A growing number of South African Jews think Israel should trade land for peace, a survey by the University of Cape Town’s Kaplan Centre for Jewish Studies and Research has shown.
Sixty percent of local Jews surveyed in 2005, up from about 50% in 1998, said Israel should give up some land in exchange for a credible guarantee of peace.
The survey also finds that 90% of Jewish South Africans consider anti-Zionism a problem in South Africa — despite feeling more positive about life in South Africa now than they did seven years ago.
The Kaplan Centre’s Milton Shain said the most striking shift from the 1998 survey was that “Jews feel much more confident about the future of the country”.
The size of the community has fallen sharply since 1980, from about 120 000 to the current 80 000.
The release of the survey comes against the backdrop of renewed divisions over Israel. Last week, a group of “Concerned South African Jews” published a letter of protest in the Mail & Guardian over the attack on Lebanon and Israeli policy on the Palestinians, urging a ceasefire and dialogue.
The number of signatories climbed to 100 this week, said organiser Pat Sidley, adding that the local Lebanese community had responded positively to the petition.
The petition is one of the first actions by “opposition” Jews in South Africa since the “Not in Our Name” petition in 2000, when Palestinians launched their second intifada (uprising).
The UCT survey shows that the majority of South Africa’s 80 000 Jews support Israel: 54% have strong attachments, a third moderate attachments, 13% have no special feelings and 1% feel negatively.
The fault lines over Lebanon appear to follow these basic allegiances. “The majority are relatively conservative and fully support Israel, which they see as a victim with every right to attack Lebanon,” said one petition signatory, Damon Kalvari. “I totally disagree, I think it’s a tragedy. Wiping out Hizbullah is no justification for attacking and killing innocents.”
Another signatory, who asked to remain anonymous, said she had signed out of a conviction that to remain silent was to be complicit in wrongdoing.
“I have deep reservations about the ability of the Jewish Board of Deputies to speak for me, just because of my genetic heritage,” the person said, adding that in its military campaign against Hizbullah, Israel was using “a mallet to hit a mosquito”.
She said that their liberal upbringing gave them a different starting-point from more conservative South African Jews.
She also described herself as a “secular Jew”, underscoring the links between religious and political reformism within South African Jewry. Secular Jews comprise 4% of survey respondents, while 66% are traditional Jews, 14% are strictly Orthodox and 14% are reformed or progressive.
Commentator Steven Friedman accused the South African Zionist Federation of actively suppressing “the full spectrum of Jewish opinion. A considerable number of people may have a position that is well-disposed towards Israel, but do not like the idea of the state bombing Lebanon into the stone age.”
Such opinion ordinarily “operates entirely underground” because people either opt out of the community or adopt a “self-imposed silence”. However, it had been easier than he had expected to collect signatures for the letter. Jews were more divided over the current Lebanon crisis than when Israel and Lebanon were last at war, he said.
Sidley said that media images of the conflict and an “acute awareness” of South Africa’s large Lebanese community may have alarmed South African Jews more than the conflict between Israel and Palestine.
Defenders of Israel’s actions argue that its right to defend itself in Lebanon is more “cut and dried” than in its conflict with Palestinians.
“The Lebanese situation is primarily a security thing,” said Rabbi Charles Wallach. “The community is much more unified than when Israel went into Lebanon in 1982.”
The recent kidnappings of Israeli soldiers was “totally unprovoked”, he said, adding that Israel had withdrawn from Lebanon and Gaza prior to the kidnappings.
Like Wallach, David Hersch, chairperson of the Western Province Zionist Council, was in Israel during the kidnappings.
“The issues are far more complex than the rubbish you see in the newspapers, including the discombobulated nonsense of those who write petitions,” he said.
He said the Israeli army was the most moral in the world and had alerted occupants of buildings earmarked for bombing to minimise casualties.
A key factor in the community’s support for Israel is its strong ties to that country. The survey shows that about 80% of respondents have close friends or family in Israel and 60% have visited the country in the past 10 years.
Calling the signatories “self-hating Jews,” Jane Levitas, of the Women’s Zionist Federation, said: “If these people would just take three steps back and ask why this war started … they would never have gone to the press.”