The steady flow of articles alleging that it is immoral to take the side of the oppressed in Palestine is becoming tiresome. All these articles simply ignore the longstanding oppression of the Palestinian people and the ongoing and unconscionable devastation of the Gaza ghetto. They all mispresent Israel as the victim of those who refuse its colonial oppression and misrepresent all those who oppose the vicious repression meted out by the Israeli state as anti-Semites, including the many Jewish critics of Israel.
The piece by Milton Shain (PoliticsWeb 21 December 2023) is as puerile as recent pieces by Greg Mills, Tony Leon, Frans Cronje among others. Shain does not say a word about the violent oppression of the Palestinians going back to even before 1948, or the currently unfolding war crime in Gaza. His silence is tacit support for that oppression and for the genocide being perpetrated on live television as he wrote his article.
Shain has so little to say that he resorts to referencing the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion at length, the notorious 1903 Czarist police forgery produced at a time when European empires were paranoid about the role of non-Zionist Jews in left wing causes. Those repressive states sought to divert attention away from issues of democracy and freedom and towards an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.
Shain, following many right-wing commentators in the United States and Israel, uses the Protocols of the Elders of Zion for exactly the same purpose. He cynically diverts attention away from the urgent issue of the ongoing slaughter of civilians in Gaza, and the West Bank, at the hands of the Israeli state.
Nobody disputes that the 1988 Hamas Charter contained anti-Semitic statements; declaring that the “Day of Judgment will not come about until Muslims fight Jews and kill them.” It is of note that the leaders of Israel advocate the same in reverse about Jews killing Muslims, and in fact all Palestinians - Christian victims amongst them. To the credit of Hamas, they have deleted such statements from their new Charter, whereas Israel’s leaders have doubled down on such declarations.
Unlike more crude right-wing commentators Shain does acknowledge the revised 2017 Hamas Charter which disavows anti-Semitism and makes it clear that Hamas is struggling against Zionism and the Zionist state and not Jewish people. However, Shain does not take the content of the revised Charter seriously and simply repeats the flawed idea that anti-Zionism is inevitably anti-Semitism, a position as ludicrous as assuming that being anti-apartheid is being anti-white. He writes that in the Charter “’the Zionist project’ in the text is simply functioning as code for ‘the Jews’.” He provides no actual evidence to support this statement.
In the end all that Shain, a trained historian, offers is the same ahistorical nonsense that implicitly sanctions terrible oppression and ongoing mass murder by slandering the victims of that oppression and mass murder. What he is saying, in effect, is that Palestinians deserve to be oppressed and subject to massacre. He simply echoes the statements made by Netanyahu, Israeli politicians and the military. His piece is nothing but an alibi for oppression, and oppression of the most grievous kind.
For Shain and his ilk Palestinians are people without rights, Untermensch, who can be openly and freely oppressed and murdered. This is entirely and grossly unethical. As I have explained before the only credible ethical position is to assert and defend the same rights and freedoms for all people irrespective or race, religion, nationality or ethnicity. This is the position that I hold.
Taking the rights of all people seriously means that all people have the same right to resist oppression, and when that oppression is violent to resist by armed struggle. The impartial application of every theory of just war clearly grants this right to Palestinians. I remain unapologetic about my support for the right of Palestinians to resist Israeli oppression with armed force.
I hate war but understand that the defeat or at least weakening of the Israeli Defence Force is a means to the end of the brutalities meted out on innocent people by Israeli oppression. This is no different to the situation in South Africa under apartheid where the defeat of the South African Defence Force was imperative. I am unapologetic about this and applaud every military defeat of the IDF, an army of oppression.
Freedom loving people around the world, including many Jewish people, share this position. If one cheers on the elimination of soldiers of an occupation force, as we did in the fight against apartheid, it is not being callous about the waste of a human being, or the suffering of the persons family.
As much as one might hate death and the sorrow it causes, it is an act that negates the power of the repressive state, and contributes to the higher laws of historic change. Of course, there are pro-Israeli cheerleaders who will go apoplectic at such a statement, whilst applauding the ravings of Israel’s government and its supporters encouraging the military to “Bring down buildings!! There is worldwide legitimacy. Flatten Gaza without mercy!” (Revital Gotlieb, Likud member of the Knesset).
The fact that the 1988 Hamas Charter contained anti-Semitic ideas in no way changes the fact that Israel is a brutally oppressive settler colonial state; just as the PAC slogan ‘One settler one bullet’ did not change the fact that the apartheid regime was a brutal settler colonial state.
As a historian Shain should understand this. He should also acknowledge that leading figures in Israeli society regularly make statements about Palestinians that are appalling prejudiced and often genocidal in character, as I have pointed out. When Benjamin Netanyahu refers to Palestinians as Amalekites, he is using the sort of language that is used to justify genocide, a biblical language in which an injunction is given to “attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.”
In my opinion, the only logical reason why Shain has no issue with this sort of language is because Palestinians do not exist as human beings in his moral universe. It follows that for Shain they are Untermensch. For Shain those of us who insist that there are no Untermensch, that every human being has the same rights to freedom and self-determination, are ‘evil’. However, history shows us that the true historical ‘evil’ always lies in rendering a people, any people, as Untermensch. It is Shain who has no moral compass.
I stand proudly with Illan Pappe, Avi Shlaim, Amira Hass, Jeff Halper, Miko Peled and many other Israeli citizens, and growing number of anti-Zionist Jews internationally, who reject the fascism of Netanyahu and many other powerful figures in Israeli society including its military and political leadership. I stand proudly with the radical tradition that opposes every attempt to render a people as Untermensch and supports the right of all oppressed people to resist oppression, and to do so with armed force if need be.
Ronnie Kasrils
Former Minister of Intelligence Agencies
Johannesburg, 26 December, 2023
