SA clerics denounce Gaza ‘genocide’
Kairos group says war did not arise out of a vacuum
● A group of prominent South African clerics, headed by Rev Frank Chikane, has added its voice to the growing condemnation of the “genocide” in Gaza.
In an open letter addressed to church leaders and Christians in the US, Europe and “the Ecumenical Family” this week, Kairos Southern Africa urged governments to stop the killings.
“We are witnessing a genocide against Palestinians in Gaza unfolding in front of our eyes, not dissimilar to what happened less than 30 years ago in Rwanda and 80 years ago in Europe,” the letter reads.
“Many in the West were complicit in those genocides. We cannot and dare not let it happen again. It must be stopped.”
The letter was signed by Chikane and Kairos Palestine’s Patriarch Emeritus Michel Sabbah.
Kairos Southern Africa was launched in 2011 to carry forward the legacy of Kairos theology in Southern Africa. It is well known for the Kairos Document, a theological statement issued in 1985 by a group of mainly black South African theologians based predominantly in Soweto. The document challenged the churches’ response to what the authors identified as the vicious policies of the apartheid regime under the state of emergency.
“Failure to act to stop this genocide, which is being supported by many in your countries, and encouraged by the supply of arms to Israel to carry it out, will make you complicit in this genocide,” the letter says. “Those whose governments support this genocide have a greater responsibility to ensure that their governments stop this genocide.
“While we condemn all violence against civilians and non-civilians, this war did not emerge out of a vacuum. Its genesis can be traced back to the illegal occupation of Palestinian territories, the expansion of illegal Jewish settlements in Occupied Palestine, the violation of the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and the siege of Gaza for the last 17 years. And most recently, the rising of the ultra-national and ultra-religious fascist groups to power in Israel and the denial of the current right-wing national and religious coalition to recognise the inalienable right of the Palestinians to freedom and self-determination.
“The entire world witnessed the continuing violations and attacks against Muslim and Christian Holy sites and worshippers in Jerusalem and other places carried out by Jewish extremists, settlers, Knesset members, and ministers, discounting the religious sensibilities of not only Palestinians but also millions of Christians and Muslims around the world; to name a few of the reasons behind the suffering of the Palestinians under Israel’s settler colonialism regime.”
They urged the various governments to “stop this genocide.”
“If Americans or Europeans were placed in a similar situation to what the people of Gaza have been exposed to, then we wonder how they would have reacted. History teaches us that they would not have reacted non-violently and therefore we find some of the labels being placed on Palestinians (and previously on South Africans) as extremely hypocritical.”
The open letter compared the fate of the under-siege Palestinians to South African freedom fighters in the previous century.
“South Africans know what it means to be labelled as ‘terrorist’ or ‘communist.’ Worse labels have been put on Palestinians by those who are guilty of the worst kind of antiSemitism, a burden and responsibility that they have placed on the Palestinian people. In practice, we see how the Palestinians are being terrorised daily by Israeli settlers and by the occupation forces and other Zionist militia,” the spiritual leaders wrote.
“And therefore, we call out the hypocrisy of these labels being imposed only upon one group of people. Most of the churches in Europe and the USA seem not to have repudiated their colonial and racist history. Because of this, the lens through which our lives are being viewed is still coloured by their sins of colonialism and racism.
“Now and once again, we need to hold this before you and make you aware of this. This is a projection of the worst kind and is inconsistent with the Jesus we know from our Scriptures. We therefore call you to deep repentance.”
The letter acknowledged that a growing number of Jews had begun “to say not in our name”.
“We pray that their numbers and protests may grow. The people taking to the streets across the globe are now primarily the ones carrying the good news of peace, justice and reconciliation.
“It is to them that we shall turn. It is therefore an indictment on the Churches in the USA, Europe and the Ecumenical Family that they seem strangely indifferent to the murder of Palestinians and the acts of vengeance being meted out to our Palestinian sisters and brothers and only react when Israelis get killed.
“You constantly speak “peace, peace where there is no peace.” As far as we can see, any pretence for peace has been abandoned a long time ago while pieces of Palestinian land have been stolen.
“The empty phrases are therefore an affront not only to us, but to the God of justice, the God who took sides with the oppressed, the downtrodden and the marginalised.”
