A FAMOUS GROUSE

THE media coverage in the UK to mark the anniversary of the Hamas attack has been extensive, overwhelming almost, but one comment stands out for me. Writing in the Sunday Times, the columnist Hadley Freeman notes a distinct shift in the criticism of Israel, a country that she, as a Jew, had always felt free to criticise, just as she was free to criticise her two “home countries”, Britain and the United States.

“But,” Freeman says, “over the past 12 months people have said things to me about Israel that felt as if they were squeezing my sciatic nerve. Not because I disagreed with them but because what they were saying was so — here comes the technical term — ignorant.”

Worse still, she adds, such people took pride in their ignorance. “Context” and “history” were now regarded by far too many as “mealy-mouthed justifications” for the slaughter of Palestinian and Lebanese citizens. “They are not,” Freeman says. “But they are real.” ___STEADY_PAYWALL___

I wonder if the former ANC MP Mandla Mandela is one of these ignorant people. Last week it was reported that, given his support for Hamas, there was widespread disquiet that Nelson Mandela’s grandson was scheduled to embark on a speaking tour of the UK later this month. 

His reported itinerary includes engagements in, among other cities, Bristol, Sheffield, Edinburgh, Glasgow and London, where he is due to speak at the Global Peace and Unity Festival, which takes place on 19 and 20 October. According to its website, the GPU festival has, since its inception in 2005, “been a shining symbol of the vibrant Muslim lifestyle, culture, and business scene worldwide”.

A polygamist, Mandela married his fourth wife, Raabia Clarke, in February 2016 in an Islamic ceremony in Cape Town. He’d converted to Islam about two months prior to the wedding, a prerequisite to marry into the Islamic community. He reportedly practices both Thembu and Muslim cultural and religious traditions.

Be that as it may, it is his “inflammatory rhetoric”, according to The Times, that left the Home Office facing “questions … about whether he should be granted a visa” to visit the UK.

Immediately after the Hamas attack, in which some 1 200 people, mostly Israeli civilians, were killed, Mandela issued a statement: “We support the Palestinian right to resist and call on all resistance formations to likewise support Operation Al Aqsa Flood (the code name for the Hamas attack) and intensify the struggle on all fronts.”

A week later there came a call to the international community to “rise to the occasion and support Hamas and the Palestinian resistance in fighting their oppressor”. When the Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh was killed in a drone strike in Iran in July Mandela sent his condolences to the terror group, describing Haniyeh as a “great leader and an inspiration to all revolutionaries and freedom fighters of the world”.

More was to come. In November he told a protest meeting in Cape Town, “We want to say to Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic jihad, the Palestinian resistance, Hezbollah and the mujahideen: intensify the struggle in occupied Palestine.” A month later, he welcomed Hamas officials to the tenth anniversary memorial of his grandfather’s death in Pretoria.

He has also eulogised Qasem Soleimani, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard commander who was killed in a US drone strike in 2020, as a leader “in word and deed” and, according to the Iranian-funded Press TV channel, he praised Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, who died in an air strike on Hezbollah’s headquarters in Beirut last month, as “one of the great freedom fighters”.

According to the Jerusalem Times, Mandela has claimed that Israel was also responsible for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In March 2022, he told a Pan African Palestinian Solidarity Network conference in Senegal: 

“The global military-industrial complex that beat the drums of war in Ukraine feeds an agenda of which they are the sole beneficiaries. Behind them lies the ruins of Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq. They are joined in this disgraceful endeavour by neo-Nazis in Ukraine, the Apartheid Israel dogs of war and those in NATO intent on advancing cold war politics.”

Heady stuff. But back to Freeman, who is understandably contemptuous of such attitudes. Her opprobrium here was directed at the award-winning writer and Harvard University academic Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose forthcoming work, The Message (Penguin), “explores the urgent question of how our stories — our reporting, imaginative narratives and myth-making — both expose and distort our realities”. 

In his book, Coates claims that Israel is analogous to the antebellum American South and that Palestinians are analogous to the slaves who toiled on the plantations there. And it’s as simple as that. Anything more complicated is “horseshit”, Coates has said. 

Appearing on CBS Mornings, Coates was asked why he had omitted any reference to Palestinian terrorism and whether he believed Israel had a right to exist. He replied, “The authors who believe more sympathetically in Israel’s right to exist don’t have any trouble in getting their voice out … I’m the child of Jim Crow. I have a moral compass about this, and perhaps it’s because of my ancestry.” 

