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Paul Hendler writes a letter in response to Africans for Peace Coordinator Klaas Mokgomole on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, disputing some of the points Mokgomole raised.
Africans for Peace Coordinator Klaas Mokgomole ("More hatred for the local Jewish community", 04 December 2021), needs to do a lot more homework on the history behind the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
For Mokgomole, history began in 2000 when he alleges Israel wanted to end its military presence in the West Bank.
The colonisation of Palestine started decades earlier. A decisive turn in 1948 relocated 750 000 Palestinians from across the country.
Zionists spin this as collateral damage of a war between the nascent Jewish state and invading Arab armies. Historian Illan Pappe weighed the evidence: "collateral damage" is misleading and, at worst, false.
Palestinian refugees were largely created by Zionist militias through expulsion, framed by Plan Dalet. Decades later surviving refugees, their children and grandchildren are either languishing in camps and towns in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, or spread in a wider diaspora.
No authority
Through non-violence and violence, Palestinian formations have resisted this violent catastrophe (the Nakba) and its ongoing permutations (following the 1967 Six Day War and more recently in the expulsion from the Jerusalem Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood).
Pappe and historian Avi Schlaim detail the Zionist policies to corral Palestinians into enclaves, rather than making concessions to create a viable Palestinian state.
Mokgomole doesn't explain why Israel intended to end its military presence when history shows Zionism imposing its hegemony over all of historic Palestine. Mokgomole says that Hamas must accept Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state. But the United Nations (UN) had – and still has - no authority to assign to a defined ethnic group the right to establish its own ethno-state: the 1947 UN Special Committee on Palestine recommended partition into two states based on full equality in civil and national rights. But the parties were not obliged to accept, and demands by Arab Delegations to put the matter to the International Court of Justice were ignored.
Unsurprisingly, in the light of the above history, Hamas rejects Israel's right to exist as a Jewish State.
That said, Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal told prominent US Jewish leader Henry Siegman that while Hamas did not recognise Israel it would consider a truce with Israel and serve in a popular Palestinian government that recognised Israel. Furthermore, many of its rockets fired into Israel are in response to recorded provocations, the greatest being the air, land and sea blockade of Gaza, imposed after Hamas won the 2006 elections, judged by the EU and US as "free and fair".
Mokgomole's claim that the generations of Palestinians succeeding those actually expelled have no right of return flies in the face of restitution for injustices of the past that affect succeeding generations.
In terms of this logic, the descendants of three-and-a half million black South Africans who were forcibly relocated under apartheid, should have no right to claim restitution.
No peace without justice
Martin Luther King commented that a violation of rights anywhere is a violation of rights everywhere. Likewise, Nelson Mandela reminded us that our freedoms and those of Palestinians are indivisible.
Mokgomole fails to uphold the South African Constitution's values and enshrined human rights in relation to Palestinians, thereby supporting Zionist racism Reports by the UN's Human Rights Commission, Human Rights Watch and Israeli Human Rights NGO B'Tselem, attest to the fact that Israel's ethnocratic polity and society constitute an apartheid system, based on The International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (1965) and defined by the Apartheid Convention (1973) as well as the Rome Statute (1998).
Mokgomole accuses Iqbal Jassat of inciting anti-Jewish hatred in his response to Mary Kluk regarding the recent killing of Jewish South African Eliyahu Kay. Actually, Jassat did nothing of the sort. His view is sensitive to the tragedy of young impressionable people recruited to fight in an army of occupation. There can be no peace without justice.
By revealing the truth about the colonisation of historic Palestine Jassat, like the global non-violent Boycott Divestment Sanctions movement raises the prospect of less violence and killing and a speedier end to the injustices that the state of Israel visits on the Palestinian people daily. Churchill famously said, "the truth is incontrovertible; malice may malign it, ignorance undermine it. But in the end, there it is".
I am a Jewish South African against the demonisation of the Palestinian people and for an objective account of the facts of their circumstances.
- Dr Paul Hendler, Stellenbosch.
*Please note further correspondence on this matter is now closed.
