Palestinians - Not the ANC

In a letter to the Sunday Times this week, Michael Bagraim - chairman of the SA Jewish Board of Deputies - responds to last week's sardonic editorial: The Palestinians Have no Freedom Charter. Bagraim highlightes that unlike the ANC, the Palestinians have no  Freedom Charter.

Following a shameless rehash of well-worn anti-Sharon canards, the editorial concludes that “South African Jewry should examine how it can share with Israel the lessons learnt from our negotiated settlement, which resulted in this country’s peaceful transition from a racial powder keg to a paragon of reason and tolerance”. One should beware of facile comparisons between apartheid-era South Africa and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, two fundamentally different situations. There is no Palestinian equivalent of the Freedom Charter, the document whose humanitarian and democratic principles were the ideological bedrock of the liberation movements in South Africa. Rather, the repeatedly stated aim of the various Palestinian movements is to obliterate the State of Israel and ethnically cleanse (or even massacre outright) its Jewish population. Moreover, unlike in apartheid South Africa, the Middle East situation is not about a struggle to replace minority rule with a non-racial democracy. Rather, it revolves around the fate of territories captured by Israel in the 1967 war. Even more reprehensible is the editorial’s assumption of collective responsibility on the part of the South African Jewish community. This has distinctly sinister overtones, being disturbingly reminiscent — ironically, in light of the writer’s reference to apartheid-era South Africa — of how pro-Nationalist newspapers called on South African Jewry to condemn Israel for its anti-apartheid stance in the United Nations during the ’60s, or for that matter to explain why it was that so many Jews were engaged in “communistic” activities against the government. Had the editorial issued a joint call to both the Jewish and Muslim communities in South Africa, it would have been less offensive, although it would still have been presumptuous and inappropriate.