and at home. U.S. officials have supported Israel, calling the case meritless. And some in the small but outspoken community of South African Jews, a group that played a key role in the anti-apartheid struggle, have criticized their government over the genocide case. Giving voice to those criticisms, Zev Krengel, the president of the South Africa Jewish Board of Deputies, called it “a massive betrayal” [1]
“Mr. Krengel accused the South African government, led by the A.N.C., of hypocrisy, saying that it hadn’t pursued cases against other countries that had committed atrocities. When Sudan’s former president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, came to South Africa for a summit in 2015, South African authorities refused to arrest him even though he was wanted on charges of genocide and war crimes by the International Criminal Court. “ We’ve never seen the A.N.C. government more excited than trying to prove the Jewish state is doing genocide,” Mr. Krengel said” [2]
For the Jewish community in South Africa to be activists against the regime that was very close to Israel the Jews had to be anti-Zionists. Is it true that the majority of Jews were anti-apartheid and anti-Zionist activists? In the real world a minority of the Jews in South Africa were against the regime.
“In his autobiography Long Walk to Freedom, Nelson Mandela notes, “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.”1 As a law student at the University of Witwatersrand, Mandela met Harold Wolpe, Ruth First, and Joe Slovo who would become lifelong friends and then comrades in battle. After graduating, it was Lazar Sidelsky who would give him his first job as an articled clerk at a time when few white firms would hire a black. Sidelsky was also “involved in African education, donating money and time to African schools.”
In fact, among whites it was Jews who would offer Mandela the greatest support and encouragement; those who hid him when he was forced to go underground; those who, as lawyers, defended him at trial; those who, as journalists, supported the anti-apartheid cause; and those politicians, like Helen Suzman, who made it their mission to see that Mandela and other political prisoners received the best treatment possible from a legal and penal system structured to humiliate and degrade black prisoners. There were even relatively apolitical Jews like Nadine Gordimer who did their part on Mandela’s behalf; Gordimer secretly helped edit the famous speech Mandela gave in his defense at the Rivonia trial, and donated all the prize money from her 1991 Nobel Prize for Literature to the Congress of South African Writers, an organization aligned with the ANC. And Mandela’s relationship with Jews was by no means exceptional; the same can be said of other “historic” black ANC leaders, such as Walter Sisulu, Oliver Tambo, and Moses Kotane” [3]
“Yet, despite this thick crust of Jewish participation in the good fight, it is nevertheless true that the Jewish establishment and the vast majority of South African Jews were inwardly focused on specifically Jewish issues, remaining distant from the central South African issue of racial injustice. As was the case elsewhere, in Europe and in the United States, while perhaps one Jew in ten might be an activist, out of ten activists, five or six would be Jewish. In South Africa, it was only after 1985 that the Board of Jewish Deputies formally condemned apartheid and encouraged the genesis of Jewish civil rights organizations, such as Jews for Justice in Cape Town, and Jews for Social Justice in Johannesburg. Though some heroic rabbis spoke out against apartheid earlier, despite threats from the security forces as well as from their own congregations, only after 1985 did the rabbinate in general begin to condemn apartheid from the pulpit. The fact that Jews were overwhelmingly overrepresented in the struggle but, at the same time, that Jews, in the main, appeared initially indifferent to apartheid, has led to renewed interest, especially after the great changes of 1994, in critically reflecting upon South Africa’s “peculiar institution” [4]
Thus, the majority of Jews in SA were and are Zionist racists and not freedom fighters as NYT wants us to believe. Also, after Apartheid fell, many Jews from South Africa moved to Israel. This is not the first lie that this imperialist publication is spreading in defense of the Genocide by Israel. For example: the lie that Hamas raped Israeli women. An article from December 28 titled: “Hamas weaponized sexual violence on Oct. 7” [5]
Down with the Zionist apartheid
For Palestine red and free from the river to the sea!
Endnotes:
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/12/world/middleeast/israel-icj-genocide-south-africa.html
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/12/world/middleeast/israel-icj-genocide-south-africa.html
[3] Franklin Hugh Adler South African Jews and apartheid https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/46721943.pdf
[4] Ibid
[5] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/28/briefing/hamas-sexual-violence-child-labor-nikki-haley-civil-war-ukraine.html