(Author: Milton Shain, Vol. 64, #1, Pesach 2009)
Late in 2008, I was struck by two virtually concurrent news headlines: the South African Jewish Report of 19 September led with the headline ‘Low anti-Semitism in SA – but don’t be complacent’, and a week later I received a piece – written by Sydney Shapiro, Director of the SAZF in Israel – entitled ‘South Africa almost tops anti-Semitism charts’. What is one to do with such discrepant information – or at least such discrepant headlines, only eight days apart?
The SA Jewish Report article was based on a talk by David Saks at the recent Gauteng Board of Deputies conference in Johannesburg. Saks monitors antisemitism in South Africa with great professionalism and care. He told the gathering that South Africa has a relatively low rate of antisemitism, which is ten times higher in the UK, France and Argentine, 15 times higher in Australia and 20 times higher in Canada and Germany. His figures are calibrated in terms of antisemitic incidents, carefully monitored, and with agreed criteria across the Jewish world. Our low figures – and indeed a decline in incidents this year – are attributed by Saks to dormant far-right white organizations, coupled with an antiracist ethos in post-apartheid South Africa, buttressed by our chapter nine institutions, such as the Human Rights Commission and the values embedded in our Constitution. However, Saks did warn that the absence of antisemitic incidents does not necessarily mean the absence of anti-Jewish sentiment.
Shapiro, on the other hand, bases his ‘South Africa almost tops anti-Semitism charts’ on a ‘Pew Global Attitudes Survey of 2008’ which found that South Africans, along with Spaniards, Mexicans and Brazilians, hold some of the most negative views of Jews outside of the Muslim world. According to the Pew Survey, 46 percent of South Africans harbour unfavourable views of Jews and of those 46 percent, two-thirds dislike Jews in the extreme. A much lower figure of 11 percent is recorded in Australia which, given the high number of anti-Jewish incidents in that country, seems to challenge directly the connection between anti-Jewish incidents and attitudes.
This problematic connection between anti-Jewish incidents on the one hand and attitudes on the other is important. Put simply, to what extent are hostile attitudes towards Jews important in the antisemitic equation? Do they inevitably result in actions and should we be concerned about the figures indicated in the 2008 Pew Survey? In reflecting on these questions, it seems to me necessary to examine antisemitism in South Africa over a long period. By tracing the ebbs and flows of hostility towards Jews from the late nineteenth century to the present, we can attempt to delineate the driving forces of hatred and the contexts within which hostility is most apparent. In this way it is possible to assess the present situation and to make sense of the Saks and Pew Survey assessments.
It seems to me useful initially to separate what the historian Todd Endelman has termed ‘private’ from ‘public’ or ‘programmatic antisemitism. By ‘private’ antisemitism, Endelman means expressions of contempt and discrimination outside the radius of public life, as opposed to ‘public’ antisemitism which is the injection of antisemitism into matters of policy and the manipulation of antisemitism for partisan political ends. The only period in which South Africa has experienced ‘public’ or ‘programmatic’ antisemitism was in the 1930s and early 1940s – a period characterised by a heightened and exclusivist Afrikaner ethno-nationalism, coupled with socioeconomic and political turmoil. Calls to curtail Jewish immigration and even to limit Jewish opportunities did not come from nowhere. These calls built upon a long maturing anti-Jewish stereotype that was already evident in the late nineteenth century.
To be sure, with the influx of Eastern European Jews in the late nineteenth century, an anti-Jewish stereotype was quick to emerge. In the rural areas the smous was often a figure of fun, while in the towns and cities the Jewish business competitor was often accused of dishonest practices. Moreover, in Johannesburg and Cape Town, the ‘Peruvian’ Jew was associated with the seamier side of urban life, including illicit liquor selling in Johannesburg and vice and prostitution in both Cape Town and Johannesburg.
More sinister was the image of the Jew as cosmopolitan financier, associated with the Jews among the Randlords and blatantly linked to the notion of Jewish international finance which was reinforced by the liberal-left in England during the Anglo-Boer War. J. A. Hobson, the one-time Manchester Guardian’s correspondent in
Johannesburg, was the best known exemplar of this view. His sentiments were succinctly captured in his book, The War in South Africa, which postulated the notion of the Boer War being fought in the interests of a “small group of international financiers, chiefly German in origin and Jewish in race”.
