Steve Linde, how come neither you, nor your editors at Durban’s Hashalom picked up that you got your mentor, Fatima Meer’s death wrong by 20 years?

That is pretty sloppy isn’t it?

Could it be the “Hand of God” at work in your subconscious which was hiding something rather important?

Why didn’t you confront Fatima Meer long before her death in 2010 rather than 1990 as your article states so clearly?

Has no one else bothered to tell you of your big error after all this time, and still no changes in the Internet edition of the Hashalom?

Do they all just accept as gospel anything coming out of your mouth because you are a former Editor In Chief of the Jerusalem Post who I conversed with a few years back and clearly you showed signs of questionable competency.

Attacking viciously Ms Meer who couldn’t defend herself while so incapacitated is rather odd to begin with.

You must have thought that it would attract eyeballs and eyeballs are more money in your pocket?

Ms. Meer must have known that at some point in your relationship, and again prior to either of your deaths, you would confront her directly on her hugely attended gatherings at our University of Natal.

You must have been there or known someone who was?

Ms. Meer was the most outspoken person on campus.

There was no one living in South Africa at the time who was both so anti Israel and anti-Apartheid Regme.

What exactly was it about Fatima Meer that had you thinking she was stupid?

That she was Muslim?

Why would a Muslim woman be stupid?

It is only stupid people who could be anti-Semitic?

You would expect that from people who have turned to label their opponents anything that would stick.

Ms. Meer left no doubt in any one’s mind including the SA Oppenheimers’ South African Secret Police who had fully infiltrated all of South Africa’s liberal campuses such as our Natal U., that she was vehemently against the State of Israel and that as far as she was concerned, the Jewish people could all rot in hell?

Why wouldn’t you mention in your speech denouncing Ms Meer who so kindly took you on a trip to the US as her teaching assistant of how she responded to your appropriate forth-righteousness?

Why wouldn’t you mention that Ms Meer never once condemned the SA Oppenheimers publicly.

Do you think none of our Jewish South African religious and secular leadership were bought?

Would you guess what percentage that might be?

Could you see Ms Meer figuring out that our bought Jewish communities couldn’t be trusted?

Why have you refrained from attacking Durban’s most Jewish Orthodox and pro supporter of the inhumane Apartheid Regime, the Durban North Lazarus clan?

Isn’t there some sort of double standard going on?

We know that money plays an important role in everything and so why wasn’t there financial support to oppose those wanting to see Israel destroyed from the inside out if she couldn’t be defeated in battle?

The Lazarus clan were obviously bought.

They weren’t being racists because they genuinely believed that people with darker skins were somehow inferior?

Again, of course the Lazarus clan and all those bought didn’t believe that people with darker skins were inferior.

Ms. Meer was a very close and trusted friend of my mother Zena Ash Gevisser, and trusted you know is very different to close, and therefore nothing Ms. Meer said negative about either us Jewish people or the fledgling State of Israel bothered the General of Generals, David Ben Gurion who knew there was a serious problem with people’s thinking when no one took to the streets, no media personality, no Henry Kissinger, no John F Kennedy, no South African Jewish Federation, no World Council of Churches, no Doctors Without Borders, etc when the arms boycott of Israel was to destroy Israel rather than save her.

There is a serious thinking problem going on here.

But let’s solve it now.

Bear in mind Israel was fully “comprised” [sic] in the late 70s, when the virulent anti-Semitic South African Oppenheimer family wiped out the last grouping of resisting Jewish people which you learned about, NO LATER than when reading chapter 16, WARRING WITH ISRAELin Professor Edward Jay Epstein’s epic 1978 nonfiction book The Diamond Invention.

JEWISH WORLD

Give peace a chance: A letter to Fatima

– By Steve Linde

It is with a heavy heart that I write this letter to my late sociology professor, Fatima Meer, after a recent visit to Durban, where she taught me in the 1980s.  Fatima, you supervised my thesis on the emergence of Gandhi as a charismatic leader in South Africa, and I later travelled with you to the United States to be your teaching assistant at Swarthmore. When I moved to Israel in 1987, however, you severed all contact with me, and declined to reply to any of the postcards and letters I sent you. Although your grandfather had been Jewish and you had many Jewish friends, you abhorred the idea of a Jewish state, believing it was racist and undemocratic. Boycotting me achieved nothing, other than causing me pain.  On a grander scale, boycotting Israel or Israeli products only hurts the cause of peace in the Middle East.

Your spirit pervaded my week-long stay in Durban.  In the local “Satyagraha” newspaper, I chanced upon an article titled, “Calls to boycott Israel intensify.” In the article itself, I found no trace of the philosophy of Satyagraha, Gandhi’s pursuit of truth and non-violence. It quotes a humanitarian aid worker, Dr Mad Gilbert, as “likening Gaza’s occupation to that of South Africa’s apartheid,” and making a plea to boycott Israel, “the same way the world did against apartheid South Africa.”  In response, let me counter that, although Israel does impose a blockade on Gaza, it withdrew from the territory unilaterally in 2005.  Furthermore, drawing a parallel between the flourishing Israeli democracy and the repressive apartheid regime is simply false. Making such a comparison only denigrates the victims of apartheid.

Muhammed Desai, the national coordinator of BDS (the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement), is quoted in the article as calling for “the solidarity of people around the world to bring real, direct pressure on Israel until it complies with all relevant international laws and to take action to end companies’ and governments’ complicity in Israel’s human rights violations.” Desai, who recently voiced the view that publicly chanting “Shoot the Jew” is no big deal, is hardly a leading proponent of Gandhian passive resistance. And Israel respects human rights as well as the rights of women, minorities, including Christians and Muslims, as well as gays much more than any of its neighbours. Desai’s appeal to boycott Israeli companies will not help break the current impasse in Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations. The Palestinians themselves do not support BDS, and many of the companies being targeted (especially in the West Bank and Jerusalem) employ a predominantly Palestinian workforce. It is also worthy of note that relatives of senior Fatah and Hamas leaders from Gaza and the West Bank, as well as Syrians wounded in the civil war in their country, routinely receive medical treatment in Israel. And there was no talk of boycotting the field hospitals Israel dispatched in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea to combat Ebola. 

