Guest Blog: Berger's Rejected Weekender Response

The Jewish Holy days, work, and study pressures have left this blog quite slow for the past week but here’s a guest blog from Mike Berger.

Berger often writes to the press but feels frustrated at how easy it is for local editors to get away with shutting down the voices that they don’t want to hear.

His article below was sent to the Weekender in response to Khadija Bradlow’s recent Israel bashing column (see – Too complicated for Weekender Columnist). After failing to hear from Weekender editor Tim Cohen, Mike took the liberty of calling him. According to Mike, during the course of the conversation Cohen became quite petulant, pretending that he had been deeply offended, ringing off in a huff. (SA media rule – Thou shalt not criticise Israel bashing articles.) Apparently Cohen couldn’t understand why anyone would be offended by Khadija’s article (Zion is not for all Jews).

To be honest (and I'm not proud of this), I’m beginning to have Walt/Mearsheimer type thoughts about a Palestinian lobby in South Africa exerting excessive control on our press. More on this later, but could you ever imagine a single local newspaper running a weekly pro-Zionist column focusing exclusively on tarnishing the Palestinian people, the way Khadija tarnishes Israel in her weekly screeds? It’s an impossible idea. Real debate on the Middle East is simply not possible in South Africa (and here is but one example - Day of Shame at Constitution Hill). In fact, this lobby's influence even extends to corporate SA (see Sparks Smears Israel an International Investment Conference).

Berger's article, which he offered to shorten to letter form (but received no response) appears below.

---

Khadija Bradlow in the Weekender (8 September) states with disarming simplicity that “that when one is on the receiving end of racist treatment, it’s hardly complicated at all”. She goes on to illustrate this pearl of journalistic insight, with what?

Is it the murder of hundreds of thousands of largely Christian, black Africans in Darfur by the largely Muslim, Jangaweed militias of Arab origin? Is it the Hamas charter or the numerous Arab writings comparing Jews to monkeys and pigs or the continued dissemination of such libels as The Protocols of Elders of Zion? Could it be the slaughter of millions of Tutsi “cockroaches” by their black Hutu neighbours? Maybe it’s the racist insults and assaults directed at immigrant minorities by white Europeans? Minorities, let it be said, which remain firmly at the lower end of the socio-economic-educational-health ladders in these often wealthy and stable democracies.

My goodness, it is none of these – or the countless other examples available from everyday life all over the world. OK, so you’ve guessed. It’s “brutish, army fatigue-clad, ‘whitish’ Israelis putting the daily boot into meek, keffiyeh wearing, sun-burnished Palestinians”. Lovely image that, but one hardly recognisable to the thousands of Israelis (brutish or otherwise) who’ve been blown up, shot, stabbed, stoned or just decapitated by their meek neighbours.

But, that’s just the hors d’oeuvres. What really exercises our seeker after justice and truth in far-off places, is the discriminatory treatment experienced by Ethiopian Jews. She quotes the experience of Ethiopian parents whose 4 year-old son has been excluded by a white, religious Ashkenazi school for a “stain on his genealogy”. And then goes on to quote a social experiment which indicated that Ethiopian Jews experienced discriminatory treatment when it came to housing and schooling.

All this is recounted with the utmost relish; Khadija Bradlow has ferreted out Zion’s guilty, black secret and presents it to us triumphantly. So let’s admit it. Many Israelis are racist; some seriously, others mildly. Racism is expressed in group relations and variably in the state institutions. Wherever it is visible it is ugly and unacceptable and no decent Israeli, or Jew in the Diaspora for that matter, is proud of it. Nor has it been hidden. The “rags” from which Bradlow so bravely sniffed out these salacious details are Israeli to the core.

But, while not all that complicated (Bradlow hates “complications” when it comes to condemnation, especially of Israel) there are a few facts which should be borne in mind. I’ll briefly list some of them.

