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Jews in Today’s South Africa Feel Embattled
By HENRY SREBRNIK Since the Gaza war began last year, South African Jews feel like they are cats on a hot tin roof.
While South African Jews have risen to prominence and helped build the country, there is a deep-seated fear of the current government and for the community’s safety, because for the ruling African National Congress (ANC), the Palestine issue is a deeply felt ideological cause.
South African public opinion is vehemently pro-Palestinian. This was already the case before the current war, and since then, tensions have only increased. In the immediate aftermath of Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on Israel, South Africa’s International Relations Minister Naledi Pandor held high-level discussions with senior members of Hamas, a move that was met with criticism.
South African Chief Rabbi Warren Goldstein condemned the government at a pro-Israel rally. After Pandor’s diplomatic outreach to Hamas, Goldstein changed the Prayer for the Republic of South Africa, said regularly at congregations across the country, from asking God to protect “the president and the deputy president all members of the government,” to asking for protection for “all the people of this country,” a measure, he wrote in a letter to South African rabbis, that was taken in “extreme situations, for government violations of morality so grotesque they undermine the integrity of praying.”
To the estimated 60,000 South African Jews, their government appears to have shown little empathy for the Jewish victims of terror. The South African Jewish Board of Deputies (SAJBD), the umbrella organization that represents the country’s Jewish community, has noted a sharp increase in antisemitism.
Since then, the South African government, with broad popular support, has accused Israel of genocide before the International Court of Justice (ICJ). For many Jewish groups in the country, the decision to side against Israel was seen as evidence of antisemitism.
Now, the city of Johannesburg plans to rename the road on which the American consulate is located after Palestinian terrorist Leila Khaled. It was proposed by a former mayor, Thapelo Amad. Sandton Drive, its current name, is a central artery in Johannesburg, and Sandton, the neighbourhood in which the road is located, is home to many of South Africa’s Jews. The area is also home to at least four synagogues among other Jewish institutions.
Khaled, a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, who is now 80 years old, gained infamy in 1969 when she was part of a group who hijacked a Trans World Airlines flight on a journey from Rome to Tel Aviv, Israel. She became known as the first woman to hijack a plane.
“We stand with Hamas, Hamas stands with us, together we are Palestine and Palestine will be free,” Amad posted online. “With our souls, with our blood, we will conquer Al Aqsa.”
All of this is now reshaping how many South African Jews view themselves, their place in the country and their relationships with their fellow citizens. It is in this crucible that they are now forced to reconcile their own complex history in South Africa with the reality of a country whose national identity is increasingly built in opposition to a foreign country, Israel, that they hold dear.
Indeed, most Jewish institutions in South Africa today are oriented toward Israel. Herzlia, the primary Jewish school in Cape Town, is named after Theodor Herzl, and its motto (“Im Tirtzu”) is based on the famous Zionist line about willing Israel into existence.
The school has been the center of controversy, as the hard-left Economic Freedom Fighters political party last year called for it to be deregistered with the government, a move that would cause it to lose funding, for being too “pro-Israel.” Among other issues, the party cited the high number of Herzlia graduates who move to Israel and join the Israeli military. The exact number of Herzlia alumni who do so is unclear, but that hasn’t stopped it from becoming a highly contentious topic.
The rhetoric reached a boiling point last December, when a speaker at a large pro-Palestine rally in Cape Town targeted Herzlia directly, saying, “We know where the murderers come from — they come from Herzlia, here in Cape Town.” After the rally, the foreign ministry said it would investigate if any citizens were serving in the Israeli military and arrest any that had. These events were used by Jewish authorities as evidence of their threatened status in South Africa.
The South African Jewish community traces its lineage almost exclusively to the Lithuanian Jews who fled Europe before and during the Holocaust. They arrived in a country where they were greeted with skepticism. There were undeniable pockets of support for Nazism among some political parties at the time.
When the Afrikaner-led National Party took power in 1948, however, it didn’t elevate these views into the political discourse. Instead, the party focused on creating the apartheid system of minority rule and gaining the full support of all white citizens, including Jews.
Jews were significantly over-represented in the struggle against apartheid, with many in the ANC, but most lived with it. Not until 1985 did Jewish community leaders condemn it outright. As Cyril Harris, chief rabbi from 1987 to 2004, later told the Truth and Reconciliation Commission: “The Jewish community benefited from apartheid and an apology must be given.”
Many South African Jews today, though, fear that the country may fall into economic ruin. Israel has always been viewed as an exit plan thanks to its Law of Return, which grants them automatic Israeli citizenship.
Henry Srebrnik is a professor of political science at the University of Prince Edward Island.
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What if Donald Trump puts his name on the US Holocaust Memorial Museum?
What if I told you that this morning, I found the following Truth Social post on my newsfeed?
“THE TRUMP US HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM HONORS will be broadcast tonight, on CBS, and Stream on Paramount+. Tune in at 8 P.M. EST! At the request of the Board, and just about everybody else in America, I am hosting the event. Tell me what you think of my “Master of Ceremony” abilities. If really good, would you like me to leave the Presidency in order to make “hosting” a full time job? We will be honoring true GREATS in the History of the Holocaust, from the Elders of Zion and the NSDAP to John Birchers and Groypers. THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION.”
If you said this post wasn’t real, you would be right. If you said that I tweaked a recent Truth Social post, swapping the US Holocaust Memorial Museum for the former John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts, you would be right about that too.
But if you said that this post was unthinkable, my response would be “Think again.”
The phrase “Thinking the unthinkable” was all the rage in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It was an era darkened by the threat of mushroom clouds, the theatrics of Peter Sellers in Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr. Strangelove, and the theories of Herman Kahn, whose notion of the Doomsday Machine features in Kubrick’s masterpiece. Kahn coined the term “unthinkable,” insisting that while “nuclear war may seem highly unlikely, indeed unthinkable, to many people — it is not impossible.”
To this very day, the threat of a nuclear holocaust remains all too real and thinkable. But it has been sidelined by a different kind of threat, one that has buried the very concept of the unthinkable.
So many words and acts once considered unthinkable have, under the two Trump presidencies, become not just thinkable and not just doable, but also increasingly unremarkable. Is there any word or act we still consider safely and surely unthinkable? Is there anything at all that, to quote Herman Kahn, while it may seem highly unlikely, indeed unthinkable, to many people — is not impossible?
To find an answer, it helps to suggest a limiting case on our government’s effort to make all things thinkable, and thus acceptable, even normal. Consider the fake post with which I began this column — namely, that Donald Trump would one day plaster his name on the building that houses the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Can there be anything more unthinkable than Trump stamping his name on the USHMM, the very institution that is dedicated to reminding the world of the consequences of acting on the unthinkable?
In his reflections on life under totalitarian rule, The Captive Mind, Polish poet and Nobel Prize Laureate Czeslaw Milosz observed that all “concepts men live by are a product of the historic formation in which they find themselves. Fluidity and constant change are the characteristics of phenomena. And man is so plastic a being that one can even conceive of the day when a thoroughly self-respecting citizen will crawl about on all fours, sporting a tail of brightly colored feathers as a sign of conformity to the order he lives in.”
We see such plasticity on the sets of Fox News, the corridors of Congress and in the board rooms of media, legal, and tech titans where talking heads, politicians and CEOs happily crawl about with many-colored tails of feathers. This is also true in the board rooms of the Donald J. Trump and John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts and the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace. (The names of these sites must be written in full to fully grasp the absurd character of this era.)
But the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum will always be exempt from this creeping rot of the absurd, right?
Wrong.
In early May, the USHMM, which like the Donald J. Trump and John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts is both privately and federally funded, announced an overhaul of its board. Nearly all its Biden-appointed members were fired, replaced by a choice assortment of Trump appointees. They include Sid Rosenberg, a conservative talk-show host who spoke at a Trump rally last year, denouncing the Democrats as “a bunch of degenerates.”