While I was in South Africa, the latest local firm to be targeted by BDS was Woolworths supermarket chain and its share-holders for selling figs, pomegranates and pretzels from Israel.  A student activist even resorted to the repugnant act of placing a pig’s head in the kosher section of a Woolworths store in protest of the chain’s support for Israel. This is clear anti-Semitism, which should not be tolerated in the new South Africa. Woolworths, admirably, has refused to buckle under the pressure. “We can confirm that we have not stopped [selling] Israeli products,” said a statement published on the Woolworths website, noting that less than 0.1 percent of its food comes from Israel. “We respect our customers’ right to make individual purchasing choices, which is why we clearly label every product’s country of origin and fully comply with government guidelines on products from Israel.”

During the week that I was in Durban, I was inundated with questions about the Woolworths boycott when I met with local journalists. And more prominence was given in the media to the Woolworths boycott than to the barbaric Palestinian terrorist attack at a Jerusalem synagogue on November 18, in which four rabbis were butchered during morning prayers. The subsequent death of a Druse Arab policeman from the wounds he sustained in the gunfight with the two terrorists received almost no press coverage. Upon my return to Israel, I felt compelled to give my take on the Woolworths boycott.

What would Gandhi have said? He may indeed have supported a non-violent boycott against Israel, but he surely would not have sanctioned the use of savage violence by the two terrorists against innocent Jews praying to God.  What would Mandela have said? During his visit to Israel in 1990, which I covered, Mandela squarely backed the Jewish state’s right to exist in security, while calling on it to hand over the territories captured in the 1967 Six Day War for the establishment of a Palestinian state. “I cannot conceive of Israel withdrawing if Arab states do not recognize Israel within secure borders,” I heard him say quite clearly after meeting with then-foreign minister David Levy in Jerusalem.

Surely South Africa and the entire world should be encouraging both parties, Israel and the Palestinians, to return to the negotiating table and hammer out a deal to peacefully end their bitter conflict. Encouraging the Palestinian Authority to make unilateral appeals to the United Nations and other international bodies, while several countries make symbolic pronouncements in favour of a Palestinian state, as Spain, Sweden and the British Parliament have recently done, can only be detrimental to any chance of peace between the parties. 

Israel should not have withdrawn unilaterally from the Gaza Strip; it should have negotiated the withdrawal with the Palestinian Authority. The hasty pull-out enabled Hamas to seize power in the Strip, sabotaging any opportunity for a negotiated peace settlement. Hamas, after all, is a terrorist group bent on Israel’s destruction. Similarly, the Palestinians should not be encouraged to act unilaterally. Their current leadership, under President Mahmoud Abbas, must be urged to put an end the current cycle of violence and resume a peaceful dialogue with Israel.

When US President Barack Obama visited Jerusalem last year, he stated his support for Israel unequivocally. “I see this visit as an opportunity to reaffirm the unbreakable bonds between our nations, to restate America’s unwavering commitment to Israel’s security,” Obama said. Peace must come to the Holy Land, Obama declared, adding: “We will never lose sight of the vision of an Israel at peace with its neighbours.”

Peace is what Obama wants. It’s what Gandhi and Mandela would have wanted. It’s what you should have wanted, Fatima. It’s what most Israelis and Palestinians want too. BDS is based on a false premise, that Israel is an apartheid state. It is the Palestinians, not Israel, who should be pushed to renounce violence and show they are genuinely interested in peace. It is the Palestinians who should be reprimanded for resorting to terror, inciting violence and aspiring to create a state devoid of Jews – what the Nazis called “Judenrein”.

Israeli leaders have said repeatedly that they are prepared to make painful concessions and negotiate the establishment of a demilitarized Palestinian state alongside Israel. Successive Israeli governments have made generous offers to their Palestinian counterparts, only to be rejected time after time. Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert all offered most of the West Bank and even part of Jerusalem, but were spurned by their Palestinian counterparts. 

Israel did not initiate the conflict in Gaza this past summer. It was purposely provoked by Hamas.  Israel wants peace. But true peace can be achieved only by direct negotiations between Israeli and Palestinian leaders. South Africa, which has been a beacon to the world in replacing apartheid with a rainbow nation, can play a positive role in advancing this process. Because it is by definition against the normalization of relations between Israel and the Arabs, BDS can only cause harm and hinder an ever-desirable peace accord. Boycotting South Africa is not what really ended apartheid. Peaceful negotiations between Mandela and de Klerk, two leaders of vision, did. Boycotting Israel will not result in the establishment of a Palestinian state. Only direct talks between the parties will.

Fatima, I was gutted when you cut off contact with me. When you died in 1990, I wept. Today you would probably be a vocal supporter of BDS. But does boycotting Israel or Israeli goods benefit anyone, especially products that are helpful to humanity, such as medical and agricultural technologies? Isolating Israel, an island of sanity in a tumultuous Middle East, is wrong. So is endorsing Palestinian terror, which only demeans the Palestinian cause. And so is BDS. Let’s rather support engagement by the parties in a peaceful dialogue, free trade and the search for a comprehensive, lasting and just resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The writer, a former Durbanite, is editor-in-chief of The Jerusalem Post. The views expressed are his own. Mr Linde’s very first published article appeared in Hashalom. 

http://www.hashalom.co.za/display.php?section=jw