The notion of a Jewish-capitalist conspiracy was revived after the war, this time in connection with the controversial importation of Chinese labour to replace the dwindling reserves of African labour in the mines. Increasingly the alien plutocrats or ‘Hebrew Goldbugs’ were portrayed as responsible for the scheme, while poems and satirical compositions alluded to a Jewish-Chinese takeover of Johannesburg. It was in this climate that Hoggenheimer, the quintessential Jewish parvenu, appeared upon the South African stage as a character in The Girl from Kays, a musical which toured South Africa shortly after the Anglo-Boer War and struck a responsive chord in the popular consciousness. By 1910 Hoggenheimer – allegedly the eminence grise of South Africa – had become a household name and a visible component of the anti-Jewish stereotype.
The anti-Jewish stereotype was thus firmly in place by 1910, intimately bound up with the local stresses and upheavals engendered by South Africa’s ‘mineral revolution’. For many categories of the social spectrum – the impoverished farmer, the unemployed worker, the competing merchant, and the frustrated businessman – this stereotype served as a psychological cushion. It was a universal scapegoat in an age of turmoil. But very significantly, it did not engender a major anti-Jewish movement. There were on-going calls to curtail the influx of Eastern European Jews; but there was no widespread call to limit options for Jews already living in South Africa. That would occur only after the stereotype was further embellished.
During the First World War Jews were accused – quite unjustly – of ‘shirking’ from military service; after the war they were accused of Bolshevik subversion. The Bolshevik charge emerged in the wake of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and in the context of the post-war economic depression and burgeoning black radicalism in South Africa. Thus a ‘Russian-Jewish’ conspiracy was the way leading newspapers depicted the heady days of March 1922, the so-called ‘Rand Revolt’. Something had to be done to curtail the influx of Bolshevik-orientated immigrants from Eastern Europe.
In addition to associating Jews with Bolshevism, newspapers began to question the potential for Jews to integrate into South African society. ‘Unassimilability’ became the new catchword, an idea influenced directly by nativist literature from the United States as well as by a new domestic segregationist discourse in which race and culture were conflated. By introducing notions of ‘racial stock’ and ‘racial quality’, newspapers were able to mobilise well established negative images of the Jew. At the forefront was the Cape Times, imbued with an exaggerated fear that British subjects were being replaced by aliens. The aliens, it noted, were “from racial stocks which experience has shown to be unsuitable to the peculiar conditions of this country”. They were, in other words, unassimilable. Eugenicist based fears of ‘race mixing’ and ‘mongrelization’ – primarily associated with South African blacks – now informed perceptions of the Eastern European Jew.
Given these developments it is hardly surprising that the full spectrum of the English and Afrikaans press welcomed the Quota Act of 1930 which set out to curtail eastern European Jewish immigration. In Endelman’s terms, the Act heralded the transformation of ‘private’ into ‘public’ or programmatic antisemitism, originally evident in the formation of the South African Christian National Socialist Movement (better known as the Greyshirts), under the leadership of Louis T. Weichardt. At its peak the movement had 2000 members and its success inspired a number of similar organisations to mushroom across the country.
Although inspired by Nazi forms and racist or volkisch discourse, the substantive message of South Africa’s many fascist-like movements related to the South African experience: Jews had fomented the Anglo-Boer War, inspired blacks against white civilization, controlled the press, exploited Afrikaners, dominated society, and so forth. Their voices grew louder as German-Jewish refugees began to enter South Africa in the wake of Hitler’s ascent to power. The groundswell of anti-Jewish feeling, especially demands for actions and threats against the existing Jewish community, prompted the ruling United Party to introduce stiffer educational and financial requirements for purposes of immigration. These were to take effect on 1 November 1936 and resulted in an interim increase in German-Jewish immigration. By the end of October well attended meetings, led by a group of Stellenbosch University professors, protested against the arrival of the Stuttgart carrying some 570 German-Jewish immigrants. One month later Purified Nationalists were calling for the unequal treatment of Jews. They wished to curtail the new immigrants’ access to the professions, limit their involvement in certain occupations, and proscribe name changing.