Another Trump appointee, Martin Oliner, published an op-ed in The Jerusalem Post earlier this year in which he called for the forcible removal from Gaza of Palestinians, whom he described as “fundamentally evil.” In another piece, titled “Make the Holocaust Memorial Council Great Again,” he warned that the USHMM was not meeting its “important role.”
Equally troubling was this fall’s temporary closing until next February of the museum exhibit dedicated to America’s wartime response to the Holocaust. The ostensible reason was to “upgrade the exhibit,” an Orwellian phrase that some staffers fear means the blurring the historical record, one that includes the disinterest of the White House, the fecklessness of most Jewish leaders, and the polite, yet potent antisemitism at the State Department.
In his landmark work The Abandonment of the Jews, the historian David Wyman offers a similar conclusion on the American public’s response to the Holocaust: “Few American non-Jews recognized that the plight of the European Jews was their plight too. Most were either unaware, did not care, or saw the European Jewish catastrophe as a Jewish problem, one for Jews to deal with. That explains, in part, why the United States did so little to help.”
Is it possible that because too many of us remain unaware of or indifferent to the Trump administration’s abandonment of the unthinkable, we have invited the catastrophe now enveloping our nation? A catastrophe that already announces itself in the mass and often violent arrests and deportations of men and women because of their skin color? In the lawless killing of civilians in international waters? In the unconstitutional deployment of the National Guard in our cities? For those who do not yet have an answer, it is worth giving the matter a bit of thought — even if you find those thoughts unthinkable.
The post What if Donald Trump puts his name on the US Holocaust Memorial Museum? appeared first on The Forward.
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Israel becomes first country to recognize Somaliland, drawing condemnation from Egypt, Turkey and Somalia
Israel became the first country to formally recognize Somaliland, a self-declared sovereign state in the Horn of Africa, in a decision that was immediately condemned by Somalia and other nations.
“The Prime Minister announced today the official recognition of the Republic of Somaliland as an independent and sovereign state,” wrote Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office in a post on X. “The State of Israel plans to immediately expand its relations with the Republic of Somaliland through extensive cooperation in the fields of agriculture, health, technology, and economy.”
Somaliland’s president welcomed the announcement from Netanyahu in a post on X, adding that he affirmed the region’s “readiness to join the Abraham Accords,” the normalization agreements between Israel and a handful of Arab states that was brokered during President Donald Trump’s first term.
Somaliland proclaimed independence from Somalia in 1991 during the country’s civil war, but has failed to receive recognition from the international community in part due to Somalia’s opposition to its secession. Somalia officially rejects ties with Israel, and has consistently refused to recognize the state of Israel since 1960. Somalia and Somaliland are overwhelmingly Muslim.
“The ministers affirmed their total rejection and condemnation of Israel’s recognition of the Somaliland region, stressing their full support for the unity, sovereignty and territorial integrity of Somalia,” Egypt’s foreign ministry said in a statement following a phone call between Egypt’s foreign minister and his Somali, Turkish and Djiboutian counterparts, according to Reuters.
In November, the Israeli think tank Institute for National Security Studies argued in a report that recognizing Somaliland could be in Israel’s strategic interest.
“Somaliland’s territory could serve as a forward base for multiple missions: intelligence monitoring of the Houthis and their armament efforts; logistical support for Yemen’s legitimate government in its war against them; and a platform for direct operations against the Houthis,” the report read.
It is unclear if the United States will follow suit. In August, Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz wrote to Trump urging him to recognize Somaliland.
“Somaliland has emerged as a critical security and diplomatic partner for the United States, helping America advance our national security interests in the Horn of Africa and beyond,” wrote Cruz.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Israel becomes first country to recognize Somaliland, drawing condemnation from Egypt, Turkey and Somalia appeared first on The Forward.
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‘Jesus is a Palestinian,’ claims a Times Square billboard. Um, not quite
“Merry Christmas,” proclaims a billboard in Times Square: “Jesus is Palestinian.”