Israel is one of the most culturally and socially heterogeneous societies on the face of our planet. The millions of refugees, which make up much of Israeli society, have come replete with the prejudices and perceptions of their home cultures and have hardly had time to assimilate. German Jews fleeing Nazi anti-Semitism (remember that episode Ms Bradlow?) thought poorly of their Eastern European brethren. The Russian Jews, who came in relative multitudes more recently, were of an outstanding educational and cultural level and looked with condescension and distaste on many Israelis. Some of the more extreme Israeli religious groups are frankly medieval and, fundamentalism (religious or secular) being what it is, such communities may be resistant to change.

The 80 000 or so Ethiopian Jews, rescued by Israel from the oppressive attention of the Marxist dictator, Colonel Mengistu, and from the general poverty, backwardness and factional violence of Ethiopia, were culturally and educationally particularly ill-equipped to deal with the demands of a modern economy and society. Hence, they suffered more than the millions of other refugees to a still raw state under constant threat from its neighbours, a reality which shows up in employment figures, crime statistics, disease and levels of social dysfunction within Ethiopian families. All this further compounded by prejudice.

But it may interest your readers to know that, partly owing to the efforts of a religious figure, Rabbi Micha Odenheimer, an active Ethiopian Jews-Israel Association exists which seeks to empower the Ethiopian community. The Ethiopian National Project, initiated by the Jewish Agency for Israel in partnership with United Jewish Communities, The American Jewish Distribution Committee, the Israeli government, and the Ethiopian community, was designed as a 660 million dollar, nine-year effort to ensure a more complete absorption and integration of Ethiopians into Israeli society.

Ethiopians are respected members of the Israeli Defence Force, which is an important mechanism for integrating immigrant and refugee communities into Israeli society. An Ethiopian Heritage Museum is being planned at a cost of over 30 million rand, and Ethiopian Jews have become university academics, musicians, rabbis, media personalities and have filled other responsible posts. Shula Mola arrived in Israel at the age of twelve from Ethiopia and is now the Executive Director of the Israel Association for Ethiopian Jews.

There is a long way to go before the Ethiopians are fully integrated into Israeli society, and I suppose that one should be grateful to Khadija Bradlow for an opportunity to point out some of the “complications”. There is just one other matter remaining to be pointed out: that Jews also know “when one is on the receiving end of racist treatment, it’s hardly complicated at all”. We know what racist anti-Semitism looks like in its ill-disguised malice, selective and one-sided comment and decontextualised simplicities. We can thank Ms Bradlow reminding us of that reality so effectively.

Mike Berger

Comments

"After failing to hear from Weekender editor Tim Cohen"
Why am I not surpried that the editor has a typcially Jewish name.
It seems Jews of the 'burn Israel' crowd are crawling out the woodwork everyday.

[Michal]

That lobby you speak of will flippantly respond saying that you a lobby pressuring the press. As you said, you shall not complain about their Israel articles.

[Gary]

The fact is that the 'burn Israel' lobby has complete monopoly over the media, civil society, academia and government in South Africa, and very, very little space is given to not only pro-Israeli views but even views calling for a balance.
South Africa is the most agressively anti-Israel society outside of the Islamic world.
Adnd for Jews, like me, that constitutes an attack on my very Jewish being, regardless of the echo by the South African Jewish Board of Deputies that SA is the best place in the world for Jews and there is no anti-Semitism and that we must trade off by sacrificing our support for Israel for a safe place in the ANC ruled-New SA.
As I see it an attack on Jews anywhere, including Israel!, is an attack on Jews everywhere.
I know that this view is very unpopular, even among pro-Israel people like the people here, and that everyone else here says that one must NEVER equate anti-Israel hate with anti-Semitism, and there is no anti-Semitism in SA, and that there never could be such a thing as anti-Semitism in the non-racial rainbow utopia of the New SA, not like Europe and the USA,where there is supposedly a holocaust just waiting to happen, and that no one on the Left could ever be an anti-Semite, as anti-Semitism is a purely rightwing phenonemon.
And I might sound repetative, and some will say I am getting boring and that my commentary should be more nuanced and more subtle and more intellectual, but getting people to see that not all is well for the Jews in the New SA and that hatred of Israli Jews effects Jews everywhere is like banging one's head against a brick wall.