Freeman notes, somewhat caustically, that whereas Coates’ ancestry gives him a moral compass, those journalists who believe in Israel’s right to exist “are full of horseshit”. She adds:

“Historical ignorance is not moral clarity. It’s narcissism, laziness and stupidity. And, as the war continues, the ignorance mushrooms, perhaps to simplify a conflict that is so complex. An English friend told me the other week that October 7 was ‘inevitable’, by which they meant ‘understandable’. Another described Israel as a ‘colonial settler country’, as though Holocaust survivors who couldn’t return to their native countries — including my Polish ancestors — were white supremacists.

“Others blame Israel entirely for what’s happened to Gaza, to which I say: google Yasser Arafat. How is it so hard for some people to understand that Binyamin Netanyahu is appalling and Hamas and Hezbollah are murderous terrorists who have sacrificed their own people’s lives because they hate Israel, Jews and the West? Are they stupid, or just stupid about Jews?”

These are questions that, of course, can be levelled at, among many others, Cyril Ramaphosa and his government for their grovelling obeisance towards Iran. But there is another line of inquiry that Squirrel and chums should perhaps consider, and that is simply this: 

Did Hamas give any thought to the consequences of their actions? How did they think Netanyahu, a hard-right extremist desperate to shore up his power base and a man vehemently opposed to any form of peaceful coexistence with Palestinians, would react to the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust? An assault by a death cult committed to wiping Israel off the face of the map? What on earth did they think would happen? 

There are those who are dismissive of the “existential threat” to Israel, that it is insignificant when compared to the tens of thousands who have died in Gaza. But there is such a threat. It’s real. It exists. And, as Freeman notes, “without understanding one, how can you talk about the other?”

Some understanding can perhaps be gleaned from the documentary, One Day in October, which will be screened in the UK on Channel 4 this evening (Wednesday). Directed by Dan Reed, it tells the story of the 132 Israelis who were murdered on Kibbutz Be’eri, one of the many targets hit by Hamas on 7 October. The film makes use of CCTV footage, WhatsApp messages, recorded phone calls from frantic Israelis, interviews with survivors and GoPro video footage from Hamas raiders themselves. And it will be harrowing, hard to watch.

But that is the point. The idea of revisiting these terrible scenes may seem lurid, grotesque even, but this is perhaps necessary as events of that day have, according to an article in the UK’s Independent, been subjected to “a strange process of minimisation”.

This has come in many forms, the newspaper’s Guy Walters writes, the most egregious being the outright denial of conspiracy theorists who claim the attacks were either faked or false flag operations to justify the assault on Gaza. Walters adds:

“Then there is the suggestion that the attack was not mounted on that large a scale. This is quite simply not true, as there were terror assaults on at least 20 locations, and carried out by some 6 000 members of Hamas. To put that into perspective, that is more manpower than two brigades of the British Army. Furthermore, this suggestion of a small scale negates the estimated 4 000 to 5 000 rockets that were fired into Israel that day.

“The final form of minimisation is more passive, and is perhaps the most common, and that is the act of partial forgetting. A year has gone by, during which so many other horrors have happened in the Middle East. Direct comparison between the number killed on 7 October, and the tens of thousands killed in Gaza is routinely made.

“The implication of such a comparison is clear — the bigger the number, the bigger the crime. This, of course, is to evaluate morality with all the nuance of a football score. As the images of the horror dim in the mind’s eye, the massacres of that day are thought about in a more abstract form and there can be a tendency to not think about those numbers as actual people.”

Walters does note that, for those who have looked in horror at events in Gaza in the year that followed and caused the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent people, it would be tempting to regard One Day in October as a “propagandist attempt to justify what Netanyahu’s government has done, and continues to do in retaliation”.

This, however, is something that Reed, who directed the acclaimed Four Hours at the Capitol, is aware of but responds: “October 7 is a pivotal day in history, whether you like it or not. Certainly in the Middle East, possibly in the world, and this is what happened. This is not a set of generalisations, or slogans about the war. This is a very detailed story about a particular group of people who more than anyone else in the world know what October 7th meant. They’re the people who really know. The rest of us are just chit-chatting about it.”

