DAVID LEWIS

I’ve previously expressed my pride at South Africa leading the charge in the International Court of Justice against the genocide being perpetrated against the Palestinian people. I am, after all, a South African, born and bred in a provincial mining town, and pleased that on this important issue my values and those of my government are strongly aligned.

I’m also a Jew.

My parental home was avowedly Jewish. The blue and white collection box of the Jewish National Fund was a permanent feature next to the telephone. My father was an active member of the Maccabi; my mother was an active member of the Women’s Zionist League.

We weren’t a religious household though we never ate pork and we observed the rituals of the high holy days. We fasted on Yom Kippur. We went to shul on Friday evenings and Saturday mornings. We participated in Habonim, the Jewish youth movement.

In brief, we were fully paid-up members of the Jewish community. But Israel never loomed large in the community of Jewish kids in our town. The community was rather forged from the Eastern European accents of our grandparents and our appreciation of their conversational humour; from the Jewish holidays when we were off school together and from our pride in Jews who achieved public recognition.

We rejoiced when Ali Bacher was made Springbok cricket captain, we knew Albert Einstein was the world’s cleverest person and that Sydney Kentridge was the country’s smartest lawyer. And the turned-on kids knew that Bob Dylan’s real surname was Zimmerman.

That was then.

I left home for university. I participated in antigovernment protests on Jan Smuts Avenue and was inevitably arrested a few times. Aunts and uncles ― though never my parents ― warned me that Jewish protesters were, by “mixing in politics”, drawing unwelcome attention to the Jews in a country whose government included prominent leaders with past Nazi links.

But I was a young South African, appalled by, and interested in, South African politics. It never occurred to me to get involved in Israeli politics. Nor was I interested in getting involved in the politics of the local Jewish community. Maybe I naively believed that because the prominent Jewish names I encountered ― such as Goldberg, Suzman and Tobias ― were all celebrated opponents of apartheid, they represented the political leanings of the community. There were even some rabbis who spoke out against apartheid from their pulpits.

However, I was beginning to learn some uncomfortable truths about the South African Jewish community. I learnt that some had gone over to the dark side. Percy Yutar, for example. I learnt that prominent Jewish businessmen had facilitated strong ties between Israel and apartheid South Africa, including military ties. My father told me the South African Jewish community was a particularly significant source of support for Menachem Begin, the ultraright-wing Israeli politician.

That was then, too. What of now?

In retrospect, the sum of what I learnt from Israel’s conduct and my contact with the South African Jewish community is that we don’t all share the same social and political values. On the contrary, on most important value-defining issues the Jewish community is as heterogeneous as the next religion-based community. All the various scriptures can clearly be invoked to support the values of all divergent believers of various religions.

Take the dispute between Chief Rabbi Warren Goldstein and Pope Leo, whom Goldstein had the chutzpah to disqualify from religious leadership due to Leo’s opposition to the Middle East war. Both cite the scriptures for their radically divergent conclusions. The pope calls for peace. Goldstein stridently defends the actions of the US and Israel on the basis that they are engaging in a “just war” to defend “civilisation”.

In Goldstein’s telling this just war will forestall a repetition of the Nazi Holocaust without once mentioning the thousands of lives already lost and millions rendered homeless by the genocide Israel has already perpetrated in Gaza and which it, supported by Goldstein, would gladly reprise in Iran if it had the military strength to do so.

I would prefer taking my spiritual guidance from an anonymous WhatsApp source who, citing God telling King David himself that he could not “build a house in My name, because you are a man of war and have shed blood”, then asks, with bittersweet Jewish humour, “but who is He to contradict Mr Goldstein?”

Of course there’s a resurgence of the deep, ancient well of anti-Semitism, though not much in South Africa. I loathe it, as with all forms of racism, and I empathise with Jews exposed to it. If we permitted punishment to be imposed on individuals for the transgressions of the collective, no-one would escape.

But it’s not the few liberal Jewish students who have brought Jews across the world into disrepute. It’s the right-wing Israeli political establishment and its supporters everywhere who proclaim that the armies of the Jewish state are fighting for the safety of those Jews who have lived in peace with their neighbours in the rest of the world, while simultaneously perpetrating a genocide against their own neighbours, crimes that will forever be bracketed alongside all other such atrocities.

I loathe too the sophists who present glib and downright false arguments to support genocide. Adam Mendelsohn, a professor of history and director of the Kaplan Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Cape Town (yes, the same UCT he and his followers excoriate as a fount of anti-Semitism in South Africa), tells us in his inaugural lecture that “Jews are a people and deserve self-determination as do other peoples” therefore rendering Zionism “an unremarkable idea”.

But it’s not the few liberal Jewish students who have brought Jews across the world into disrepute. It’s the right-wing Israeli political establishment and its supporters everywhere who proclaim that the armies of the Jewish state are fighting for the safety of those Jews who have lived in peace with their neighbours in the rest of the world, while simultaneously perpetrating a genocide against their own neighbours, crimes that will forever be bracketed alongside all other such atrocities.

He tells us that Jews have been present in Palestine since 5 BCE but neglects to mention that they were one small community among a multitude of peoples. The professor should be reminded that since then Palestine had been ruled by Romans, Persians, Byzantines, Arabs, Christians, Crusaders and Ottoman Turks.

Immediately before the expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians at the time of the declaration of the state of Israel, the 600,000 Jewish inhabitants only represented about 30% of the population, against 1.2-million Arab inhabitants.

David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister of the state of Israel, had the honesty to ask, “Why should the Arabs make peace? We have taken their country. Sure God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel, it’s true, but 2,000 years ago and what is that to them?”

Never, before or since, has self-determination been granted on a land that was clearly also populated by another people.

I’m familiar with the Israeli riposte: “They have threatened to eliminate Israel and drive us into the sea”. But ordinary Palestinians and Israelis will not countenance the slaughter of millions on both sides of the divide that this will entail; the warmongers on both sides will be marginalised. There is no alternative.

As for me, I retain my deep affection for the features of Jewish communal life that characterised my parents’ home. Their humour is my humour because there is none funnier; give me a challah over a wholewheat loaf anytime. I sing as lustily at the Passover table as ever I did, disliking the pharaohs as much as I do all other absolute monarchs and dictators.

But ethnic cleansing, genocide, war crimes. Not in my name.

• Lewis, a former trade unionist, academic, policymaker, regulator and company board member, was a cofounder and director of Corruption Watch.