[Gary]

And perhaps I am tired of hearing from SA Jews, at dinner parties and family gatherings, that we are just soooo lucky to live in SA as there is no anti-Semitism here, and that the ANC regime is not at all anti-Semitic as they have not done anyhting to the SOUTH AFRICAN Jews (as if one's attitude towards South African Jews alone constitutes one's level of anti-Semitism:how many South African Jews did the Nazis kill during the holocaust) and that if you want to see real anti-Semitism you must go to Europe and America (because we know the only real anti-Semitism is from the rightwing) and that the reason the SA government and society wants to anihilate Israel and every Jew there to the last child, is that Israel discriminates against the Arabs and that further more we are sooo lucky to be living in SA because if there is a nuclear war we will be safe from the nucleus (as if it doesnt matter that we are watching five million fellow Jews dying in Israel) and that the governments support for totalitarian and terrorist regimes is our saving grace as SA will never expereince terrorism, and that the SA governemnt have done so much to help the Jews with security (as if Jews around the world are not one people, and that Jews in South Africa are not living in a vacuum).

[Gary]

Let me sign off for Yom Kippur by saying this.
Each one of us has our own things to atone for and deal with in personal relationships and personal deeds etc.
And for that I cannot give judgement advice or judgement to anyone other than myself.
But as a community I believe South African Jewry need to examine it's total indifference (and often hostility) to our fellow Jews in Israel and ponder this.
It is a well know principle that G-D interacts MIDA KENEGED MIDA. As a person acts towards his fellow man, so to speak, G-D acts towards him. If the Jews in the Galut act with such indifference or, even worse, with hostility towards the dangers faced by Jews in Israel, how do they expect G-D to treat them when they will be endangered?

[Hard Rain]

I don't think that there's some kind of organized lobby for these types of absurdities. I'm inclined to think that it's more a sort of unspoken and self-propelling mentality among such people which fosters itself independently but is fed co-dependently.

I'm reminded of a quote Ambassador Chaim Herzog used in his speech to the UN in 1975 from Paul Johnson:

"The world is increasingly governed not so much by capitalism, or communism, or social democracy, or even tribal barbarism, as by a false lexicon of political cliches, accumulated over half a century and now assuming a kind of degenerate sacerdotal authority.... We all know what they are...."

[Steve]

Anonymous: As far as I know Tim Cohen is not Jewish. I don't think it matters.

Hard Rain: You probably right. Still, I think there is more of a case for arguing about a Palestine lobby here than there is about arguing about an Israel lobby in the US.

[Mediocrates-x]

You should see how the American 'liberal' online media is kvelling over the visit of Iran's president. I don't know whether it's sickening or hysterically funny. In either case you'd come away from Kos or Salon.com with the idea that not only is it a good thing to be holocaust denying genocidal maniac but that any criticism, any at all is 'proof' of the global Jewspiracy attempting to crush that voice of peace and freedom. It's insane. Truly insane.

http://rihannanude.blog.drecom.jp||rihanna nude
http://rihannanaked.blog.drecom.jp||rihanna naked

http://digg.com/celebrity/Lisa_Ann_2

[ummjo]

"hundreds of thousands of largely Christian, black Africans in Darfur by the largely Muslim, Jangaweed militias of Arab origin"??? that's a joke. Pretty much all in Darfur are Muslim and there is no disticntion between Arab and black in racial terms.

[ummjo]

very little space is given to not only pro-Israeli views but even views calling for a balance???

what balance? that's like saying there should have been a pro-apartheid and anit-apartheid balance in global media pre-94