Chief rabbi calls for end to threats
● The chief rabbi of the Union of Orthodox Synagogues of SA wants Muslim leaders to help ensure that communities with opposing views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict do not intimidate or harm each other.
In a statement on Friday, chief rabbi Dr Warren Goldstein called on the Muslim Judicial Council and the Jamiatul Ulama SA to join him in imploring the Muslim and Jewish communities to be tolerant of each other’s vastly differing political and religious views regarding the continuing conflict.
“Freedom of opinion and conscience is protected by our constitution, especially for the times when we disagree vehemently — times like this.
“Let us jointly call on our communities not to intimidate or threaten one another because we disagree about the rights and wrongs of the bitter conflict in the Middle East. “We can vigorously and publicly debate the issues with each other. We can make our voices heard. We can protest. But we cannot intimidate or harm one another. We can agree to disagree. That is the South African dream — unity in diversity,” he said.
Goldstein called for Muslim and Jewish religious leaders to “call for mutual respect and tolerance”.
“Let us make the unified call for our congregants to behave in such a way that every citizen of this country feels safe to attend mosque or synagogue and to practise our faiths and hold our beliefs and opinions as our conscience demands,” he said.
The Muslim Judicial Council and the Jamiatul Ulama SA could not be reached for comment.
An open letter to President Cyril Ramaphosa Dear Mr President
Iwrite in appreciation of your newsletter of May 17 where you refer to “the illegal occupation by Israel of Palestinian land and the denial of the Palestinian people’s right to selfdetermination”. As you know, president Nelson Mandela said: “We South Africans cannot regard ourselves as free until the Palestinians are free”; and referred to the question of Palestinian liberation as “the greatest moral issue of our time”.
You wrote that there will never be peace until the root issues are addressed; it is not just the illegal occupation, but also Israel’s colonialism and apartheid that militate against peace.
Comrade president, you reminded us that as a people who profoundly believe in the core values of “equality, justice and human rights”, we are moved and angered “at the pain and humiliation being inflicted on the Palestinian people”, which our people know all too well from similar experiences. No South African can have cause to object to these sentiments.
Clearly those who do, do not believe in these same values, and do not have justice, compassion and empathy at the heart of their understanding of the world. This becomes particularly tragic when such a person is the head of a religious community.
As touched as I was by your newsletter, so was I appalled by the response to it from chief rabbi Warren Goldstein. His letter to you (Sunday Times, May 23) is bereft of any sense of compassion and justice. Not a word of pity for the hundreds of innocent Palestinians, including women and children, who have perished in Israel’s so-called precision bombing. He refers to “peace” and
“truth”, but it becomes clear that these are hollow words.
In his version of “the truth”, Israel’s onslaught “has nothing to do with” what he refers to as “a property dispute” and “pending evictions” in the East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah, regarded as the cause of Hamas and Islamic Jihad’s retaliation out of Gaza.
That he refers to people violently being thrown out of their homes by racist fundamentalists as “evictions” is a reflection of his mindset. We know, comrade president, how apartheid used legalsounding terminology to disguise its vile oppression. Forced removals in SA were also legal, but they were profoundly unjust and inhumane. Goldstein’s comment about this being a “property dispute” and a ruling by a “court of law” is devious; South African apartheid used the same language to justify its brutal human rights abuses.
As Palestinians have maintained, and as confirmed by the Human Sciences Research Council, our own distinguished human rights lawyer John Dugard, and organisations such as Human Rights Watch and the Israeli B’Tselem, Israel practises apartheid internally and in the Palestinian territories it occupies. This is apartheid as defined by international law, and worse than that practised in SA. Sheikh Jarrah is a continuation of a process of dispossession that includes the depopulation and destruction of 530 Palestinian villages in 1947/1948, making 750,000 people into refugees, by those who created Israel.
