Ronnie Kasrils’ ugly op-ed on News24 reveals the limits of his humanity. In his warped world, those who butcher families, kidnap children, and slaughter the defenceless are heroes. Israel is always to blame. The end always justifies the means. And Hamas – whose actions and ideology are exclusivist, fundamentalist, and authoritarian, and which unleashed a wave of suicide bombers to destroy the peace process in the 1990s – will somehow advance the goal of creating an “inclusivist, secular, democratic state” in Israel/Palestine. Pity the mind that harbours such blinding hate.
Kasrils’ origins make him useful to others: a person whose nominal Jewishness can provide cover for their hate. But his op-ed reveals that he is Jewish in name only. For his hateful response is the exception that proves the rule about what it means to be a Jew.
Jews of all stripes, whether on left or right, whether they support Israel or not, have reacted with visceral horror to the massacres in southern Israel. They have done so for many reasons. Some have families and friends who have been affected. Most, but not all, feel attached to Israel, no matter whether they agree with its policies or not. Many feel a sense solidarity with fellow Jews, an almost familial bond.
All, when they read and see and hear of the massacre of women, children, and men feel the tug of history. Most do not know of an older history of the kidnapping of Jews for ransom – unfortunately there is no need to write new Jewish prayers for the redemption of captives -- and have only the faintest familiarity with a history of medieval massacres of Jewish communities.
But all share a collective memory and dread of the “pogrom,” the anti-Jewish riots that escalated in frequency and ferocity in eastern Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The victims were pulled from their homes, tortured, raped, shot. There were over one thousand such attacks in Ukraine alone in the three years after the First World War; over 100,000 were murdered.
The pogrom shares space in Jewish collective memory with the Holocaust. Less well known than the poison gas of Auschwitz and other killing centres was the “Holocaust by Bullets”: the slaughter of entire communities by the SS, German soldiers, police, and collaborators who systematically moved from village, town to town, city to city in eastern Europe to round up as many as two million women, children, and men: pulling them from their homes, torturing, raping, shooting.
These are the swirling memories that have been evoked by the atrocities inflicted by Hamas in southern Israel.
Though the actions of Hamas have generated deep distress and sorrow for Jews the world over, most do not share the hardness of heart exhibited by Ronnie Kasrils. History has taught us to see humanity. We dread what is to come for the women, children, and men of Gaza. We know that they will suffer terribly for Hamas’s actions and the response from Israel that it was designed to elicit.
In his eagerness to celebrate the “resistance” – a much more pleasing phrase than murderers -- Kasrils also invokes Jewish collective memory. But his invocations of Jewish history are warped. For as much as he writes of “our people,” he clearly feels very little for other Jews. Nor, as his essay reveals, does he care much for human life when murder advances his political cause.
Professor Adam Mendelsohn is the Director of the Kaplan Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Cape Town