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In January 2006, I was a member of the South African observer mission to the elections in Palestine’s West Bank and Gaza Strip. I was assigned to Nablus, Jenin and Tulkarm in the West Bank, and so came to witness the brutality that results from Israel’s illegal occupation. The daily humiliation to which Palestinians are subjected is worse than the diabolical apartheid social engineering, as it involves the systematic appropriation of the Palestinians’ ancestral land for Israeli settlements.
The current conflict stems from Israeli absolutism, which leaves little space for an enduring resolution that reconciles Zionism and Palestinian demands for statehood. Without condoning Hamas’s bloodletting in Israel — which has left more than 1,400 civilians and military personnel dead and led to about 200 hostages being held captive by Hamas — the disproportionate response by Israel and its defence force to the massacre exceeds in its brutality the violent confrontations and diplomatic stalemates of the last 15 years.
In Gaza, besides the destruction of infrastructure, a human tragedy is unfolding which will worsen the Palestinians’ feelings of anger, bitterness and distrust.
By the last count, more than 9,000
Palestinians have been killed and more than 15,000 wounded in Israel’s aerial bombardment of Gaza since October 7, after the attacks by Hamas on Israel.
With the US aiding and abetting this carnage, White House spokesperson John Kirby asserted that “this is not the time for ceasefire” because Israelis “still have work to do to go after Hamas leadership”. The subtext is that there will be no let-up until Israel is satisfied it has eliminated Hamas in Gaza, no matter the collateral suffering of Palestinians, which will only intensify when the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) ground offensive begins.
The plight of Gaza’s citizens will not be eased even after the arrival of aid trucks delivering food, water and medicine.
We also have to take into account the growing intransigence of the Benjamin Netanyahu government, which will make the conflict even more uncertain and any future territorial compromise impossible. There will be no reprieve for the Palestinians, which will only strengthen their resolve to resist through protests and confrontations reminiscent of the intifadas that took place from 1987 to 1993, and then again from 2000 to 2005. The lethal force that then met Palestinian anger left almost 2,000 Palestinians dead during the first period, compared with 100 Israeli civilians and 60 IDF personnel.
The intifadas were a direct response to Israel’s “Iron Fist” policy towards Palestinian nationalism that included beatings, shootings, killings, house demolitions, uprooting of trees, deportations, extended imprisonments, and detention without trial. Against the backdrop of this blood-drenched history, any hope for a peaceful resolution seemed to dissipate. However, after the Israeli general election of June 1992, the Labor Party’s main coalition partner was the Meretz bloc, which was oriented towards a peaceful settlement, with the relatively dovish Shas Party providing the votes required for a majority in parliament. Crucially, Yitzhak Rabin, the new prime minister, was explicit in his commitment to finding a peaceful resolution to the conflict. The hopes of the 1990s were also complemented by the 1991 Madrid Conference and the 1993 Oslo Accords.
The conference sought to revive the peace process, while the accords were a bid to hammer out a peace deal between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation, as well as establish the Palestinian National Authority as a limited form of self-government. This process was facilitated by UN Security Council resolutions aimed at fulfilling “the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination”.
Aspirations [for peace] have foundered on the shoals of a zero-sum struggle
However, these aspirations have foundered on the shoals of a zero-sum struggle, where the Netanyahu government and his Likud acolytes are more hellbent than ever before on denying the valid aspirations of Palestinians, what with Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant referring to Palestinians as “human animals”. This new chapter, which started on October 7, has thus inaugurated a violent interregnum of mutually destructive and adversarial confrontation whose final contours are impossible to discern as long as Netanyahu stays in power.
These reflections bring me to an inescapable conclusion: as an urgent and immediate moral imperative, South Africa should sever its diplomatic relations with Israel, which essentially now serve no purpose. There is still space for moral and political rectitude in diplomatic relations if this is rooted in a Kantian logic where the path to shared peace, security and prosperity for all Israelis and Palestinians lies in identifying and resisting all forms of human suffering.
By breaking off relations with Israel, South Africa will send an unequivocal message to Africa and the world that it is no longer prepared to countenance the horrors of the occupation I observed, and which have now been reproduced in Gaza as a human catastrophe of unprecedented proportions.