When he first began speaking out against Israel in 2001, Ronnie Kasrils insisted he was not equating Israelis with Nazis: “I am not making that comparison,” he told Parliament on 23 October 2001. Today Kasrils indulges such analogies brazenly: “Now Jews, too, have behaved like Nazis,” he crowed last week (“Rage of the elephant“, September 1).
That he does so is not a measure of change in Israeli policies, but rather a sign of how extreme the minister’s views have become as he has abandoned all pretence at moderation.
Kasrils is right to invoke the Nazi era; however, he has got the labels the wrong way round. Like Hitler’s Germany, Iran is bent on regional domination at any cost, and is imprisoned by an official ideology of anti-Semitic hatred. (The very name “Iran” means “Aryan” and was bestowed on the country in 1935 by Reza Shah Pahlavi, an ardent admirer of Hitler and his racial theories.)
Today, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is determined to pick up where Hitler left off. Not only does he wish to destroy Israel, he also yearns for the collapse of what he calls “liberalism and Western-style democracy”.
Israel is playing the role of Czechoslovakia, circa 1938: a lone, vulnerable democracy encircled by hostile, totalitarian powers. Like Czechoslovakia, Israel is at risk of being abandoned by fellow democracies, such as South Africa, for short-sighted reasons.
Lately, South Africa has become the chief apologist for Iran in the democratic world. During the war, Deputy Foreign Affairs Minister Aziz Pahad attempted to deny the fact that Iran has been funding and supplying Hizbullah. Worse, our government has tried to shield Iran’s nuclear programme from action by the International Atomic Energy Agency and the United Nations Security Council.
The minister’s contribution is to paint “the axis of Hizbullah, Hamas, Syria and Iran” as benign forces, merely seeking to restore a regional balance of power.
These are the primary sources of violent instability in the Middle East today, which have long sponsored terror in the region and across the globe. In Africa, for example, Hizbullah has been blamed for fuelling bloody civil wars in Sierra Leone and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Kasrils, predictably, condemns Israel’s response to Hizbullah. We should not, however, indulge the self-righteousness of a man whose human rights record is indelibly stained by association with Quatro and the Bisho massacre.
Last year Kasrils signed an intelligence and defence pact with Zimbabwe in the wake of Operation Murambatsvina, which saw about 700Â 000 Zimbabweans forcibly removed from their homes by their own government. That is roughly the same number of Palestinians who became refugees during the 1948 war, but Kasrils has nothing to say about the tragedy on South Africa’s doorstep.
And while Kasrils professes sympathy for the displaced Palestinians, he fails to mention that Lebanon imprisons these refugees and their descendants in apartheid-style separation from the rest of Lebanese society.
Instead, Kasrils offers yet another version of his crackpot history of the Middle East, cut and pasted from unnamed sources and filled with crude misinformation. He misrepresents facts and quotes only the most marginal, controversial sources to support his claims.
It is ridiculous to argue, as Kasrils does, that Israel fought in Lebanon to achieve “Zionist annexation plans”, or that Israel’s leaders deliberately exposed their citizens to terror as “part of their cynical calculations”. These are the rantings of a conspiracy theorist, not someone who wants his views to be taken seriously.
Evidently, there is no act of self-defence by Israel that Kasrils would ever consider legitimate. That is tantamount to claiming that Israel has no right to exist — and Kasrils quotes with approval a Norwegian writer who recently made that suggestion.
The real concern, however, is that he refuses to acknowledge the threat posed by the Iranian “axis” to the region and the world. In most other democracies, such wilful ignorance would be grounds for his dismissal as intelligence minister.
Oddly enough, for all his blustering, Kasrils dutifully carries out his role in the murkier manoeuvrings of the “war on terror”, such as the deportation of Khalid Rashid. Perhaps that is why Kasrils has become so vehement in his denunciations of Israel and the United States. Maybe he wants to compensate for the Rashid affair, which has alienated many of his former supporters.
Perhaps the minister’s real reckoning is not with Israel, but with his own confused conscience.
Joel Pollak, a former DA speech writer, attends Harvard Law School