In an obvious response to flourishing antisemitism, coupled with a private Bill introduced by Malan to restrict Jewish immigration and stiffen naturalization laws, the United Party introduced an Aliens Bill in 1937, designed to restrict Jewish immigration – particularly from Germany – without mentioning Jews by name. Immigrants were to be permitted entry by a Selection Board on the grounds of good character and the likelihood of assimilation into the European population. The Bill failed to satisfy the Purified Nationalists; for them any Jewish immigration was unacceptable. The ‘Jewish Question’ was now a central plank in the political platform of the Radical Right. Malan, under pressure from the ultra-right Greyshirts, focussed increasingly on the Jew as an explanation for the Afrikaners political misfortunes. It was Hendrik Verwoerd, however, who stood at the vanguard of anti-Jewish agitation. In a major editorial in Die Transvaler, the newspaper he edited, he summarised the whole corpus of antisemitic discourse: Jewish domination in business and the professions, the unassimilability of Jews, Jewish alienation from the Afrikaners, questionable Jewish commercial morality, and the use of money by Jews to influence government through the English-language press. Obviously the ‘Jewish Question’ was no longer the concern solely of fringe fascist groups; it was now firmly entrenched within mainstream white politics.
Malan’s Purified Nationalists predictably stressed the ‘Jewish Problem’ in the 1938 general election campaign. Party propaganda was underpinned by an insistence on the prospect of Jewish domination. The election year also saw the emergence of a new paramilitary authoritarian movement, the Ossewabrandwag. Born out of the centenary celebrations of the Great Trek, the Ossewabrandwag attacked so-called “British-Jewish-Masonic” imperialism and capitalism, “British Jewish” democracy, “Jewish money-power” and “Jewish” disloyalty. The rhetoric of protest and opposition was riddled with racist assumptions and antisemitic generalizations. Jews were aliens, disloyal and bent on exploitation. Hostility was driven largely by Afrikaner intellectuals, some of whom had studied in Germany where they imbibed views of the corporate state, an idealist worldview, and a sense of exclusivist nationalism. These ideas propelled a powerful republicanism rooted in notions of divine election, a leitmotif within the Afrikaners’ civil religion. Like their European counterparts on the Right, Afrikaner nationalists were opposed to liberalism, Marxism and laissez-faire capitalism. Nationalist sentiment, in other words, sharpened perceptions of the Jew as a quintessential alien. For the Afrikaner he symbolized all that was foreign and oppressive. Moreover, as English speakers for the most part, Jews were political enemies.
The Jew also helped to consolidate an all embracing Afrikaner identity, understood in terms of cultural unity, national roots, and opposition to the foreigner. In this way antisemitism helped to cover or paper over class divisions and antagonisms within Afrikaner society. The Afrikaner’s inferior status in society and his poverty could be explained in racial or national terms. By employing this discourse of race to exclude and denigrate Jews, the Afrikaner was in turn elevated. Consequently, it is no coincidence that antisemitism continued to suffuse specifically right-wing Afrikaner political discourse and programmes, this despite the upturn in the economy from the mid-1930s.
Antisemitism was given further impetus following the South African parliament’s decision to support the Commonwealth war effort to resist Germany in 1939. A powerful antiwar movement was orchestrated by the Ossewabrandwag in which the appeal of fascism and with it the rhetoric of antisemitism was strong. A range of major National Party publications issued in the early 1940s demonstrated the formative influence of Mussolini and Hitler or the exclusive nature of an insurgent Afrikaner nationalism in which the Jew had no place. However, the struggle against Hitler gradually eroded the warm reception accorded to Nazi and fascist ideas.
The 1930s had clearly witnessed a sea change in the nature and character of antisemitism. Hostility had moved from the ‘private’ or ideational sphere into the ‘public’ or party political realm. The transformation was unquestionably related to specific traumas in the 1930s: the intensification of ‘poor whiteism’ following the impact upon South Africa of the world depression, the emergence of Nazism in Europe and the rise of an illiberal, anti-modernist and exclusivist Afrikaner nationalism. That is why ‘public’ antisemitism in South African was an essentially Afrikaner phenomenon and why it appealed across the whole spectrum of Afrikaner nationalist opinion. But it was built on the maturation of an anti-Jewish stereotype that had evolved over decades.
