The recent alleged comments by South Africa's Deputy Foreign Minister, Fatima Hajaig, about Jewish money controlling America and most Western European countries throws into sharp relief the complicated nexus between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. After all, it was at an anti-Zionist rally in Lenasia that Hajaig allegedly launched into a diatribe that would have befitted the toxic views of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad or former Malaysian Prime Minister, Mahatir Mohamad.
Ahmedinejad shares the delusional views attributed to Hajaig, while Mahatir Mohamad some years ago similarly informed 57 heads of state at the Organisation of the Islamic Conference held in Malaysia that the Jews have "control of the most powerful countries". "This tiny community," he told his gullible audience, has "become a world power." Hajaig is in good company; the conspiratorial cast of mind is widespread and has a long pedigree.
Dating back to the late middle ages, anti-Jewish conspiracies took on their most virulent and sinister form over 100 years ago in the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a forgery referred to by the historian Norman Cohn as a "Warrant for Genocide". The Protocols was hugely popular in inter-war Germany and was widely employed by the Nazis in their propaganda as they prepared for the destruction of European Jewry. Put simply, Hajaig's alleged comments are old hat. But we do have to take heed. Ideas have consequences, especially when uttered by a government minister, albeit a junior one.
Hajaig's thinking and that of others of her ilk share common delusions. Simplistic conspiracies provide a convenient explanation for complex problems. So-called Jewish money power accounts for everything, and intractable problems are reduced to imaginary financial machinations. Hajaig's legitimate concern for the plight of the Gazans is conflated with a palpable and crude Jew-hatred.
Such slippage on her part - and indeed many others - has led some commentators to describe anti-Zionism as a hygienic form of antiSemitism. This is problematic. Anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism cannot axiomatically be equated. It is possible - albeit arguably naïve in the wake of our past century and the realities of Israel's 60 years of existence - to object to the idea of Jewish peoplehood and a Jewish State. But the inordinate attention devoted to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict does raise questions of motivation.
Why did the war in Chechnya receive so little coverage? Why did the masses not regularly march in the world's capitals during the Russian siege and almost complete destruction of Grozny, the Chechen capital? Why did they not march when Nato planes bombarded Kosovo? What about the estimated five million deaths over the past 10 years in Central Africa? Only last week, we saw hundreds of thousands of refugees displaced by the conflict between the Tamil Tigers and the Sri Lankan army without a peep from our foreign ministry or from the Congress of South African Trade Unions.
Fewer than 10 000 people have been killed in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since World War 2 - a mere fraction of the 25 million people killed in other internal conflicts during this time. Yet Israel has been condemned by the United Nations and other international organisations more often than all the other nations combined. Can this excessive and skewed attention be explained by the region's geopolitical importance? Is it because three Abrahamic faiths converge in the region? Or is it simply a case that Jews are news? Perhaps the explanation is more sinister.
For some observers, it is simple anti-Semitism; the "longest hatred" has mutated into a new form. Much anti-Zionist rhetoric, the argument goes, is riddled with anti-Jewish motifs that go beyond the bounds of normal political conflict. It is particularly powerful today in the Muslim world, where, historically, hostility towards Jews lacked the vitriolic character of Christian hatred in the medieval period.
From the thirteenth century, however, humiliation and degradation of Jews began to characterise Muslim-Jewish relations. European colonialism and its Christian influences further undermined the Jewish condition, especially in the Arab world. Anti-Semitic calumnies such as the "blood libel" entered into Muslim discourse in the 19th century amid the looting, rape and killing of Jews in numerous cities and towns.
Against a backdrop of Zionist settlement and the complicated question of "the right to the land", Arab nationalism and the growth of Islamism fuelled hostility. A vast anti-Jewish Arabic literature now makes use of texts such as Hitler's Mein Kampf and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Extremist groups such as Islamic Jihad and Hamas have appropriated ideas of a world Jewish conspiracy in what they consider to be a holy war against "Satanist Zionism".
Such invective takes on the features of delusional Christian antiSemitism at its height. Jews are characterised as a malignant disease, bent on global domination. They are evil incarnate. The Hamas Covenant cites the Protocols of the Elders of Zion with approbation, while liberally employing that forgery's tropes. Jews are accused of financial manipulation, media control and of fomenting the two world wars. Indeed, they are even depicted as the force behind the Rotary Movement and the Freemasons, perceived as sinister by Hamas.
After its election victory, Hamas placed on its official website two Hamas suicide bombers' video testaments. "My message to the loathed Jews," noted one, "is that there is no god but Allah. We will chase you everywhere! We are a nation that drinks blood, and we know that there is no blood better than the blood of Jews. We will not leave you alone until we have quenched our thirst with your blood - and our children's thirst with your blood."
This mindset merges effortlessly with Holocaust denial, similarly delusional, but initially the preserve of the far right. Thus it is hardly surprising that at the 2006 "Review of the Holocaust: Global Vision" conference in Tehran - which brought together notorious far right "revisionists" (denialists) and Islamists - the nexus between the white supremacist and anti-Semitic far right and radical Muslim extremists was patently apparent. One-time Ku Klux Klan leader, David Duke, the French "revisionist" Georges Thiel and the Australian Holocaust denialist Colin Tobin rubbed shoulders with Islamist clerics and Iranian President Ahmedinejad.
That our deputy foreign minister allegedly shifted from a Palestinian narrative of the Middle East conflict during her Lenasia speech to blatant anti-Semitism should not have come as a surprise. Exposing one's real motivations in this arena is simple. It was certainly evident at the World Conference Against Racism and Xenophobia in Durban in 2001, where the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was on sale, despite being banned in this country.
Such rhetoric from a government minister as Hajaig's reported Lenasia speech should not be accepted in a country that values tolerance, religious pluralism and cultural diversity.
There is no room for crude prejudice in a democratic South Africa. And there is certainly no room for a rabid and vitriolic deputy foreign minister whose ranting can only be labelled anti-Semitic.
Professor Shain teaches in the Department of Historical Studies and is Director of the Isaac and Jessie Kaplan Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Cape Town. This article first appeared in the Cape Times, February 2 2009
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