We South Africans know, comrade Ramaphosa, that “the right to vote” does not mean equality. “Citizens” of Bophuthatswana and Transkei also had the “right to vote”, as did those classified
Indian and coloured. But only a sophist would suggest that all those with this “right” were regarded as “equal” to whites in SA.
Goldstein’s comment that “there have been many opportunities to establish a Palestinian state” is sheer sophistry, and classic victim-blaming. When Britain decided to establish a “state” for foreigners in someone else’s country, without consulting the indigenous Palestinians, that is not an “opportunity”; when the UN, dominated by colonial powers, decided in 1947 to establish a “Jewish state” and “an Arab state” without consulting the Palestinians, that is not an “opportunity”; when successive US presidents tried to pressure Palestinians to give up their land and accept a Bantustan controlled by Israel, that is certainly not an opportunity.
Israel has colonised Palestinian territory by brute force from 1948, and even when it signed agreements with the Palestinians (such as the Oslo Accords), it repeatedly violated them.
Successive Israeli governments have refused to be partners for peace, proving that their only interest is expansion, land theft, colonisation and the ethnic cleansing of the indigenous people.
On the other hand, Palestinians have gone out of their way to consider a “two-state solution”; even Hamas — despite Goldstein’s obfuscation — expressed willingness to accept such a solution in its latest manifesto, adopted in 2017.
The Israeli response has been a rejection of any olive branch from Palestinians, insisting on a Bantustan solution where a Palestinian “state” would be Israel’s vassal. Whatever administration is in office, the US provides Israel with $3.8bn [about R53bn] annually. It cannot be an honest broker, and is a singular part of the treachery owing to its common interests with Zionist Israel.
Goldstein joins the chorus about Hamas rockets, crying Israel’s right to self-defence while it pours a rain of death into one of the most densely crowded areas in the world, an open-air concentration camp from which its 2-million inhabitants have no place to run. Eleven days of sheer hell in which about
250 people were killed, including 66 children and 29 women, and 1,900 were wounded.
What kind of people smash a small, densely populated territory to smithereens because they sustained 12 deaths? Israel falls into the category of the most heinous regimes in the world.
Comrade Ramaphosa, international law grants an occupied people the right to resist. Based on UN General Assembly resolution 1514 (1960) and the Fourth Geneva Convention, international law expert and former UN rapporteur Richard Falk states: “Palestinian resistance to occupation is a legally protected right … Israel’s failures to abide by international law, as a belligerent occupant, amounted to a fundamental denial of the right of self-determination, and more generally of respect for the framework of belligerent occupation — giving rise to a Palestinian right of resistance.”
Goldstein’s reliance on a property-dealing God who presented another people’s land to the socalled “chosen” stands in stark contrast to the God of Love that Palestinian Christians and Muslims talk about; a concept close to the heart of many Jews as well. The Palestinian Kairos document, adopted by all Palestinian churches, refers to Israel’s occupation as “a sin against God and humanity”.
It is significant that not all Jews support Israel’s Zionist regime; numerous devout Jews interpret the Hebrew bible very differently to Goldstein and his ilk. His views are not representative of Jews in general, as seen in many protests around the world. Indeed, from the founding of the Zionist movement until well into the 20th century, Zionism remained on the fringes of world Jewry.
When the architect of political Zionism,
Theodor Herzl, formally launched the movement in Europe in 1897, three sceptical rabbis of Vienna travelled to the holy land to investigate. Observing a prosperous and thriving Palestinian society, they reported back: “The bride is indeed beautiful, but is already married.”
Comrade Ramaphosa, I urge you — and minister of international relations & co-operation Naledi Pandor, who, like you, has spoken with moral fortitude on this issue — not to allow our foreign policy to be influenced by those who support apartheid, colonialism and land theft.
Goldstein’s utterances contradict the golden rule of all religions to treat others as you wish them to treat you. He fails the Jewish people and the morality he is meant to teach.
As touched as I was by your newsletter, so was I appalled by the response to it from chief rabbi Warren Goldstein