Glen Heneck
In the closing passage of his August 4 op-ed article, “Rabbi Goldstein attempts to create veneer of moral authority”, Shuaib Manjra makes a rousing plea for the establishment of a “rainbow nation” in Israel and Palestine. Addressing himself directly to Chief Rabbi Warren Goldstein, he urges joint support for a “unitary secular democracy” and the elimination of “religious, ethnic and racial hatred”.
It’s a beguiling image – but, sadly, one utterly at variance with both the realities on the ground and the rest of his essay.
Dr Manjra begins with Marx’s famous nostrum about religion and opium and proceeds to prove a lesser one: namely that righteous indignation is the crack cocaine of the literate left. In paragraph after paragraph he savages his fellow Abrahamite as (grossly) dishonest, insensitive, ignorant, belligerent and cowardly.
I understand the motive force behind this tirade: I too find the Gaza images appalling, the IDF assault disproportionate, the siege disquieting and the Palestinian cause generally emotionally compelling. For all that, though, I find this kind of (too common) contribution deeply depressing. Not just for its hyperbolic and incendiary tone, but for being, at once, shamelessly partisan, hopelessly simplistic and – in its attribution of mass moral delinquency – egregiously racist. It’s one thing to cast Bibi Netanyahu as a belligerent neo-Nazi (rather than a beleaguered crypto nationalist); it’s something else to depict an entire nation as callous misanthropes rejoicing in the suffering of their neighbours.
That said, mind you, I readily accept that the kind of circumspection I’m urging would not be appropriate in the face of genocide, or other palpable injustice. So what remains the key issue is the proper characterisation of the conflict itself.
My personal view, for what it’s worth, is that Israel should yield up every inch of land outside the borders determined by the UN in 1947 – and offer further compensation besides. What I also believe though – against the mainstream left – is that, as a quid pro quo, it is entitled to demand all-round recognition of its sovereignty as a Jewish majority state. Unqualified recognition, complete with reasonable security guarantees.
In saying so I well recognise that I am inviting an accusation of betraying both the secular humanism I (think I) espouse and the foundational principle of our own brave republic. For the reasons that follow, however, I do not believe that such an indictment could be sustained. I believe that it stems from a fundamental misreading of South Africa’s history; a misreading driven by the (nigh universal) tendency to seek out badness abroad.
I bought into the rainbow “nation” narrative ages ago, and I’m still committed (and optimistic) now. I take my encouragement from two sources mainly, the one being the extraordinary grace and forbearance of my ordinary countrymen, and the other being a vision of our country as a giant social laboratory; a 50-million-person experiment in the mechanics of world government.
If we can, somehow, pull it off, that would be truly epochal. It would prove that disparate groups can actually get along and that world peace (a just, neighbourly world peace) is a feasible prospect.
Truth is though that as things stand today – more than two decades on from the end of apartheid proper – the historical record is anything but encouraging for us universalists. We’ve had six decades in which non-racialism has been de rigeur, everywhere, and still the fissiparous forces that have marked out all of human history endure, seemingly undiminished. Geneticists and sociologists have relentlessly proclaimed that race is both a scourge and a fiction – but the catalogue of secession, suspicion and strife continues to grow.
Armenia, Burundi, Croatia.
Azerbaijan, Bosnia, Cyprus.
Afghanistan, Belgium, Crimea.
Taking our cues from the real world – not the campus conceit – the lesson seems blindingly obvious (notwithstanding a few encouraging countervailing examples). What’s also important though is that the literature itself is not actually uniform.
It’s an article of faith among modern progressives that non-class loyalties are examples of “false consciousness” – but this was contested terrain until the 1930s. Moses Hess, for one, while continuing to push for socialist transformation, came eventually to the view that “class is secondary, race is primary”. And JS Mill, in his seminal work on democracy, insisted that it simply couldn’t work in “divided societies”. Where a country was host to more than one nationality, he reckoned, “the united public opinion necessary to the workings of representative government, cannot exist”.
Even assuming though that co-operation and amity are notionally possible (as I for one emphatically believe), the region-specific outlook would still be very poor. Firstly on account of an apparent Qur’anic injunction against allowing Islamised land to revert to “infidel” control. And secondly because a standout feature of the Palestinian struggle has been the unrelenting vilification of the Israeli “other”. I’m not saying this hatred is groundless, or unreciprocated, but I am saying it makes Dr Manjra’s unitary state idea seem cynical, laughable, impossible.
As for the two-state arrangement, I’m guardedly bullish, despite all the hatred and bloodletting. Call me doltishly over-sanguine, but I see cause for hope in the following positive contrasts with South Africa:
l That Israel is more like a Bantustan than a colonial behemoth; an arid, oil-free sliver of land, about the size of Venda, or Lesotho.
l That the only time when relations between the protagonists took a master-servant form – with all the oppression and disdain that necessarily involves – it was the Israelis who were in the subordinate position.
l That on any tenable measure – repression, misogyny, intolerance, misgovernance – the moral delinquency of the neighbouring states outstrips that of Israel by miles. Never mind Islamic State and Hamas.
l That when I watch television with the sound off I can’t tell which of the two groups of Semitic cousins I’m looking at.
Dr Manjra ends his piece by proposing an open debate. I’m no practised public intellectual, but I’m willing to take up the challenge.
l Heneck holds a BA LLB from UCT and a Master’s degree in law from Cambridge University. He is a city businessman and a member of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies.