Challenging South Africa's Zionist establishment

I could not stay silent when the South African Jewish Board of Deputies smeared foreign affairs director general Zane Dangor as an "anti-Semite"...

On the New York Jewish “fringe”: Zane Dangor, center, with my good friend Daniel Levy and and Palestinian lawyer Diala Shamas at a Jewish Currents event

This piece was published earlier this week on South Africa’s News24 outlet, which requires a subscription to read. So, sharing here for my global audience. Also worth noting that South African human rights champion Audrey Coleman, also Jewish, took aim at the SA Jewish Board of Deputies this week for its silence on the Gaza genocide.

I felt a renewed sense of kinship with my friend Zane Dangor when I learned, this week, that he, too, was being branded an anti-Semite by the South African Jewish Board of Deputies. Join the club, Iqabane Zane! The same institution had branded me an anti-Semite in early 1981, just seven years after my Barmitzvah at Maitland Shul and barely a year after I’d left the Zionist youth movement, Habonim. My poor father was deeply embarrassed when, representing Bnai Brith, he attended a Cape Jewish Board of Deputies meeting on the topic of “Anti-Semitism at the University of Cape Town” — and, he angrily informed me, Exhibit A was a piece I’d written in the student newspaper, Varsity, attacking Israel and Zionism.

Zane’s offense is far more consequential: He stands accused of playing a leading role, as Director General of South Africa’s foreign ministry, in international efforts to stop Israel’s genocide in Gaza, by upholding international law and accountability. South Africa’s moral and legal stance at the International Court of Justice has earned it global acclaim — except, of course, among the handful of Western governments who continue to enable the genocide, despite the revulsion even among their own citizens at Israel’s crimes.

But, of course, we’re not hearing any condemnation of the Gaza genocide from the Board of Deputies; they instead condemned those who make the “false and inflammatory accusation of genocide” against Israel. That’s an accusation echoed by the overwhelming majority of the world’s genocide scholars, or the widely respected Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem and the Israeli doctors at Physicians for Human Rights, not to mention the leading globally-focused human rights organizations Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

I can’t say I’m surprised, though, because the Board of Deputies kept pretty shtum about South Africa’s apartheid, too, until the final years of the regime when criticizing apartheid had become safely mainstream.

If being branded an “anti-Semite” for calling out Israeli apartheid had signaled a kind of excommunication from the Jewish community for me in 1981, truth be told, I’d already walked away from it, as had most of the Jewish comrades with whom I worked in the liberation struggle. That’s because Jewish communal life in apartheid South Africa was characterized by passive indifference to the fate of the Black majority. All that mattered was what was “good for the Jews”, which for the BoD and the communal institutions it represented meant staying “politically neutral” on the moral outrages being perpetrated by the South African regime. For me, this stance was exemplified by the grotesque spectacle of sitting around Passover seder tables singing “Avadim Hayinu” (“Once we were slaves”) before the tureens of matzoh-ball soup were brought in by Black women domestics living in conditions of servitude far more akin to slavery than anything experienced by the apartheid-privileged white families for whom they worked.

Whatever self-serving explanations are offered for the BoD’s silence on apartheid, the reality for my generation, and also for my Jewish forebears in the liberation struggle, was that if your values compelled you take action to fight the apartheid regime, you weren’t going to find a platform to do that, or even support for such a stand, in Jewish communal institutions, synagogues, even youth movements.

Individual Jewish South Africans had joined the liberation struggle in proportions many, many times larger than the tiny share of the white population who were Jewish (3%), but we did so entirely outside of the Jewish community. Instead, we joined a community of shared values with comrades from all backgrounds, bonded by our common commitment to fight for liberation for all South Africans. Zane Dangor was an integral part of that community of struggle, and worked alongside many Jewish South African comrades; the Board of Deputies and the communal institutions it represented were not among them. But what he would not have failed to notice was that the State of Israel was the closest ally of South Africa’s apartheid regime, violating the mandatory UN Security Council arms embargo to provide weapons and military support to an army that had been unleashed on the Black majority.

Still, the ICJ case brought by South Africa wasn’t based on feelings; it was based on a solid factual documenting of Israel’s actions and statements of intent that persuaded the court of a “plausible case” that Israel could be committing genocide — the case is ongoing. And South Africa stepping up to lead it honored President Nelson Mandela’s insistence that “our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians”. South Africa’s freedom had been won with the help of a massive international solidarity campaign to hold the regime accountable, and such a campaign is growing in strength every day to do the same with Israel. Global civil society no longer accepts their own governments’ passivity and worse in the face of Israel’s U.S.-backed campaign to eliminate Palestinian life in Gaza. Governments may have failed, but many of their citizens are stepping up, whether on the Sumud flotilla currently making its way to Gaza, or the myriad actions in the streets, in football stadiums, at music concerts and more.

Opinion surveys in Western countries show a growing revulsion at the crimes Israel is perpetrating in Gaza – less than one third of Americans today support Israel’s military campaign there, while in the main Western European countries, close to two thirds of citizens have an unfavorable view of Israel. Even an internal study commissioned by the Israeli foreign ministry found that Europeans generally agree with the statement that Israel is a “genocidal, apartheid country.”

So, yes, Zane Dangor and his Department are very much in alignment with the growing consensus in global civil society. And in building the ICJ case, the South Africans worked closely with many organizations committed to international law and accountability – groups like the heroic Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, which the Board of Deputies casually smears as a “fringe organization”. That’s their answer to B’Tselem’s meticulously recorded facts. Yes, it is clearly a “fringe” organization within Israel’s criminal consensus — a majority of Israelis agree with the genocidal sentiment that “there are no innocent people in Gaza”, and a similar majority support expelling all Palestinians from Gaza, which is ethnic cleansing, a crime against humanity. The voices of the Israeli-Jewish “fringe” are those who align with progressive humanity and international law against apartheid and genocide.

The Board of Deputies also lists the U.S. organization Jewish Voice for Peace as part of the “fringe” with which Zane is accused of consorting. From where I sit in New York, I see an organization with 32,000 dues-paying members and a wider following of 750,000. That’s a significant “fringe”. And the Board of Deputies would be dismayed to learn that despite the best efforts of Zionist groups to brand socialist NYC mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani an anti-Semite because of his principled support for Palestinian liberation and opposition to the genocide, 67% of Jewish voters aged younger than 44 plan to vote for him. Turns out that it doesn’t hurt a candidate’s standing, even among the majority of younger Jewish voters, to be smeared as an anti-Semite by the apologists of the Gaza genocide.

And while the Board of Deputies branded South Africa’s ICJ action to stop the genocide as anti-Semitic, former Speaker of Israel’s parliament Avrum Burg has called for 1 million Jews to “rebel” and file a legal complaint at the ICJ “against the State of Israel for crimes against humanity committed in our name and under the false banner of our Jewish identity.”

Zane is also accused of using the term “Zionist” as a camouflage for hatred of Jews; the Board of Deputies fault him for refusing to abide by their insistence that the modern settler-colonial ideology of Zionism, and the resulting apartheid reality lived by millions of Palestinians, are expressions of Judaism, a 3,500 year old religion.

Of course, collapsing the distinction between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism is exactly what Zionist institutions have spent decades trying to do, whereas what I see Zane doing is the opposite — pointing out and embracing the many Jews who have distanced themselves from Zionism, a modern political ideology that seeks to use Jewish history and belief to rationalize and excuse its war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Zane is castigated for daring to define Zionism, which the Board of Deputies insist only Jews can do. Nope. That’s like insisting that South African apartheid could only be defined by its Afrikaner architects. Whatever phrases and fantasies are tossed around its by its champions, Zionism has for 78 years been a lived reality for millions of Palestinians of settler-colonial dispossession, ethnic cleansing, apartheid oppression and now genocide. Zionism, like apartheid in South Africa, is necessarily defined by its victims, not its architects — after all, in our social lives, we judge people by their actions and behaviors rather than by what they tell us about themselves.

There’s something a little bizarre in the identitarian pique that scolds Zane for “silencing” South African Jews by interpreting Zionism in a historical, lived context. Or for making common cause with Jews like myself, or my many friends at Jewish Currents magazine, Jewish Voice for Peace and B’Tselem, who have rejected Zionism as a lived system of settler-colonial Jewish supremacy, ethnic-cleansing and apartheid, and now genocide. That regime is no more tolerable for Zane than South Africa’s apartheid regime was; of course he embraces Jews who have stepped up to resist the crimes being perpetrated in our name, just Just as he embraced the many Afrikaners who chose morality over tribalism and joined South Africa’s liberation struggle.

“We ask the Jewish Board of Deputies to look at what is happening genuinely and objectively and then, you know, to start calling out the Israeli government for what it is doing today,” Zane said in the interview that triggered their attack on him. Exactly. Having failed to stand up to apartheid in South Africa, the South African Jewish Board of Deputies has an opportunity, today, to redeem itself by adding its voice to those demanding an end to Israel’s genocide.