SAJR,+Kasrils+responds,+13+Nov+06

13 November 2006

South African Jewish Report
 * The Editor**

Mr Geoff Sifrin E-mail: **//geoffs@icon.co.za//** Fax: +//27-11-8864202//


 * Mr Editor**


 * Open Letter in Response to your Editorial of November 9, 2006**

You have not only stifled my words but your editorial misrepresents and distorts what I wrote. This is a shameful debasement of journalistic ethics, not to mention the questionable morality and crass intolerance that refuses to allow my right to reply to questions directly put to me in your columns, by an embittered correspondent who willfully distorts what occurred during my lecture at the University of Witwatersrand. You reneged on an undertaking to publish my reply and yet have the temerity to claim that “the richness and creativity of Jewish life owes much to its acceptance of open debate, even if acrimonious”. Your utterances fly in the face of a cowardly action last personally experienced when anything I said or wrote was silenced by an Apartheid government banning order in 1962.

Whilst you decide that your readers need to be shielded from my opinions you mislead them into believing that I am calling for the “annihilation” of the state of Israel and imply that I am a Holocaust “denier”. I challenge you to demonstrate this side-by side with my actual words and not on the basis of a slanted and perverted analysis.

On the question of my invoking the Nazi parallel with Israel you fail to acknowledge that I have consistently and pointedly referred to //certain// //comparable measures// being employed against the people of Palestine and Lebanon. I am clearly referring to //certain actions// and not a total genocidal system such as the Holocaust, which is quite another matter. The //measures// I refer to include ethnic cleansing to make way for Jewish settlement; house demolitions; indiscriminate bombings of civilians including women and children; the mass cruelty of collective punishment; massacres stretching from Deir Yassin in 1948 to Qibya in 1953, Qana and Gaza recently; and manifestly disproportionate responses to violence which Amnesty International and the UN have denounced as violations of international humanitarian law and human rights. After the criminal cluster bombing of south Lebanon an Israeli army officer declared “what we did was insane and monstrous”. When the Israeli military leveled a part of Jenin to the ground in 2002 one of their commanders revealed they had been studying the suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto resistance by the Nazi storm-troopers.

Further Mr. Editor, what you, along with all those vilifying me have done, is to patently avoid the fact that I did not invent the Nazi analogy. My “crime” has been to draw attention to the use of the comparison by Israeli cabinet minister Aharon Cizling (“now we too have behaved like Nazis”), Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt and others after the Deir Yassin massacre and destruction of Palestinian villages in 1948 – actions which in fact continue in one form or another to this day.

Mr. Editor, you ask me to examine my own motives as though these are dubious and self-serving. I have provided my motivation in plain language in the letter you have suppressed; namely that the lesson of the Holocaust ought to be compassion for the suffering of others and solidarity amongst people of all lands to prevent similar horrors. My understanding of Rabbi Hillel’s teaching is “to do unto others as you would wish them do unto you”. Although I am without religious faith I understand this as a Jewish heritage – one which I never deny and have often proudly declared and which led me into a lifetime of struggle against Apartheid. What concerns me is that apparently so many Jews, unfortunately misled by militant Zionism, may interpret Hillel’s moral teaching as applying only to ones relationship with fellow Jews. Intolerance such as you exhibit serves to reinforce such prejudice. Is there anything Israel does that offends you? A growing number of Jews, both in Israel and the diaspora, are questioning such morality which they regard as corrupting the universality of Judaic values.

Mr. Editor, you and the cowardly cabal behind you can ban and vilify me, but as long as I have breath I will continue to protest against Israel’s fascist-style brutality and declare “not in my name”, in the interest of the true values of Judaism and humanity and in support of justice and security for all Christians, Jews and Muslims in the Middle East and further afield. The truth will out.


 * Ronnie Kasrils**

739 words