Laurel and Hardy in South Africa
In the old Laurel and Hardy films the slim and tearful Stan Laurel would, by casual incompetence, gradually land the pair in trouble. At which the plump, moustachioed Oliver Hardy would come out with the line he made famous: "Here's another fine mess you've landed me in". This was usually uttered at a point when the situation was, indeed, hilariously irrecoverable.
The news that DA representatives have voted in favour of extreme anti-Israel resolutions at the Cape Town Conference of 6 February is one more complete DA mess (see here). We are getting used to them. First there was voting in favour of extreme new laws on affirmative action and BEE; then the flip-flop back again; then a re-flop as the party cast away more than fifty years of history and decided to use race as one of its criteria. Then we got the entirely predictable (and predicted) disaster with Mamphela Ramphele. Now we have the party of Helen Suzman spitting on her grave by infuriating the Jewish community on election eve. Helen didn't hold strong views about Zionism or even Judaism but about basic political competence she certainly did.
For anyone who lived through the whole era of the Progs this last misadventure is simply eerie. When the Progs defected from the UP in 1959 it was immediately clear that their chief supporters were the Jewish community. They provided funds, votes, activists. I was a teenager in Durban and I remember like yesterday the formidable Lynn Ovenden, the archetypal chain-smoking, tough-minded, bridge-playing Jewish woman, the key organizer for the Progs, tireless, down-to-earth and hugely impressive. But there were other Lynn Ovendens around the country. It was unsurprising that Helen Suzman was the only Prog to hold her seat in 1961 because she was much the same and had the most Jewish constituency in South Africa behind her. One of the reasons why Verwoerd called an election in 1961 - two years before he needed to - was because he was keen to wipe the Progs out. When this didn't happen, he was angry and said on air (I heard him) that "it has not gone unnoticed that so many Jews supported the Progressive party".
But now here is the DA supporting completely one-sided anti-Israel propaganda, demanding sanctions, boycotts and all the rest. Of course there is a difference between being Jewish and being a Zionist. But almost no Jews enjoy hearing Israel unfairly and one-sidedly attacked. Even those Jews - and there are many of them - who deplore the settlements on Arab land and Israel's often criticizable policies - know perfectly well that Hamas and the PLO regularly commit atrocities against their own people, never mind the Israelis, that they are utterly undemocratic, refuse to allow free elections, carry out torture and so on and so forth.
A simple-minded pro-Palestinian attitude can only be adopted by ideologues and the willfully blind. The "Cape Town conference", as it is now called, was, we are told, attended by some Jews who were friendly towards Palestine, Cuba and the people of Western Sahara. This probably means Ronnie Kasrils and his dog. Ronnie and I have known one another since he was 21 and I was 17. He is a nice guy in himself. Politically he is like a barbarian cheering the fall of Rome, careless of the fact that that means 500 years of Dark Ages. He means no harm, he just doesn't understand.