The following refers to, “Jews hold silent protest over holocaust and genocide centre’s silence on Gaza”:
On Thursday, Karen Milner, the current national chairperson of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies, published an article accusing myself and my colleagues of anti-Semitism for daring to stage a protest about an ongoing genocide outside of a genocide centre.
Karen’s logic appears to both begin and end with the fact that this centre places a particular emphasis on the Holocaust, which was a genocide committed against Jewish people, and thus surely the mere act of any person protesting near to it is inherently anti-Jewish.
But what could be more Jewish than opposing genocide? What lesson could better be learnt from the Holocaust than never again? Had Karen read the statement we released regarding this protest, she might have understood that the motivation behind it was to highlight the role that institutions tasked with teaching about genocide can play in enabling ongoing atrocities by refusing to speak about them.
Perhaps it is worth sharing that most attendees who encountered us on that day engaged us amicably, and indeed we were subsequently told that while those inside the conference did not express a unified view on our substantive position in relation to genocide in Gaza, there was wide support for the legitimacy of the stand we were taking and the manner in which we took it.
What manner was that? By standing silently, as a small group of 10, holding up signs with messages such as “Never again means never again for anyone, not in our name”, and then later on singing songs like “Lo Yisa Goy”, whose lyrics literally describe opposition to nations going to war with each other.
At one point while singing this song, a prominent local rabbi arriving at the event even briefly joined us in song. He too did not agree with our substantive stance, but was moved by the nature of the song, and commented on the significance of the prophets singing this song thousands of years ago.
Later on, yet another senior Cape Town rabbi arrived and similarly engaged us amicably, inviting all the men in our group to lay tefillin with him.
Presumably Karen Milner’s uncritical and vehement insistence that our protest action was self-evidently anti-Semitic is at odds with these two respected rabbis engaging us with such camaraderie in the space, unless of course it is the position of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies to cast out senior rabbis as anti-Semitic too?
Perhaps then, now might be the moment for the SAJBD to finally admit that it would be better named the SAZBD. For if ever it had any serious intention of representing Jewish people — as a whole, rather than only those committed to Zionism — it might be more concerned with the fact that on that same day a Zionist man approached a small group of Jews and insulted and threatened us, telling one of my friends that he “looks cute”, and “would like to bend him over”.
If the real concern were for the safety and well-being of Jews, you would think that Karen Milner would be reaching out to us to make sure we are okay rather than attacking us for an action which neither the staff of the Genocide Centre nor the rabbis in attendance, objected to in the slightest.
* Anthony Fish Hodgson (member of SA Jews for a Free Palestine), Observatory.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
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