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.

But the real drama is the DA. How to explain this fresh catastrophe? One may rule out the possibility that DA policy towards the Middle East has suddenly been changed from its old even-handed stance to a new and rabidly anti-Israel one. This is clearly another case - as was true, we are told, over affirmative action and BEE - of DA MPs not knowing what DA policy was.

No doubt harsh words will be spoken again, representatives disavowed, apologies and retractions made. Even at the end of it Jewish DA supporters will be left feeling disgruntled and unsure - after all, the flip-flop over affirmative action and BEE was soon followed by a further re-flop. Maybe that could happen again. Meanwhile, all the obvious attempts to placate an angry Jewish community are likely to annoy Muslim Indians and Coloureds who previously voted DA. It is all ridiculous. After all, DA policy towards the Middle East is like DA policy towards a Mars landing - not much to the point.

So what to make of it? Once again, it goes back to Helen Zille's failure to lead her party in Parliament. The DA is a party of a new type, thoroughly multi-racial. Which means that it includes many new MPs who are complete strangers to the liberal tradition and even to party policy.

The leader has to be there with them, educating and talking to them, explaining why the party feels as it does, gradually drilling them into a united team. This job cannot be delegated and it cannot be done by remote control. For the party leader to go off elsewhere and leave the task to a young 33 year old who lacks an instinctive knowledge of these matters is simply to ask for trouble.

This would be true irrespective of the person's race and no one could blame such an inexperienced young person for not getting it right. Any seasoned politician would have spotted a mile off that a conference on Israel/Palestine was - given the ANC's known hostility to Israel - a large unexploded bomb just waiting to go off. DA representatives to such a conference would have to be carefully chosen, well-rehearsed both in party policy and the key facts of the Middle Eastern imbroglio, and with a carefully pre-planned strategy to counter what was clearly going to be a kangaroo court. None of this seems to have been done.

So, this is another major management failure. Is that all? No. It follows a pattern, which is the neglect of traditional constituencies. Under Leon, for example, the Solidarity Movement- now by far the most important Afrikaans organization in the country - had a friendly and co-operative relationship with the Leader's office. They didn't need to see eye to eye on everything: Leon knew how important Afrikaners were to the DA and Solidarity knew how important it was to have a leading politician willing to listen to them. But under Zille Solidarity says it has been just frozen out, that it no longer has any relationship at all with the Leader's office. Almost exactly the same could be said of the Jewish community. Zille's DA has been so frantic in its pursuit of black voters and a black-skinned leader that it seems to have forgotten its own key constituents.

Is that all? No, it's not. If one were just talking about management failures one would expect the failures to be evenly distributed. In which case the DA might have made some mistakes to the left, some to the right - the party might, for example, have taken up a flatly pro-Israel or flatly free market position. But this isn't what happened. In every case the slip in policy occurred, so to speak, on the ANC side. It's as if the default position in every case is to do what the ANC would have done, or would do. This is the real disaster, that the DA has been so brain-washed by the ANC that not only has it lost its way but it is no longer offering South Africans a real choice.

RW Johnson

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