After the war South Africa experienced a rapid decline in antisemitism. A new Afrikaner bourgeoisie – well educated, confident and more optimistic than their forebears – enjoyed the economic fruits of racist exploitation and political power. They developed very rapidly a respect for enterprise and material success. The very scaffolding that had underpinned their sense of inferiority was thus removed as they began to experience power and social mobility. A sense of competition with and fear of the Jew declined. A postwar consumerist culture meant the erosion of rural values and a newfound respect for the city. No longer was it an alien and inhospitable place. Most significantly, however, the impetus of exclusivist Afrikaner nationalism waned. English speakers, including Jews, were necessary for the apartheid project. Colour was the cardinal divide and any lingering views – heard earlier in the century – of the Jew not being ‘white’ soon disappeared.
Classic Jew baiting in postwar SA was restricted to a fringe ultra-right element. So, for example, Hitler’s birthday was regularly celebrated in Hillbrow, occasional Holocaust denial literature was distributed, and the Afrikanerweerstandsbeweging displayed swastika-like flags from time to time. But Jews had little cause for discomfort, despite the government questioning their loyalty in the early 1960s when Israel supported the African bloc in the United Nations against the apartheid government, and despite the government from time to time reminding Jews of their disproportionate involvement in anti-apartheid activities. Jewish security – at least insofar as the National Party was concerned – was further enhanced by Pretoria’s very close ties with Jerusalem from the mid-1970s.
THE PRESENT
What about the contemporary situation? The radical white Right, with its conspiratorial views of Jewish wealth, power and influence has disappeared. Individuals preaching an anti-Jewish message are at best leaders of small disaffected groups; they are not an advance guard of an ethno-nationalist movement, attempting to mould a ‘people’ or ‘volk’ by using the Jew as a classic other as we saw in the 1930s. But what about the majority black population? After all, in the ‘new’ South Africa, Jewish well-being is essentially dependent upon the black majority.
Historically blacks (including Coloureds and Indians) have never focussed specifically on the Jews when articulating grievances and aspirations. Going back to the late nineteenth century one finds that Jews hardly figure in the African press. The cardinal divide in South Africa has always been one of colour. This is not to say that anti-Jewish sentiment is totally foreign to the black population. Specifically “Jewish capitalists” have been identified in some industrial protests and antisemitic placards have been displayed at a number of strikes around the country. More recently, in the wake of the Gaza War, anti-Zionist protests have raised the possibility of targeting specifically Jewish businesses while questioning Jewish loyalty.
Clearly some blacks have imbibed well-worn anti-Jewish stereotypes. This should not come as a surprise. In a study of matriculation students in Soweto in the early 1970s, Melville Edelstein showed that blacks experienced a greater “social distance” in relation to Jews than toward English speakers in general, although less than towards Afrikaners. They told him that an African who was loth to part with his money was described as being as “stingy as a Jew” – a trope affirmed by the black consciousness leader, Saths Cooper, in an interview conducted in the late 1980s.
Edelstein thought that such prejudice arose from New Testament teaching in school and church. It may well be that there is an added cause: the resentment of blacks – in the widest sense of the term – against Jewish traders in town and country. Certainly one can find evidence of hostile stereotypes in fiction written by blacks. We should also note that a (methodologically questionable) survey conducted in 1990 among urban South African ‘elites’ showed that black ‘elites’ harbored substantial antipathy towards Jews. Almost one in five said that the Jewish community ‘irritated’ them because, in descending order of frequency, they were parasites, snobs, racists, anti-Christ, and unpatriotic; almost the same proportion approved of right-wing antisemitic actions, and nearly one in three considered the Jewish community to be ‘mostly a liability’ to South Africa.
It needs to be noted that surveys should not to be equated with actions. In the 1930s in the United States, for example, the average American held the most appalling stereotypes of the Jew. There is a quantum leap from attitudes to action. Nonetheless, ideas are the bedrock of action. And here one needs to look at a sustained hostility emanating from the Muslim population among whom many share conspiratorial ideas of the old far white Right. These ideas are manifested in the letter columns of our daily press and articulated in radio talk shows.
