Official Jewish Community Responds to HSRC Witch Trial

The official Jewish leadership has responded to the brazen misuse of public funds that is the HSRC Report (view details of the report here). The following response has been sent to the Minister of Science and Technology.

Dear Minister Pandor The Human Sciences Research Council, which falls under the Ministry of Science and Technology, has just released a Report entitled “Occupation, Colonialism, Apartheid? A re-assessment of Israel’s practices in the occupied Palestinian territories under international law”. This was carried out under the auspices of the HSRC’s Democracy and Governance Programme Middle East Project. The intention of this research project was to provide “a scholarly resource for the South African government and civil society and the concerned international community”. In this regard, it can unequivocally be said to have failed conclusively. It seems all too clear that the researchers decided beforehand what they wished to establish and thereafter set about selectively compiling evidence and arguments to support this predetermined conclusion. As a result, their report is fundamentally flawed, providing a skewed, unrealistic analysis of the Middle East conflict that certainly will not redound to the credit of the HSRC. At the core of this failure is the fact that the Report adopts throughout an artificial “Actor vs. Acted Upon” paradigm through which to interpret the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Israeli side is always the ‘acting’ party, whose actions are subjected to the minutest critical scrutiny. The Palestinians, by contrast, are depicted as essentially passive and, it therefore follows, guiltless of any wrongdoing. It is Israel that has multiple obligations; the Palestinians seemingly have none. The Report arrives at the sweeping conclusion that Israel’s “racially discriminatory” policies vis-à-vis the Palestinians “cannot be justified on reasonable security grounds” yet at no stage seeks to grapple with the details of just what those security concerns might be. Just what are the on-the-ground realities of terrorist attacks on its citizens that have motivated Israel to impose the kind of restrictive measures on the Palestinians that the Report continually deplores? Put another way, how many recorded attacks have there been, what form have they taken, who has been targeted, what was the role in all of this of the Palestinian leadership and what would any nation similarly threatened be reasonably expected to do in response to such acts? One would expect responsible, professional researchers to delve very carefully into such questions. There is a vast, and ever growing, body of sobering evidence of Palestinian violence directed against Israel and its citizens, both within the West Bank and Gaza and within Israel proper. Such acts of hostility, in which civilians more often than not were the targets, number in the tens of thousands. All this evidence is readily available. The record shows, amongst many other things, that the Palestinian leadership has been directly responsible for planning and carrying out terrorist attacks, that humanitarian resources have been abused for this purpose (e.g. ambulances used for weapons smuggling) and that the propagation of racial hatred and incitement to violence against Jews permeates every level of Palestinian society. Astonishingly, the HSRC Report has nothing to say about any of this. Nowhere in its more than three hundred pages does one find these crucial aspects of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute being addressed, even to a limited degree. Judging by their approach, we can only conclude that the researchers believe the Palestinian leadership to have no reciprocal obligations to foster an environment in which the two peoples can co-exist in peace and equality. It is, self-evidently, meaningless to level sweeping accusations of colonialism and apartheid against a sovereign State without rigorously examining the context in which those actions take place. That the Report studiedly avoids doing this can only lead to the conclusion that those responsible were motivated by their ideological biases rather than by a genuine desire to unravel the complexities of what all agree is one of the world’s most difficult conflict situations. Examining the backgrounds of the chief editor of the Report, Dr. Virginia Tilley, the principle contributors and the sponsoring organisations, one is not surprised to discover a common thread of intensive anti-Israel sentiment. Virtually all have long records of campaigning against Israel, and as such should be seen as activists rather than neutral scholars. That the Report ultimately produced is decidedly not scholarly as reflected in its clearly biased original terms of reference, its original motivation (by Special Rapporteur to the UNHRC John Dugard, internationally known for his partisan views on the Middle east question) and its selective and partisan researchers and sponsors. Whatever it was intended to achieve, the Report that has emerged serves to obscure rather than clarify, unjustly condemns one side of the conflict while by pointed omission exonerating the other and constitutes a distinctly ones-sided analysis of a complex international issue under the guise of independent scholarship. The SA Jewish Board of Deputies and SA Zionist Federation hereby express our profound regret over what we consider a misuse of public funds by those intent on pursuing a grossly partisan political agenda. This is decidedly not what the Human Sciences Research Council, a scholarly, statutory body of the South African Government, was set up to achieve. Yours respectfully ZEV KRENGEL NATIONAL CHAIRMAN SA JEWISH BOARD OF DEPUTIES AVROM KRENGEL NATIONAL CHAIRMAN SA ZIONIST FEDERATION

Update - Kasrils at the HSRC

Voice of the Cape has the transcript of Former Minister of Intelligence Ronnie Kasrils' speech at the HSRC symposium this past weekend - it's here, if you have the stomach for it.

Comments

[tcltk]

save them money, here's what really happened:
http://media.terrorismawareness.org/files/What-Really-Happened.swf