Countless people will walk by the display or see it on social media, and many will believe it.
So, let’s go through why that statement is such a mistake, once again.
Jesus was a Jew. He was born to Jewish parents, was circumcised under Jewish law — traditionally, on Jan. 1, which is how that day became known as the Feast of the Circumcision — and lived as a Jew. He taught from the Hebrew Scriptures. He worshiped in the Jerusalem Temple. He observed Jewish festivals. He debated Jewish law with other Jews using Jewish modes of argument.
Go back to the Gospels in the New Testament — specifically Luke 4:16: “He went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom.” Or, John 4:9, in which a Samaritan woman asks Jesus: “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?”
Cross-reference other ancient sources. Josephus, a first-century Jewish historian, refers to Jesus as a Jewish figure executed in Judea. No serious historical study of Jesus elides this basic truth: Jesus was a Jew.
Yet many efforts through history have sought to sever Jesus from his Judaism — often, if not always, in an attempt to denigrate Jews.
In the second century, the theologian Marcion sought to completely sever Christianity from Judaism. For him, the God of Israel was inferior and the God of the Christians was morally superior. Jesus, therefore, belonged to a different moral universe. The early Church condemned Marcionism precisely because it erased Jesus’s Jewish roots, and ultimately dismissed the idea as a heresy that needed to be rejected.
In the twentieth century, Nazi theologians attempted to portray Jesus as Aryan and anti-Jewish, which Susannah Heschel documents in her book The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany.
But it’s not just because of his religion that Jesus shouldn’t be considered Palestinian.
“Why not?” you might ask. “Didn’t he live in Palestine?”
The short answer is: Not yet.
When Jesus lived, the land of Israel was called Judea. It was under Roman rule, and it fell under several administrative districts: Judea, Galilee, and Samaria.
So, what is the source of the name “Palestine” for that area? It comes from the ancient people known as the Philistines, a perennial enemy of the Israelites. After the Romans crushed Jewish independence, they deliberately renamed the province in an effort to sever Jewish historical ties to the land, as well as to humiliate them by naming the land after their ancient foes.
To call Jesus “Palestinian” is therefore anachronistic.
Yet even so, the idea of Jesus as Palestinian appears in some strands of Palestinian liberation theology. Those strands tend to envision the Palestinian people as Jesus on the cross — crucified by Israel and the Jews, in an image that recalls the longstanding and deeply misguided allegation that “the Jews killed Jesus.”
This language appears repeatedly in the writings and sermons of Naim Ateek, the influential founder of the Jerusalem-based Christian organization Sabeel. In his 2001 Easter message, he wrote “as we approach Holy Week and Easter, the suffering of Jesus Christ at the hands of evil political and religious powers two thousand years ago is lived out again in Palestine,” adding that “Jesus is the powerless Palestinian humiliated at a checkpoint, the woman trying to get through to the hospital for treatment, the young man whose dignity is trampled, the young student who cannot get to the university to study, the unemployed father who needs to find bread to feed his family; the list is tragically getting longer, and Jesus is there in their midst suffering with them.”
Yes, of course, Palestinians have suffered and continue to suffer. But illustrations of that suffering should not include the pretense that Jesus was Palestinian. It suggests that Palestinians need to be seen as akin to Jesus to deserve safety and dignity, when in fact they deserve safety and dignity simply because they are human. And casting Israel and the Jews as crucifiers only resurrects medieval theology and hatreds; it adds nothing to the hopes for justice for Palestinians.
Mainstream Christianity has rejected this foul mythology. We have recently celebrated the sixtieth anniversary of the Christian world’s most vociferous denial of that ancient hatred. In 1965, Vatican II’s Nostra Aetate explicitly rejected the charge that Jews are responsible for Jesus’s death. The World Council of Churches issued similar warnings about reviving Passion-based antisemitism — the revival of the ancient accusation that Jewish leaders were responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus, and that Jews bear that guilt eternally.
History matters. Theology matters. And words matter — especially when they carry two thousand years of blood-soaked memory.
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