In looking at this issue it is necessary to note that anti-Zionism or criticism of the Jewish State cannot axiomatically be equated with antisemitism. The Arab-Israeli conflict, as Bernard Lewis argues, “is in its origins and its essence a political one – a clash between peoples and states over real issues, not a matter of prejudice and persecution.” My concern is an anti-Zionist rhetoric which reveals and displays classic anti-Jewish motifs. In other words, a special hatred seems to go beyond the bounds of normal political conflict. Jews or Zionists have become, at least for some critics, diabolically evil. One sees this invariably in the rhetoric associated with Al-Quds Day, during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, and in booklets such as Achmed Deedat’s, Arabs and Israel. Conflict or Conciliation?, published by the Islamic Propagation Centre International in Durban. Here anti-Zionist rhetoric and propaganda degenerates into blatant antisemitism with emphasis placed on Jewish power, cunning and duplicity. This was best captured in the comments made by the deputy foreign minister, Fatima Hajaig, at an antiZionist rally in Lenasia in January, 2009. Hajaig spoke of Jewish money controlling the USA and Western Europe, a classic anti-Jewish canard with a long pedigree.
Holocaust denial has also crept into Muslim anger. In 1996, Radio 786, a Muslim radio station, had to apologize for airing an interview with Dr Ahmed Huber, who spoke of the ‘Holocaust swindle’ and in May 1998, the same radio station interviewed Dr Yaqub Zaki who, besides claiming that the “million plus” Jews who died in the Second World War had died of infectious diseases, spent much of his time engaged with elaborate Jewish conspiracies. Legal wrangles surrounding the broadcast did not prevent Muslim Views – the main Muslim newspaper – from suggesting “ shortly after a Holocaust Center was opened in Cape Town in 1999 – that its readers avail themselves of a number of books denying the Holocaust. The use of the “Six Million,” explained Jameel McWilliams, a journalist on the newspaper, was a “red herring” to divert attention from Israeli ‘aggression’ against the Palestinians. McWilliams went on to explain that the furnaces had been necessary to burn dead bodies in order to prevent the spread of disease. “We are constantly reminded of the suffering of the Jews by the media, by Hollywood, particularly Steven Spielberg. But where is the evidence that the Germans gassed six million Jews? Was there even a deliberate policy of extermination by the Nazis of European Jewry?”
Readers of Muslim Views did not challenge McWilliams. It was thus no surprise that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion – that notorious forgery – went on sale at the World Conference Against Racism in Durban in 2001, where South African Muslims joined their co-religionists from abroad and others hostile to Israel in what turned out to be an anti-Zionist hatefest. Only a few days after the Durban conference – perhaps even inspired by it – Sheikh Mogamat Faaik Gamieldien of Cape Town wrote a letter to the Cape Argus entitled “The Golden Calf of Judaism” in which he quoted the Protocols approvingly. He recalled that the Protocols had been banned under the apartheid regime, and that they clearly provided an explanation for Zionist and Israeli actions.
Given this cast of mind it is hardly surprising that many South African Muslims, following the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and on the Pentagon, took conspiratorial ideas further. Invariably Zionist connections with the US were identified and an all powerful Jewish lobby was identified. This sort of thinking was evident in an interview conducted in September 2004 with a young Capetonian, Sheikh Mogamat Colby, a student at alAzar University in Cairo. Referring to the Protocols, the Sheikh noted that Jews controlled (and I quote) “economic systems in the world… all our land, all the means of the radio stations, the newspapers, the televisions – they are controlling all these things and this is how they have full control over the whole world.” These sorts of sentiments are now regularly aired on Channel Islam International, a Multichoice DSTV option that connects South African listeners with some of the world’s most notorious antisemites via satellite.
There can be little doubt that Muslim-Jewish relations have deteriorated in the past two to three decades. But one should not treat the Muslim community as a monolith. Various intellectual discourses operate and compete. Some are innovative and progressive, with an emphasis on Islamic humanism and universalism; others are conservative or Islamist, at odds with religious pluralism and ecumenism. Qibla, a radical Cape Town-based Muslim organization founded in 1979, and the Islamic Unity Convention, for example, are heavily influenced by Khomeinism and some of the more radical schools of Islamic thought. Common to both strands, however, is a hostile critique of Zionism. In some cases this hostility is separated from antisemitism; in others Zionism and Judaism are conflated into a combination which incorporates notions of international Jewish finance and imperialism. In the 1980s, according to former Western Cape Premier, Ebrahim Rasool, these ideas were often merged into an analysis of the South African struggle.
Certainly there has been a radicalization of Islam from the early 1970s among a new generation of Muslims, more in touch with international developments and inspired by the anti-apartheid struggle and the Iranian revolution. Successive defeats of Arab states by the Israelis demanded an explanation: sinister Jewish power and the Jewish lobby in the US provided the answer. Qibla identified Zionism as the ‘citadel’ of imperialism, a term that resonated powerfully in the apartheid context. Indeed, for some observers, Jewish and Zionist manipulation was responsible for South Africa’s race based policies.
In the 1980s, the Muslim press regularly wrote of international financial machinations centred on Zionism. Even local newspapers, noted Sheik Nazeem Mohammed, president of the Muslim Judicial Council (MJC), the official voice of Muslims in South Africa, were “controlled by the Jews.” These conspiratorial ideas were taken further by journalist and academic, Ibraheem Mousa, who spoke of Jews being “in control of a large stash of economic power in South Africa” and as such having substantial influence and political power. A pamphlet, distributed by “Islamic Messages” on the campus of the University of Cape Town, referred to the Protocols as the “secret ‘manifesto’ of Zionism for a plot to dominate the world.”
It is clear that much of this anti-Zionist discourse has overflowed into vulgar antisemitism, something noted already in the 1980s by Faried Esack, a prominent Muslim cleric and intellectual. “Nothing that the Jews do will be enough for Muslims”, explained an exasperated Esack in response to a question asking if Jews would be accepted by the Muslim community if they renounced all recognition and support for Israel.
How are we to assess these recent developments? Can the past help us to speculate about the present and the future? Quite clearly, accounting for the ebb and flow of antisemitism is complicated: anti-Jewish hostility cannot be reduced to a single cause. The structural position of Jews and the timing of their entry into society are important. Certainly one sees a significant increase of antisemitism during times of economic and social stress. It was in evidence on the Witwatersrand in the mid-1890s and in Cape Town during the economic depression which followed the Anglo-Boer War. The alien nature of Yiddishspeaking newcomers also had a major impact on perceptions of the Jew. They were ineradicably different and set apart by specific cultural predilections, underpinned – according to their detractors – by a racial essence.
But to account for antisemitism in terms of the conspicuousness of the victims is too simplistic. Prevailing discourses, as cultural critic, Bryan Cheyette, has argued in the British context, are inclined to construct the Jew within a particular frame and no account of antisemitism can ignore the historic evolution of an anti-Jewish discourse. While not wishing to discount the Christian Adversus Judaeos legacy, in the South African case Jews have by and large not been perceived through a theological prism. At most we can say that religious differences reinforced the alien or outsider status of the Jew. General perceptions, as we have seen, were rooted in the context of South Africa’s own historical reality and intellectual traditions.
In this regard we saw how nativism in the 1920s and ethno-nationalism in the 1930s heightened and sharpened differences. Hostility towards Jews was driven at this time by an anti-modernist and exclusivist Afrikaner ethno-nationalism. Calvinist Afrikaners saw their lifestyle threatened by English-speakers who dominated the urban centres, and among whom the Jew emerged as a convenient symbol. The right wing Afrikaner of the 1930s employed the ‘other’ to enhance self definition and to deflect divisions within the group. Insular and backward-looking, it focused on the Jew, an exemplar of the modern.
Given the enormous danger of exclusivist nationalism, it is particularly encouraging that the character of nationalism in the ‘new’ South Africa – at least up to now – is inclusive in orientation and non-racial in content. Pluralism, multiculturalism, religious tolerance and ‘rainbowism’ – the very antithesis of ethno-nationalism – takes the sharpness out of ethnic conflict and militates against antisemitism. South Africa’s ‘rainbow’ nation now celebrates cultural diversity and difference. Cultural rights and religious freedom are enshrined in the new South African constitution. Such sentiments are far removed from the exclusivist and triumphalist character of Afrikaner nationalism in the 1930s and 1940s. As important is the condemnation of antisemitism by political leaders in recent years. The apology from the deputy foreign minister, Fatima Hajaig, following her tirade in Lenasia, is not unimportant. Unlike the Nationalists of the 1930s, the ANC has not manipulated whatever anti-Jewish sentiment exists for political gain.
