Oscar van Heerden and his use of gross stereotypes shows he prefers to provoke emotions than find a peaceful outcome to the tragic Palistinian conflict. (Photo by JACK GUEZ / AFP)
Perhaps the most complex, and contentious, question Jewish civil rights organisations the world over have had to grapple with is where the boundary lies between “criticism” of Israel (which, even when biased and arguably unfounded, amounts to a legitimate expression of opinion) and old-fashioned anti-Jewish prejudice — in a word, antisemitism.
It can hardly be denied, nor is it particularly surprising, that more extreme forms of anti-Israel invective do sometimes cross the line into denigrating and defaming Jews in general. As the world’s sole Jewish majority state whose Jewish connections stretch back more than three millennia, Israel is a country with which most Jews identify and in turn are broadly identified with it in the public mind.
It is thus all but inevitable that what purports to be mere anti-Israel rhetoric in some cases propagates classic antisemitic tropes and stereotypes, while also often making comments that Jewish people would reasonably be expected to consider gratuitously hurtful and insulting. When this happens, it must be called out for the bigotry that it is.
As the representative voice and civil rights watchdog body of South African Jewry, the South African Jewish Board of Deputies has unfortunately been required to address many instances of anti-Israel rhetoric crossing the line into antisemitism. This fundamentally was what was at issue in our 13-year case against then Cosatu international relations secretary Bongani Masuku, who, in February this year, was found guilty of hate speech by the constitutional court and ordered to apologise to the Jewish community.
The crux of the apex court’s ruling was that Masuku’s addressing a predominantly Jewish group as “friends of Hitler” was based on the Jewish ethnicity and identity of his audience. Since Hitler’s extermination campaign targeted all Jews, for a reasonable reader any mention of “Hitler” would undeniably have “evoked semantic associations with the entire global Jewish community, and not a specific faction thereof”.
One of the most important aspects of the judgment, therefore, is its recognition that using Nazi terminology to describe Jews who support Israel is an antisemitic insult and is intended as such. This in turn helps to counter a toxic form of antisemitic discourse that has surfaced in recent times, which is to accuse Jews, formerly the primary victims of Nazism, of now behaving like Nazis themselves.
A recent article by academic and columnist Oscar van Heerden published by News24 encapsulated this mode of wounding and denigrating Jews under the guise of “criticising” Israel. Titled The Israel-Gaza conflict and the banality evil, the article invoked the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi official who oversaw the practical implementation of Hitler’s genocidal programme before going on to state that “most Israelis … cannot or will not acknowledge that what they are doing is no different from those very Nazis so aptly represented by Eichmann”.
In his article as well as in a subsequent interview on the radio station Smile FM, Van Heerden propagated further deeply unpleasant antisemitic tropes, specifically relating to the supposed superiority complex Jews have towards those outside their faith. This he does by grossly misrepresenting the ancient Jewish religious notion of what it means to be a “chosen people” combined with inflammatory claims that Israeli Jews do not regard Palestinians as being human beings.
In a follow-up interview by the same station, I made a number of points regarding these assertions. In terms of likening Israelis to Nazis, even if one believes the most exaggerated crimes that Israel is being charged with, these do not remotely compare to the deliberate, systematic genocide of six million Jews.
So manifestly false is that comparison, in fact, that the only reason for Van Heerden’s making it would have been to use the pain that all Jews still feel about that unbelievable tragedy against them, not because of any desire to see peace in the Middle East. Aside from demonizing the Israeli people and causing hurt to Jewish people, it further had the effect of minimising the true extent of the Holocaust.
Before discussing the Biblical concept of “chosenness” and some of the ways it is approached in Jewish theology and philosophy, I considered it necessary to express the profound objections I had for someone from outside our religion to misconstrue and denigrate this aspect of our tradition in the way Van Heerden had done. It is common cause that the doctrines and precepts of any religion can be subtle and complex, particularly for those who are not adherents of that faith, hence we don’t typically criticise other people’s religions (and certainly not without understanding them fully).
I don’t think it would be tolerated in relation to other people’s religion, yet Van Heerden was given a platform to do so regarding the Jewish faith and was allowed to do so in a way that was grossly misleading and inappropriate. The fact that he cited the view of a single individual on the evident basis of that person himself being Jewish was no justification.
Why the “Chosen People” notion is by no means the notion of racial superiority, but a belief in Jews having a certain moral obligation to the world is a separate discussion. In any case, when such a debate is framed in terms where one is required to justify and defend rather than explain and clarify, no self-respecting Jewish person needs to feel obliged to participate.
The final libel that Van Heerden references is the assertion that all Israelis view Palestinians as subhuman. While this slur is directed at Israelis rather than Jews, the sheer ludicrousness of the statement points to the crass propagandist nature of Van Heerden’s piece.
On what basis does Van Heerden find that all Israelis share this view? He cites Gideon Levy (an Israeli) quite extensively; so can we assume that there is at least one exception to this outrageous generalisation? Is Van Heerden perhaps projecting his demonization of an entire population onto Israelis?
In essence, this kind of gross exaggerated stereotyping is the clear hallmark of someone more interested in whipping up emotions than engaging to find a peaceful outcome to this tragic conflict.
Karen Milner is chair of the South Africa Jewish Board of Deputies.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Mail & Guardian.