Tony Ehrenreich, the Cosatu and ANC leader in the Western Cape, has denounced the Jewish Board of Deputies for daring to hold different views than him about the division of opinion in South Africa over the issue of the Palestinians and Israel. He suggests that they should, as a result, leave the country. In addition, he threatens boycotts and strikes against Jewish-owned businesses in the Cape if the SAJBD does not cease "its Zionist propaganda".
It is important to see this for what it is. The constitution guarantees freedom of speech and of the press but in effect Mr Ehrenreich is trying to insist that these rights do not apply to Jews. Secondly, like anti-Semites through the ages he is attempting to insist that the natural loyalty of Jewish people towards the wider Jewish community means that they thereby disqualify themselves from properly belonging to any country. This was the slur that Stalin cast with his talk of "rootless cosmopolitans" during the so-called "Jewish doctors' plot".
Yet this weapon is used selectively. After all, it makes just as much sense to attack Catholics for having a supra-national loyalty to the Pope in Rome or Muslims for their loyalty to an international creed centred on Mecca. Logically, Mr Ehrenreich ought to be telling these groups too that they have forfeited their right to belong to the national community and that they too should leave the country. But he doesn't. He wishes to single out the Jews.
One should also note that Mr Ehrenreich has already clearly got an idea in his mind of what constitutes a "Jewish business" and no doubt he also has a list in his mind of such businesses that he wishes to attack with boycotts and strikes. That is to say, in his mind he already has yellow stars ready to hand out to Jews, just as Hitler did. Yet it should be noted that such a list and such a definition is purely ethnic. Mr Ehrenreich doubtless has no idea - and no concern - whether a Jewish person who owns a business is religious or secularly-minded, let alone what their views on Israel and Palestine might be. He doesn't care about that because he hates Jews simply for being ethnically Jewish (whatever that might be). It is very crude, almost medieval.
Mr Ehrenreich says, of course, that he is motivated by the fact that Palestinians are getting killed in the present Gaza crisis. This is quite true and it is certainly extremely regrettable. But the number of Syrian Muslims who have died in the present civil war there is 150 times greater than the number of Palestinian dead, yet Mr Ehrenreich is utterly silent about that. Similarly, in Iraq ISIS has decreed that it will carry out genital mutilation of all women under its control, from the age of 13 up. Mr Ehrenreich is similarly silent about this bestial treatment of Muslim women en masse. Why is he so selective? It can only be because in these other instances there are no Jews to denounce, no local Jews to be bullied and harassed.
Finally, Mr Ehrenreich is trying to bully Jews by giving them a time limit (until August 7) within which they must make it plain that they are not Zionist. Silence on this issue will clearly not be tolerated and will be seen as tacit support for Zionism. Thus Jews, even if they say nothing, will be guilty of a thought crime. Mr Ehrenreich is clearly hoping to pick off a few of the more timorous Jews by getting them to publicly dissociate themselves from the rest of their community. Just as Percy Yutar was keen to prove to the apartheid regime that he was "a good Jew" by prosecuting the Rivonia trialists, so Mr Ehrenreich is hoping he can find some who are willing to show they are "good Jews" by showing loyalty to his view of the Israel-Palestine issue. There are of course a smattering of such people and it is greatly to the credit of the Jewish community that such dissidence is tolerated. One may imagine what would happen to a South African Muslim who spoke out publicly in favour of Israel.
All of this is apartheid era stuff in that it confounds ethnicity with ideology and seeks to separate out some citizens purely on an ethnic basis. It is of primary importance that non-Jews - whether they be Christians, Muslims, Hindus or atheists - should stand up against it. It must not be left to Jews alone to protest against such appalling anti-Semitism. This is not about what views one holds about Israel or the Palestinians. Anyone should be free to hold whatever views they like about that. So one's attitude to that is beside the point. What is at stake here is that Mr Ehrenreich - and those like him - are seeking to demonize and bully a whole section of the country's population in clear defiance of our constitution and all our laws and values. Such voices speak for a brutal past that we all thought had been rightly left behind.
RW JOHNSON
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