Some observers may see the ANC’s less than even-handed policy in the Middle East as a form of anti-Jewish sentiment. This is not necessarily the case. The ANC is fully entitled to maintain close ties with the Palestine Liberation Organization. These ties go back to its years in exile when the ANC had every reason to look askance at Pretoria’s cozy relationship with Jerusalem. Jews will have to live with the paradox that some of the people whose struggle for freedom they supported are hostile to the Zionist cause and genuinely sympathetic to the Palestinians. Certainly Nelson Mandela saw Yasser Arafat and Muammar Gaddafi as comrades-in-arms, loyal friends who helped the ANC with funds, training and international support. It should be noted, however, that applauding notions such as ‘Zionism is Racism’ – as happened in Parliament during Arafat’s visit in 1998 – raised serious questions for most Jews. Not only does this slogan contradict United Nations General Assembly resolution 46/86 of 1991 which revoked the equation of ‘Zionism and Racism’, but, it runs counter to the ANC’s stated position on the Arab-Israeli conflict – that is, accepting a Jewish State alongside a Palestinian state.
It should also be noted that the ANC alone will not define popular attitudes to Zionism for all time. Many Black leaders have visited Israel, spoken highly of its achievements and have availed themselves of Israeli expertise. Furthermore the majority of Blacks are Christians, with a deep attachment to the socalled ‘Holy Land’. Should Israelis and Palestinians resolve their differences, it is possible that all tensions surrounding South African Zionism could disappear. We also need to put Muslim hostility towards Jews in perspective. In the first instance, the Muslim population only numbers about 1.3 percent of the total South African population. As such, the chances of South Africa taking on an Islamist character are virtually nil. In any event, the vast majority of Muslims at least for now wish to share a multi-faith and multi-cultural South Africa. Only a small minority are intent on dragging the Middle East conflict with all its hostility into local politics. We should certainly not fall into the trap of believing that all Muslims are antisemites or radical Islamists.
In conclusion, with hindsight it is apparent that antisemitism has taken on different forms and emanated from different constituencies over the past century – the English community, the radical right Afrikaners and – more recently elements within the Muslim community. And we have seen how the Muslim community expresses its anger within an anti-Zionist discourse. Judging by the outpourings across the political spectrum during the Gaza War, they are not alone. But it is not unimportant that a Pew Global Project Attitudes Survey conducted in urban areas in South Africa in 2007 indicated that 28 percent of South Africans sided with Israel in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as opposed to 19 percent with the Palestinians. Nineteen percent sympathized with both the Israelis and the Palestinians.
Given these figures and recognizing the absence of a specifically ‘Jewish Problem’ in South Africa today, it is arguable that Jews are far better off under the new democratically elected government than under the old apartheid regime. Of course Jews share the same concerns as all other South Africans, arising from crime, economics, education and health care. But antisemitism, as such, is of marginal significance in South African public life. And, given the ANC’s opposition to racism, the climate for opposing antisemitism in South Africa publicly is more favorable than it has been in the past. There is no exclusivist ethno-nationalism of the right wing variety which, as we have seen, can be a real threat to Jews. The possibility of hostile attitudes, or in Endelman’s terms, ‘private’ antisemitism, being transformed into public policy is remote. And that is the litmus test. Nonetheless, the mood in the wake of the Gaza War and the ugly rhetoric surrounding it is a cause for concern. Fatima Hajaig’s comments underlie the easy slippage from anti-Zionism to antisemitism.
Milton Shain teaches in the Department of Historical Studies and is Director of the Isaac and Jessie Kaplan Centre for Jewish Studies and Research, University of Cape Town. A long-serving member of the Editorial Board of Jewish Affairs, he has published widely on SA Jewish history and antisemitism. His latest book, The Jews in South Africa: An Illustrated History (co-written with Richard Mendelsohn), appeared in 2008. A version of the above article was delivered by Professor Shain at the Annual Franz Auerbach Interfaith Memorial Lecture in 2008.
