The ANC and the government it leads have brought their support for the Palestinians into South Africa’s domestic politics, by excluding the country’s Jewish community from events that it had long been part of.
This is according to Wendy Kahn, director of the South African A Jewish Board of Deputies, in an opinion piece carried by The Citizen on Tuesday.
She noted that for the first time since 1994, the ANC had not invited a Jewish representative to present a prayer at the party’s Siyanqoba rally. During his address, President Ramaphosa had criticised Israel harshly and led a chant of ‘From the River to the Sea, Palestine shall be free’- a formulation widely understood to refer the destruction of Israel. He also did not refer to the Israeli hostages still held by Hamas (although there was a mention of this in the prepared version of the speech.).
‘Compared to how it deals with all other international disputes, South Africa has approached this war in an unapologetically one-sided manner,’ Kahn wrote.
She added that on 3 May, Jewish representatives had not been invited to participate in an ‘engagement’ between government (represented by deputy president Paul Mashatile) and religious leaders. ‘For the first time in our new democracy,’ Kahn noted, ‘SA Jewish leadership was not invited to be part of a government interfaith engagement. The deputy president’s office acknowledged this exclusion but have yet to provide reasons.’
There was a similar exclusion from an inter-faith prayer event, and later the ANC refused to participate in an eNCA debate unless it was relocated from the South African Jewish Museum in Cape Town.
Kahn wrote: ‘We, as SA Jews, are not surprised by the double standards shown by our president and the department of international relations and cooperation. We know too well that when dealing with the Jewish state, different international relations rules apply We are equally appalled that our government has used this conflict to exclude and marginalise its Jewish community.’
She concluded that the ANC and government seemed to have targeted South African Jewry: ‘It is becoming quite clear that the ANC is today doing its best to exclude a minority that has consistently sought to be part of creating and building up our democracy. It is airbrushing Jews out of our rainbow nation.’