***

There is, meanwhile, another “existential threat” that Israel faces, one that many South Africans may understand, and that is the flight of its elite.

In August, one of Israel’s leading scientists, the Nobel laureate Professor Aaron Ciechanover warned a “national emergency” conference in the ruins of Kibbutz Nir Oz, the worst hit of all the communities targeted by Hamas, that the country was in grave danger due to the departure of its intelligentsia who wish to live in a “free-liberal democracy” and not one where “the government forcibly takes power” and too many people are “silent and do not react”.

An outspoken critic of Netanyahu, Ciechanover was quoted by the Times of Israel as saying, “There is a huge wave of departures from the country … Most senior doctors are leaving the hospitals, universities are finding difficulties in recruiting faculty members in critical areas.”

This was a “very narrow” community, he added, citing economic reports which suggested that “as soon as 30 000 of these people leave, we won’t have a country here. These are people who leave the country because it’s not good for them … because of what was before the war.” 

This was a reference to the Netanyahu government’s divisive judicial reforms which sparked protests across the country. But such concerns are not limited to the prime minister’s opponents. In May this year, Israeli government administration experts Eugene Kandel and Ron Tzur released a paper bluntly stating that, in 24 years from now, Israel will not be celebrating its centenary as a sovereign Jewish state due to the deep divisions plaguing its society. The two were quoted by Haaretz as writing:  

“After the government’s attempt to weaken the judiciary last year, followed by Hamas’ massacre in the south, a picture of total failure in the systems, management and operations of the administration has emerged. 

“In the Israeli political regime today, there is no possibility of ending the internal war. After the terrible disaster [of 7 October] and the functional break down it reflected, it is no longer possible to act within the same framework and expect better results.”

Kandel and Tzur pointed to three main camps in Israel that are competing to “impose their world view on the state”. 

The are those, for example, who identify with the Jewish-democratic-liberal state and who wish to live in a Western-style democracy. According to Kandel and Tzur, the majority of Israelis, including Arab Israelis and many religious Jews, identify with this “tribe”.

Then there are those who oppose a Jewish state and would want a state for all citizens, a model that most of the Arab community would prefer. Lastly, there is the ultra-Orthodox model, a religious state ruled by the Torah and supported by those who would prefer Rabbinic law over democracy.

Coupled with these clashing “camps”, according to Haaretz,  are three principal existential challenges: the economic challenge, the clash of values, and the fact that very few citizens appear to notice these dangers — particularly rising emigration among those who have built the country’s hi-tech sector and its academic institutions.

“Israel’s locomotive of growth is innovation, and that is driven by a small group of several tens of thousands of people in a country of 10 million,” Kandel and Tzur warned. “The weight of their departure from the country is immense in comparison to their number.”

The increasing domination of the state by religious traditionalists is indeed worrying, according to Uri Ram, professor of sociology and anthropology at Ben Gurion University of the Negev. He told the Guardian that secular Israelis who prioritise living in a liberal democracy are a shrinking portion of Israel’s population, as religious and ultra-Orthodox Jewish families have, on average, more children.

By 2015, just 45 per cent of the Jewish population in Israel defined themselves as secular. But, according to Ram, data from the elementary schools in 2023 revealed that only 40% of children were in the secular stream..

“There is a growing problem of a ‘brain drain’,” he said, “and it will increase, firstly, if the military risk is not reduced and, secondly, if the state does indeed turn more populist-autocratic. In these situations, the upper middle classes will send their young generations abroad. Jews are well networked in desired academic and professional markets abroad, and family and work connections will assist the integration of young, educated Israeli immigrants in the desired locations.”

One businessman who spoke to the Guardian, identified only as Noam, revealed that he and his wife now pore over school options for their children in European countries as they weigh up where to start a new life. The war has increased the urgency of the search, but it has been a decision born out of longstanding concerns.

He firmly believes that Israel’s economy will be hampered by the growing number of ultra-Orthodox young people not qualified for professional jobs because they do not study maths or science, or speak English. Socially, he fears the rise of religious conservatives will make life hard for secular Jews. 

“If you ask me what we are headed for,” Noam said, “you can look at the Iranian model, where religion plays a major role in daily life. Even without the enemies we have all around [the region], that’s a good enough reason for any child-loving parent to take his children away from harm.”